Bored during a recent commute home I decided to pay attention to the gadgets people were using. Then, in conversation with my sister it dawned on me: "Apple products are for old people!". My sister agreed, elaborating that "old people just need a simple device they can use for making phone calls plus the middle-class/post-middle-age have the money to buy into the Apple 'it just works' dream. 'It just works' is another way of saying 'simple' and that is what they want."

Although there are a gazillion web designers/web coders out there sat in front of their allegedly hip MacBookPros that will disagree with me, take a look at the Apple demographic on your next commute. Whilst you are at it look at the 'Samsung' demographic (including those with other Android devices). Apple products are the conservative choice, the safe bet for those of a certain 'elderly' demographic.

On the desktop Apple products do spare people of the tedium that goes with a classic Windows PC - ages to start up, lots of virus dangers and lots of 'reboot to install this pointless upgrade' scenarios. However, Google, with their Chromebooks have shown that there is another way and the choice is no longer Apple or really-boring PC.

The bit I like about Chromebooks is how everyone says the Google Pixel is 'a very expensive browser'. The bit they don't see is how Google have moved on from the classic 'WIMP' desktop metaphor that is now many decades old.

ChromeOS is not a 'skuomorphic metaphor' in the way Apple OSX is, it is a pure web experience, the future now. Sure you cannot run ye-olde-desktop-programs with it, however, there are much better collaborative tools for creating content that are almost here. ChromeOS forces you to work with these new and improved tools because you cannot work with Wordperfect/MS Word any more. It is great and it is no tragedy at all that those gatekeepers of yesteryear - Microsoft and Apple - haven't really got much to offer for this brave new world.