Swiss Gnomie Bruno Fiems writes:

Hello Chris,

First of all, my mother tongue is French, so please excuse me for my English mistakes! I do live in Switzerland and you got some fans here. My girlfriend thinks you are a little bit crazy to share your life like this on the Web, but I do like it because it is an open window to the other side of the planet for me!

I used to work for Quark in Switzerland for nine years as a technical support specialist until it decided to close the office for economical reasons… damn. I never touched a Mac before working there and during my free time I surfed on YouTube looking for tutorials on this “alien” platform. That was long time ago.

I have been following your videos on YouTube for some time now (I have not seen all the latest ones — no time so far) and I have to admit that I really like to listen to your points of view on many different topics. Most of the time I am difficult to convince, but since I watch your videos I did switch to Mac (more than one year ago) and I changed my mind on what would be the best system for ME.

Now with Windows 7 on the market I have to admit that this is a great upgrade from XP (considering Vista was an internal joke at MS that had been released by mistake), but sometimes I wonder how this will compare to OS X (I am not talking about what I will think but what the “other six billion people” will think…

I am telling you this because I laughed a lot when I watched the video called “Windows 7 Thoughts.” The guy said that his father liked the way he could change his background every x minutes or play with the widgets, etc.; he could have had all of this a long time ago with a Mac! Sometimes I have the feeling that almost every single new thing in Windows 7 that pushes the Windows users to say “Wow, it is great now!” is just an implementation of an OS X functionality available for a long time on Apple’s system… but people dont know OS X enough to realize this.

On the other hand, if we consider that MS kind of filled the gap between its system and OS X, why would people still use OS X (especially when we see companies like Adobe not correctly supporting the OS X platform with its non 64 bit apps, etc.)? I have to admit that using 7 gives me a feeling of “confidence.” When I use my Mac I know (I feel) that it will not crash on me for some reason and not start to collapse without warning. With XP or Vista I don’t have this feeling, but on 7 it feels like the system is there, strong and fast… I will see in a few months, but for now this is what I feel.

Personally I use my white MacBook with 10.6.1 and I don’t think I will ever consider using 7 on this computer (which is my main computer). I also have an HTPC that runs under XP and I may upgrade it to 7 due to a better HDMI sound output support than XP. (I use 7 on my mini tower PC, which is my test machine)

What are YOUR thoughts on the final version of Windows 7? Not general thoughts, but the one that could answer the question: “Will I switch?” Did you ever feel like it could be your main system one day instead of OS X? If not, for what reason? The same as me? (I like my “girlfriend” — why should I change?)

I think you’ve already had this question 1,000,000,000 times, so I would feel okay if you can’t yet give me an answer to this.

Anyway, we like you here also! If one day you want to go to Switzerland for some reason, please feel free to let me know — we could go for a cheese fondue and geek talks!

Keep on rocking man.