That's one way of interpreting these results, that Mac users are more generous donors to charity than Windows users:
The online donation–management company Qgiv has analyzed the charitable-giving patterns of 165,000 people and found that Mac users are far more benevolent than Windows users.
Qgiv analyzed 320,000 donations given through their donation platform from November 2011 through November 2012, and discovered that the average donation given by a Mac user to a nonprofit organization was $182; the average Windows user's donation was a mere $137.
However, there's a slight problem with that prima facie evaluation of those numbers. For "generous" can be both an absolute and a relative description. Yes, given that Mac users give more actual cash than Windows users then we can indeed say in that absolute sense that they are more generous.
Yet we have it on good authority, in that story about the Widow's Mite, that generosity can also be considered as a relative matter. It isn't the amount given that shows generosity, it's the amount, the portion, of what you have available that does. That poor widow gives that mite (the smallest coin of the time) for she has almost nothing else to give. Unlike the rich man throwing gold coins around the place.
Which leads us off into other considerations. Mac users tend richer than Windows ones, that we know. The average income of said Apple buyers is indeed higher than that of the average PC buyer. We also know that rich and poor tend to give different portions of their incomes. Surprisingly, it tends to be the poor who donate a higher portion of their incomes: even as it's much less cash as those incomes are lower.
Which leads us to a not very satisfactory solution: we don't, in this relative sense, know who is more generous. The Mac or the Windows users. For we don't know what portions of incomes are being given. The lower Windows cash payments could actually be a higher portion of those lower incomes. Or they might not be: just not enough information to be able to tell.
