The whole 'Mac vs. PC' thing is so over, and 'Android vs iPhone' is close behind

Back when I was a kid in the late 1990s, most everyone I knew had a Windows 95 PC - myself included.

But I had this one friend whose family owned a Mac, one of those multicolored iMacs that were the company's first big product launch after Steve Jobs returned to the company.

I loved video games, and he loved video games, but he especially loved games on his Mac. Well, one game in particular: "Marathon," a first-person shooter, which was only for the Mac.

We got into fierce, week-long arguments about it, in the way that only ten-year-olds can. He said the Mac may have less software, but what was there was simply better. I said the Windows PC was way more versatile. Each of us begrudged the other everything.

Apple stoked the flames with its famous "Get a Mac" ads circa the late 2000s, in which actors John Hodgman and Justin Long played a PC and a Mac, respectively, showing how the PC was old and stodgy but the Mac was young and hip. It was a big part of Apple's turnaround story, as the iMac brought the company back from the brink of disaster, paving the way for the massive success of the iPod, and then the iPhone, which turned Apple into the most valuable company in the world. Sometimes, it feels like those days never ended.

People are still crazy protective of the computers and phones they use. When Business Insider published a piece a little while back saying that Microsoft's Surface Book laptop might be better buy for most people than the newest MacBook Pro models, we got some hate mail from the Apple crowd.

Well, guess what? The world has moved on. And it's less of a "choice" than ever before.

Because so much of what we do these days is based in the browser and in the cloud, Mac versus PC is no longer a lifestyle decision like it was back when boxed software ruled all.

It's just a matter of taste. Even Microsoft knows it.

And in the exact same way, because of the rise of the App Store model, iPhone versus Android is barely a thing anymore to most people. That's why analysts now believe that iPhone versus Android is "stable": Nobody cares anymore.

The operating system wars are over

For the last year and a half or so, I've been using Windows 10 after many years of being a Mac faithful. I found a lot to like (touchscreens, Cortana, window management), and a lot that was annoying (random crashes, peculiar device issues).

Every so often, like today, I switch back to the Mac, just to make sure I stay familiar with both sides. And I'm rediscovering that there's a lot to like (performance, stability, iPhone-related superpowers like iMessage), and a lot that's annoying (no touchscreen, no Cortana).

They both fill a niche. And they're both successful for their parent companies in their own ways. Macs are highly profitable for Apple, which is still primarily a hardware company. Windows is everywhere, from cheap laptops to premium machines like the Surface Studio, which is good for Microsoft, still mainly a software company.

They can both win. Windows and Apple have their die-hard fans, sure, but they can happily co-exist.

The same goes for the mobile platforms, too.

Apple and Google both won: Apple's iPhone is ridiculously profitable, while Android dominates with something like 87% of the whole market. Both of them got exactly what they wanted from the smartphone business: Apple is selling a lot of profitable iPhones; Google gets its web services and search engine in front of more people.

So while iPhones and Androids may have few features that set them apart from each other, they are still, by and large, running the same major apps, connecting to the same big services. Each phone operating system has its pluses and minuses, but they're pretty much exactly as useful to a vast majority of people as each other.

Maybe you like Instagram on iPhone better than Instagram on Android, but Instagram is still Instagram.

It's all about the service

Indeed, it's "service" that's going to make the difference going forward.

Switching between a PC and Mac was simple because even my handwritten notes from the Windows 10 computer were stored in Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service. I didn't need to worry about syncing my music between computers, because I use the Spotify service on my Mac and the Spotify service on my PC and the Spotify service on my iPhone.

This is why Microsoft is making sure there are Office apps and services available for the iPhone and Android. It's why Apple is going to bring its new Apple Music service to Android. It's why Google invests so much in the Chrome browser, which runs on both Windows and MacOS, and in web services like Google Photos.

When the operating system doesn't matter, users are free to choose whatever service suits them, at any time.

It also means that picking a computer or a phone is no longer like getting sorted into a house at Hogwarts. Go where you want, do what you want.

So relax, and remember that you don't owe the big tech companies anything. Let them serve you, in the way that you want.