Re: apple? ummm... not for me
huncowboy said:
Depends on what you want to use it for. I like to play games on the PC.
Of course, that's why I made a point of saying that in my reply, as I'm well aware that as a gaming machine, it's not ideal. There are some terrific games out there for it (Halo, Soldier of Fortune 2, etc.), but not nearly in the quantity or time frame that they are for the PC. (That's also why I keep my Playstation 2 around.
For me, gaming on the computer is way down in my priority list, so it didn't factor into my computer-buying decision at all. I'm definitely a different kind of customer from you; nothing wrong with that.
I am sure you can build your own Macintosh too but the community behind it is much smaller and you don't get the amount of info that you can for regular PCs. "Is my nVidia card going to work with the Epox board with the whatever chip set?"... kind of thing I am talking about.
They're certainly shooting for a different kind of customer than you, and that answers your question about how Apple is still in business. They sell to people like me who don't
want to worry whether some ATI or nVidia card is going to conflict with the FireWire/USB cards I just put in, or whether the OS is going to accept any of it. They include things like Firewire 800, USB 2, 100 or Gigabit ethernet sound output/input, wireless networking etc., in the machine when you buy it. You buy it, you plug it in, and it works well.
Same goes for the laptops, which aren't really home-buildable. I'm typing this on my girlfriend's new iBook, and it's an absolutely amazing little notebook computer. Is it for you? Probably not. But it'd be an ideal machine for a lot of people, and at $1100, it's not the bank-breaker people seem to think Apple machines all are. Take a look if you're bored:
http://www.apple.com/ibook/
(Don't let the "slow" clock speed fool you. The PowerPC processors do quite a bit more in a clock cycle; its speed is in the neighborhood of a 1.8GHz Intel chip. Clock speed's a very bad indicator of processor power.)
I buy the argument that you are less vulnerable because your group of users is smaller and thus less viruses are written for your OS. But than it is also true to say that you have less security people working on freeware software to keep your Mac safe for the very same reason.
There's more to it than that. The core of the modern Apple OS is an open-source unix architecture (FreeBSD), and there are a myriad of people working constantly on security for this system, and not just at Apple. That's one of the huge advantages of an open-source operating system. Programmers around the world can contribute to it if they discover a security flaw (or other improvement that can be made). There's no spyware. For an application to install ANYTHING, it has to be with express permission of the user. The internet ports that would let the outside world do damage are SHUT by default. (I believe Windows is
finally doing this as well. Happy to see it.) And the root user is disabled by default, and must expressly be activated. I haven't needed to yet for any reason.
In short, it
is very secure, right out of the box. The smaller user base does make it less likely I'll get an attack, as you point out, but that doesn't diminish the inherent security of the system itself which will protect me from such an attack. You just don't see things like the Blaster worm affecting unix systems, because they wouldn't be able to replicate the way they did under Windows. It simply wouldn't have had the access to do it under the Mac OS or any modern unix system.
Of course you need to do your windows update on every Sunday after church but that goes for the hardware too in your computer not only for the OS. Is this not the case for Mac?
Not for the hardware, no. The only firmware update I ever got was for the built-in DVD-RW drive, allowing my 2X burner to handle 4X media without barfing on it. (It was a bug in the Pioneer drive's firmware, specifically.) Because it was a drive Apple shipped with the machine, the OS's built-in software update function alerted me to the update. I didn't have to go find it on my own from Pioneer. I'd probably have never even known about its existence if it hasn't alerted me to it.
There are software updates that will come out periodically, but not nearly as frequently as the XP updates come out. Generally they'll be things like a security update, an update to one of the modules like the built-in e-mail that gives it new functionality, or something like that.
Please don't get me wrong; I'm
very glad to see Windows getting more stable, even with a bit of tinkering. I'm just getting to the point where I don't
want to tweak it anymore; I just want to fire the thing up, do my thing on the internet or whatever I need to do, and relax. I used to repair and sell computers for a living; I guess you could say I burned out early on the tinkering.
My point I guess was for the folks who don't want to chase the latest viruses, worms, spyware, etc., there is a very viable option out there. It isn't for everyone (it sounds like it's probably not for you), but it's worth a look for a lot of people who dismiss Apple without ever really researching it.
Thanks for your reply.
