As a PC user and programmer, I’ve had to listen for many years now to hipper-than-thou Mac users telling me how their favorite machines are simply better. Sure, Macs are beautifully designed, with a pleasing integration of hardware and software. But they are also more expensive, and there is a great deal of software for which Mac versions simply don’t exist.
But what really singes my drawers is when Mac users start telling me about how much safer they are. These Bohemian sorts imagine, in their technical naiveté, that this is due to the edgy, creative cleverness of the system’s design, when in fact it is simply because hackers haven’t bothered to focus their energies on a system that is run by only a small percentage of computer users, and an even tinier — utterly negligible, really — percentage of businesses. Apple, with their irritating “PC vs. Mac” commercials, have been nibbling away at this market, but have so far done so while staying, for the most part, under the hackers’ radar.
So it is not without a small, and I hope, forgivable, measure of Schadenfreude that I read this news item, about a new piece of malicious “botnet” software that explicitly targets Macs.
Welcome to the big time, kids.
17 Comments
sphere, i’m not hipper-than-thou i’m just practical. i work with both peecees and macs and both have their place in this world. it is a fact that macs are more expensive and it certainly is a fact that their integration of hardware and software is superior to the windows verified software and the multitudes of third party, unverified software claiming to run on windows. in the beginning macs were purposely built to handle graphics and design software. peecees were great at games. once unix and other much more expensive operating systems were replaced by windows because of its affordability the majority of business software was written for windows and linux. it’s not apple’s fault that the nerdball windows hackers have been more interested in exploiting the holes in the windows OSes than targeting mac OSes. windows has just been an easier target, until now, apparently. and that’s a fact.
watch where you’re pointing that schadenfreude. you seem to be wishing the same calamity on mac users that windows users have been dealing with for years. not all mac users can afford apple’s top of the line machines. don’t hate those of us who saved our hard earned cash to buy a better machine. some of us are as humble and hardworking as windows users. can’t we all just get along? ;)
Malcolm,
The flaw in your presentation of this is the concept of the ‘botnet’ targeting a particular operating system, in this case OS X. The ‘targets’ of this attack were people willing to download pirated copies of iWork containing a Trojan as this is social engineering which could be made applicable to any operating system. I am honestly a little surprised you’re as susceptible to Symantec’s and the media’s spin on this.
– M
Full disclosure: yes, I own both Macs and PCs.
– M
A fair charge, Mike, and indeed I hadn’t even bothered to look into the technical details.
There was just a certain grim satisfaction in the prospect of letting the air out of some very smug balloons.
Welcome, Lee.
Why certainly, let’s get along. There is just something ever so slightly gratifying, having had to look so long at a cap set at such a jaunty angle, about seeing it knocked askew.
Yo Mac! (ha ha)
I think Apple has a right to be cocky, as well as its legions of enthusiasts. Is there a company on the planet which has been as consistently innovative and creative as Apple? I thought my original iPod was the coolest thing in the world, until I got the iTouch. Although I come from a mixed marriage (my wife has a Mac, I have a PC), I’ve noticed how lots of people go from PC to Mac, but very few go the other way. People who have them uniformly seem to be passionate about them. Once you go Mac, you never go back. And let’s not forget that they more or less launched the personal computer industry.
I drive by the Apple headquarters on the way home from work, and about a third of the people here in Silicon Valley seem to have Macs, based on who is using what at Starbucks. So it’s the home town favorite. Even so, I am hard pressed to name another group of inventors which has produced such great stuff year after year.
Peter, you provide an excellent example of just what I’m talking about.
Sure, Apple has been consistently creative (I want an iPhone myself), but to say that they “more or less launched the personal computer industry” is quite a reach indeed. And while Apple was selling Macs to a handful of artists and musicians, Microsoft was busy assembling a truly gigantic suite of applications, and defining a trailblazing set of protocols for allowing them to interoperate not only with each other, but with integrated development environments, databases, Web servers, and so on. These products form the IT core of most businesses in the entire world, and they are running on PCs, not Macs. It is that very dismissiveness of this impressive achievement — because allowing businesses to do their business isn’t “the coolest thing in the world”, but is rather staid and unhip — that I’m bothered by.
Well, Lexus sells a lot more cars than Porsche, but my vote goes to Porsche. I’ll take cool and cutting edge over well-made but staid any day of the week.
Also, Apple developed its products in-house — a lot of what Microsoft does was not developed organically, but rather by other companies which Microsoft acquired to get their intellectual property. Nothing wrong with that, but I would give Apple more credit because they did it themselves.
That’s all fine, Pete, but the world needs staid, uncool things just as much as — or, probably, even more than — edgy, fashionable things. The main reason Mac users weren’t being troubled by malware as much as Windows users was simply that the bad guys weren’t bothering — not, as Mac-o-philes would like us to think, because Macs are closer to God.
I admire Apple very much. It’s just the damn smugness.
Call me cynical, but my guess is that most software viruses are created by companies which make anti-virus software, which are looking to create more demand for their products. Perhaps there are enough Macs now that they want to sell their products to Mac users as well as PC users.
Steven Hawking said that man has been searching for artificial life forms for centuries, and finally found one: computer viruses.
OK, Pete: that’s pretty cynical.
But Lee . . . Malcolm isn’t a ‘sphere’.
Jeffery Hodges
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I currently use a pc because I want a machine that is fully compatible with what I use at work, and I’m too cheap to plump for two computers. Prior to my current situation, I used apple/mac systems — and when the work connection is gone, I’ll go straight back to mac. It’s stable. Enough said.
I’m surprised that Malcolm seems not to have been infected by the mac meme when he worked in the music industry.
Hi Bob,
Actually, what I noticed about them back then was that they seemed to hang and crash all the time. I seemed to spend an awful lot of time twiddling my thumbs at the console while the programmer rebooted his Mac; I got very tired of that little smiley face.
Thanks, Jeffery; indeed I am less spherical even than I was in January, having lost almost 20 pounds since then.
Maybe he was referring to your “sphere of influence.”
I grew up with Macs (my first computer was an SE) and didn’t switch to PCs until high school, I think, when our school switched over to PCs. I must admit that the smugness has always bothered me a bit as well, although I will admit that not all Mac users are like that.
Right, Charles.
As for the smugness, the real point is: it’s just a goddam computer, fer Chrissake. Get a life.