April 22, 2011 at 1:02 PM ET
It's almost impossible to avoid encountering the great Mac vs. PC debate lately — after all, tech-lovers tend to be quite passionate about their obsessions. The big platform argument usually involves mocking stereotypes, angry rants and hilarious quips, but today we're going to switch things up a bit and focus on some actual data.
The folks at decision-making site Hunch recently had design firm Column Five Media create the infographic you see on the right. The graphic used data Hunch collected between March 2009 and April 2011. (That means it includes details from more than 80 million aggregated and anonymous responses which came from about 700,000 individuals, about 400,000 of whom answered questions specific to the Mac vs. PC issue.)
Based on the infographic, we can see that PC users tend to be team players, mathematically inclined, introspective, and conservative in regards to politics, art and food.
Mac users, on the other hand, seem to value the idea of uniqueness a great deal — and this appears to be reflected in their choices when it comes to art, food and media.
As with any survey or data analysis of this nature, it's worth pointing out that correlation doesn't imply causation. This means that while there appears to be a certain behavior or preference pattern among users of a specific platform, that doesn't mean that this behavior or preference was caused by the platform decision. (In other words, the fact that I'm currently a Mac user doesn't mean that I instantly consider "The Office" to be the most hilarious show on television.)
Click on the infographic for a closer look. Do the statements made about your preferred platform sound accurate? Or are they so far off-base that you'll barely be able to stop laughing long enough to manage to leave a comment?
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Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. She's a bit obsessed with Twitter, loves to be liked on Facebook, and is a PC-turned-Mac.