Nice, thoughtful, albeit long piece from John Gruber, on his Mac blog Daring Fireball, on how people make choices (specifically, in this case, computer choices) and on how those choices tend to attract essentially misguided criticism.

It’s often said that you shouldn’t compare apples and oranges — generally used figuratively, but even looking at it literally you can see that it’s not true. You need to compare apples and oranges when you’re deciding what to pack in your lunch. What you can’t do is compare apples and oranges and somehow conclusively prove that one is better than the other.

Or ask yourself this: what would you rather read: a well-plotted but poorly-written potboiler or a well-written novel with a rather nondescript story line? A quick look at the best-seller lists tells you how most people would answer. The point is that you don’t choose one novel over another because it is somehow universally “better”, but rather because it is somehow more appealing, better for you, as an individual, based on the innumerable inscrutable tastes and desires and opinions that make you the unique snowflake that you are.

The reason this Pilgrim situation is so hideously complex is that all modern operating systems are complex. It takes a lot of work and investigation and expertise just to understand and form opinions about one of them, on its own; comparing one against another can’t be done by reducing the comparison to some single metric because they’re different in so many different ways. It’s easy to choose between two things that differ from each other in just one way — and it’s easy to explain your decision. Not so when choosing between things that differ in hundreds or maybe even thousands of ways.