I heard an anecdote from the 1980s, when Microsoft programmers who developed software for the Macintosh platform joked that on a Mac, keyboard interrupt has higher priority than the hard drive interrupt, which they considered supremely silly, because of course hard drive is a more important part of the computer. What they didn’t realise is that when keyboard isn’t responsive, the user thinks the machine is dead and panics, so it’s extremely important to keep the user interface responsive even when the machine is stressed. If hard drive takes somewhat longer to do its thing, however, nobody neither notices nor cares.

It’s a matter of corporate culture, obviously, and it persisted to this day. When Mac OS has an update pending, it notifies me and goes away. When I’m ready to let it update the machine, I let it know and then it does its thing. Other than that, it gets out of my way and lets me do the important things. On a Windows machine, however, the first thing it does is start downloading and installing updates, which makes the machine hot, loud and slow. A Windows machine thinks updates are the most important thing in the world, because it’s a self-serving mess. To a Windows machine, the user is an unimportant addition, someone who was allowed to use it, but otherwise doesn’t matter. The machine serves itself, the OS serves itself, and its updates, security and similar buzzwords nobody really cares about are the most important things. The user comes last, after the OS is happy because it finished doing the “important” things with 100% of resources. Only then can the user get the leftovers.

This, among other things, is the reason why I’m writing this on a Mac.