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I thought "aren't MacBooks already PCs, at least between when they were PPC and before they started using ARM", but then this is actually an "engine swap".

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They are Personal Computers and I'm dying on that hill

Yes!

People who keep saying PC when they mean a Windows or Linux machine. As if the Apple machines weren't PCs too.

It seems that in the Apple world, PC means "IBM PC-compatible".

> The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software that a contemporary IBM or Lenovo PC could.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC%E2%80%93compatible

(Lenovo's mentioned because they bought IBM's PC division.)

I remember being hugely confused by this when I first saw a PC, asked my friend what kind of computer it was, and got the answer "it's a PC". Like being told "it's a computer". Thanks?

This is a fairly recent usage. Back in the day, the term was "IBM-compatible", then later, "Wintel". It wasn't common to treat the term "PC" as being exclusive of Apple hardware until Apple's "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ad campaign of the mid-2000s.

I think that date could be pushed back to at least 1995. Here's an article dated January 1996 about SoftWindows, for Mac, which uses phrases like "Mac and PC clipboards", "running PC programs", "playing PC games", and "PC sound cards".

https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorldMagazine/PC...

Here also is an article about desktop publishing from 1990.

https://archive.org/details/FinancialTimes1990UKEnglish/Sep%...

It talks about "running a Mac-based system and a PC-based system side by side", and how "some text and graphics files can be moved relatively easily between Mac and PC formats". Opposite is an advert for Toshiba's early IBM PC compatible laptops, bragging about winning awards from PC User magazine, which I don't think featured Macs.

But when was any Mac ever called a PC? I don't think the Mac Plus, for instance, was called a PC at any point?

SoftWindows was Windows bundled with x86 emulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC, created in 1986. Note the PC in the name, apparently equivalent in meaning to x86 already. Maybe this was implicitly short for IBM PC Compatible, maybe the term PC was ambiguous back then, and for the next two decades, but I doubt it. (Clearly it is still somewhat ambiguous, though, or I'd have nothing to wrangle about here.)

The full phrase was "IBM PC compatible" and that dates back to the 1980s.

And it was specific to the PC model. The PC was a new architecture and IBM was otherwise better known for their other products at the time.

PC was established long before those Apple commercials.

The key here is that it always included "IBM" in some way. "IBM-compatible" or "IBM PC", or "IBM clone" or something along those lines. "PC" without reference to IBM was not specifically tied to the Wintel ecosystem, at least outside of Mac user circles, until comparatively recently.

Additionally I think in casual context PC has implication that it is the Desktop Computer and not a Laptop which is what the OP has.

I associate the term with something that descends from IBM PCs, which (thank god, for I abhor their usability) macs are not.

I'd even say MacOS is better for casual use out of the box than Windows.

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