In the old days, it would be the boilerplate "OS X is so much better than Windows" malarky. Recently, it'll be the hipsterish "Apple is becoming evil and taking over the world" line.

At my place of work, we use Mac's and we build iOS apps, which means conversation about Apple is never too far away. And I have increasingly found myself ranting and raving about these topics until I'm blue in the face.

But I recently had a week off, and went outside for a while. And do you know what? None of this matters.

Here's the dialogue I had with myself;

Old Alex: Apple are evil.
Zen Alex: Stop buying their products then.
Old Alex: But I genuinely enjoy working in OS X.
Zen Alex: Then continue to do so, but move off of iOS when your contract runs out.
Old Alex: But what if Apple lock down OS X like they have iOS.
Zen Alex: Then don't upgrade, jailbreak or simply move OS.
Old Alex: ... Crap.

When you stop to think about it, the tech industry is a ridiculously partisan place to live. You have your Apple diehards, your Windows fanbois and the Linux evangelists. But any web developer worth his/her salt will use all three OS's on a daily basis.

Even the companies that have become idolised are not as partisan as we are. Guess what, Apple has Windows machines in their building (how do they test the Win versions of iTunes or Safari?). Microsoft has a whole business unit dedicated to writing Mac software.

The point I'm laboriously crawling towards is this; you are never locked into an ecosystem unless you want to be. Don't like Apple's way? Move. Think Google owns too much of the worlds information? Use Bing and WebOS. Standing on a soapbox moaning about it changes nothing. Buying a competitors product does.

So I'm retiring my own soapbox. I'm finding inner peace. I'm shifting focus from the distraction of childish format wars, to what really matters; writing the best software possible with the tools I enjoy using most.

Just don't get me started on PHP vs Ruby.