It comes as some relief to find there are still a few years left before I become a typical Apple customer. According to MetaFacts 2006 Home PC Brand Profile Report just about half of Apple’s base users are aged 55 and over, almost double the proportion of older users with Windows-based computers.

While these two statistics are hardly life-changing, certainly for some of us more mature computer users, our choice of platform has been or can still be a major influence in our lives. As a devout trend bucker, not being in the age profile of Apple’s users is even better news – bucking the trend of the trend buckers.

Many older users have chosen Apple because they have been advised it’s the easier of the various operating systems to get to grips with, without letting spyware and the like getting grips on their computers. Others have undoubtedly stayed the course since using Mac OS in the last century when their industry standardised on it – printing and publishing for example. But lately there has been a new trend, Metafacts also found Apple has a higher than average share among the “young technoliterati”.

In a study of 1,000 teens by equities firm Piper Jaffray, they queried music buying patterns and discovered 91% buy from Apple’s iTunes and 76% own an iPod. Senior analyst Gene Munster said: “We believe that winning over the teen demographic is critical to continued long-term growth and Apple is clearly in the lead in this market segment,”.

Apple certainly agree by making its products as user-friendly and flexible as possible, with marketing aimed directly at kids. The results speak for themselves as market share grows. Then there is the recent move to Intel chips and virtualisation making it possible to run just about any operating system on a Mac at the same time. Although, strangely, not the legacy Apple Systems 6/7/8/9 unless they run under emulators in Unix. Apple has, single-handedly, made Windows-only PCs seem almost obsolete at the same time as making operating system choice a matter of visual taste as data can be passed back and forth between them.

Of course, there is also the possibility that teenage rebellion plays a part of this. Mum and Dad buy the kids a PC to help with school work (as if) so it’s natural for them to want something else. Who do they turn to but grand ma and pa where they see something completely different from the PC they have at home. Plus it’s made by their favourite MP3 company and looks funky. As games consoles have been made to look like dinosaurs as soon as Wii hit town (even my wife wants one), could Microsoft’s decision to not allow home versions of Vista to run virtual machines go down as the wrong choice at the wrong time?