IT Bytes

I must confess two things, 1. I enjoy my Mac book 2. I can’t stand people that glorify the Mac. I’ve owned Mac’s for about nine years and subscribed to MacUser for the same amount. I’ve seen the Mac go from an "also ran" to a potential leader of the pack. All through this period people have written in MacUser saying how great the Mac is compared to the Windows PC or rather just the PC. This months edition contained a letter that really made my blood boil. Basically the letter was saying that this guy was telling a family member to ditch their PC because of all the trouble they had with a virus. The premise to switch was that you won’t get a virus on a Mac. How stupid. Sure statistically I bet there are a thousand Windows based viruses for ever Mac one, but this is all about popularity rather than a secure system. I’ve long argued that rather than heap praise on one side or the other both Apple and Microsoft produce annoying operating systems and applications. Their hardware isn’t always that much better either. My MS Force Feedback joystick failed to work on XP, two Apple Macs were delivered dead-on-arrival, Ipod Nano scratches by simply looking at it, OSX is black or white OS, either your totally pandered by UIs or your down in the guts of Unix, Vista attempts to secure itself by panicking the user into never installing anything! What I’m saying is stop the my OS is better than your and start asking your preferred vendor to produce better quality products.

The real choice between PCs and Macs is flexibility vs. out-of-the-box compatibility. Mac’s only contain a very restricted set of hardware, basically you could say that the only options are how much memory or disk space you have (yeah ok there are more choices but it’s not far from the truth). This means the a Mac OS only has to worry about a very small set of hardware and hence the chance of a dodgy hardware drive getting into the mix is greatly reduced. Whereas PCs come in all sorts of permutations, some with downright cheap and nasty kit. Windows bravely attempts to cope with all of this, but with all these permutations of kit getting a conflict is greatly increased. So for me, when I want to build my optimum machine I go the PC route, when I want something that will be pretty dependable without me doing loads of researching then a Mac would be a good choice.

Ok rant over, now onto the title of this blog entry. Apple have made a
very big push at the home user to switch by concentrating on what the
average Joe user wants. Pictures, music, internet browsing and email.
Ok so you get that with Windows too but why should that matter?
(Although Apple charge for their email services). We swallow the slick marketing and go an buy our pretty iMac and put it into our homes, in fact it’s so versatile we put it into our living rooms/lounges. Great, we’re thrilled. But hang on what’s this on the horizon? A device that sits in our living rooms/lounges you say. Plays music, browse the internet, email, etc? Apple have been so keen to market the Mac as a simple users tool that stuck the Mac in the middle of the road where the consoles trucks travel up and down. Next gen consoles will do everything that the Mac campaign says you want from a computer. Plus they play cool games…hmm the choice of what to switch to looks obvious now, I don’t want a PC/Mac I want Nintendo, Playstation, 360…