Mac Misconceptions

Ah-ha! Here I am trying to debunk a mess of myths regarding Apple's Macintosh computing platform. I must be one of those brainwashed Mac junkies who can't see anything past the rose-coloured blindfold they continuously wear, right?

Well, there's myth one for you.

Actually, I approached it from the opposite direction. I'm a computer science lecturer at college and regularly delve into the murky depths of programming, software, hardware, malware and operating systems with my students. Knowing how computers work at their deepest levels makes it very hard to respect Windows. Or, to an extent, PCs. There's stuff left over from 1985 in there, you know. A brand-new, modern, out-of-date-in-one-year, dual-core 3.0 GHz computer still has legacy crap twenty-five years old under its hood. I don't appreciate Macs because they work better on the outside, but rather because they work better on the inside.

The true killer feature which motivated me to buy a Mac, though, was not the operating system or the software. It was the ability to run anything - Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris UNIX, Ubuntu and all the software of each. Powerful, simple virtualisation from software like VMWare's Fusion is a killer feature for a computer science lecturer. I can do anything, teach anything and demo anything to my class on the one laptop. Even the original Macintosh OS from 1984 gets rolled out in my classes for a quick history lesson.

One myth down, then.

Macs are More Expensive

Here in Australia, Apple computers are generally around the same price as a PC. Sometime a little more expensive but sometimes a little cheaper too. It depends on the timing, the model and the currency exchange rates.

Before I bought my iMac (the first aluminium model) I built an exact duplicate from PC parts on an online quote page for a computer shop I frequent and found the iMac to be just $100 more than the generic equivalent (about $50 in US dollars, plus or minus a bit). I decided that I was quite happy to pay that much just to get rid of the cable mess.

The misconception of a huge price difference comes about because Apple only updates their hardware once or twice a year. If I was to make the same comparison at the end, rather than the beginning, of my iMac's life, the hardware would be older and price difference with an equivalent PC would be much higher. Prices are revised constantly on the PC side and a confusing jumble of models are cycled, refreshed, abandoned and replaced. Apple prefers to keep things simple, sticking to a simple line-up at more-or-less static prices which get updated with newer technology only every so often.

The simple line-up and consistent price points makes decision making easy but at the cost of the best possible deal for the hardware in the box. I admit that, at heart, I prefer the PC system but, then, at heart I'm a nerd and know what I'm doing. Apple's system is different but not wrong. It has different strengths for a different audience. People like me who are not that audience simply buy the hardware as soon as it comes out to get the best deal.

As a disclaimer, I should point out that currency conversions might be affecting the old "more expensive" argument here in Australia. Apple is, of course, an American company but their computers are built in Asia. Which currency conversion applies when pricing the systems in Australian dollars, I have no idea. Perhaps both. Your mileage may vary, then.

Macs Are Slower That A Similarly Priced PC

The flip-side of the "more expensive" argument is the computer you get for your money. The usual ways of measuring this are, of course, CPU clock speed and memory. Clearly, if a given Macintosh is a long way from its last refresh, you'll be paying more money for a slower CPU and less memory than the equivalent PC, right?

Well, yes. Broadly speaking. However, the question should not be whether or not you want a faster CPU but whether you want a faster computer.

Let me put this simply: MacOS X is much, much faster than Windows (and shortly to get faster with the next version). I could go into the deep and tangled details as to exactly why but it's about ten pages of operating systems theory and probably best saved for my actual students.

However, I've pitted my 1.6 GHz Macbook Air laptop against the finest in 20-inch, red-lit gaming laptops from my students and, yes, rendering a complex filter on a high-resolution Photoshop file is faster on their 2.8 GHz dual-core powerhouses - but the Mac is faster at launching Photoshop. It brings up previews of files faster, boots faster, wakes up quickly, lets me shuffle and re-size my windows more smoothly. Searches are instantaneous, graphical effects are swift and liquid, and more memory is available to software that need it (Windows has a 2GB limit for software, if you didn't know). All those little operating system jobs that are done a thousand times a day are much, much faster on a Mac and the whole experience is smoother, easier and less niggling.

So the question is, what do you mean by "faster"? Are we talking a sprint here? Shaving a few seconds off a complex and involved bit of number crunching that takes five minutes? Or a moving faster through everyday life, a computer equivalent of a Segway? Again, there's no right answer, only preferences.

I also found it interesting that, when I bought my iMac, there was no specifications on the box. No speed, no memory - nothing. Clearly the argument is one Apple does not care about and does not think its customers care about. It's like advertising a car's top speed to someone more concerned with whether it will seat the whole family and is fuel efficient. It's just the wrong audience.

Macs Have Less Software Available

The obvious retort here is the old virtualisation argument of "I can run any software I like on any operating system I like on my Mac". Let's leave that to one side though and focus on actual Mac software.

There is less Mac software than PC software, yes. However, it's not nearly as bad as saying so sounds. There's software for the Mac that will do everything you need it to do. The main difference is that there will be two or three different pieces of software that do the job rather than the ten to thirty you get on the PC. But the software's still there. Believe me, you won't buy a Mac and then think "Well, damn, now I can't do batch renames of files or run my old Nintendo 64 games or record audio from a RealAudio stream on the web".

There is something important you do need to know about Mac software, though. Where, on the PC side, you tend to get a full spread of freeware you can make use of, the Mac side tends more towards shareware.

Setting the cross-platform open source movement to one side, most Mac software costs between five and a hundred dollars with popular price points around the twenty dollar mark and the eighty dollar mark. Some of this software has equivalents on the PC which are free, such as Speed Download, a twenty-five dollar equivalent of the Windows program Flashget. On the other hand, a lot of the Mac software is dead cheap, too, like Pixelmator and Acorn, two excellent shareware competitors to Photoshop and both around $50. That's a saving of $90 on the cheaper versions of Photoshop and a saving of $650 on the full version.

I can't say this is a good thing or a bad thing as there are weights on both sides of the balance. Certainly, there's no reason why the developers shouldn't make a few dollars for their work and making software profitable encourages higher quality and more innovation. Heaven forbid that we fall into a ghetto of buggy software with miserable interfaces nailed together by bored college students. Much better that it is a genuine industry with higher standards (And, believe me, the standards are high).

Macs Have Less Games

Okay, you've got me there.

Mind you, I was astonished how well games run in a virtual machine (again, using VMWare Fusion in my case). Portal, Hitman: Blood Money and the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy all work fantastically. Those games are not exactly state of the art now and I wouldn't want to try, say, GTA 4, but if you don't have a twitching need to have the latest game right now, a Mac will keep you entertained.

Macs Use Generic Components

No. And then again, yes.

I get the impression that the people who say that Macs use the same hardware as PCs are talking about the Intel processor. However, Apple develops a lot of custom technology and silicon for their computers and with their not-so-recent-anymore acquisition of P.A. Semiconductors, this seems set to continue. There's a lot which is unique in a Mac these days - the new glass multi-touch trackpads and the unibody enclosure being the two big talking points now.

And then there's a lot of technology which Apple brought to the market but did not create. USB was unique to Macs for a while. So was the mouse. And the trackpad. As too were firewire, displayport, sudden motion sensors, bitmapped graphics and 802.11 wifi. They brought the consumer the three-and-a-half inch floppy, the CD-ROM drive, the all-in-one computer (which, admittedly, hasn't taken off outside of Apple), laser printers and the modern laptop form factor. Apple was first with all of them at the consumer level and first with most of them, period. They were, every one of them, unique to Apple. For a time.

However, most of this custom hardware doesn't impact on the Holy Grail of PC metrics - speed. The processor, memory, graphics and chipset in Macintosh computers is all standard stuff, right?

Nope. Most of it is standard stuff but not all. Twice now Apple has collaborated with its hardware partners to surprise the computing industry with new chips in Macintosh products. First up was the custom processor in the Macbook Air. Intel has since sold the same chip to others but Apple had it all to itself at the launch. Nvidia, too, has worked with Apple on something built just for their Macbooks - a new graphics chipset, which, again, is available to anyone only after Apple has already used it.

Macs Are Going to Get Viruses Sometime Soon. Any Time Now. Wait For It.

It's in the rulebook that I have to start this section with a disclaimer that no operating system is one hundred percent secure and, yes, the occasional virus may crop up for the Mac later. Okay, done.

But, personally, I don't think so. Oh, maybe one or two, but I'm pretty sure the Macintosh line will never have an infestation anything like Windows PCs suffer. People find this hard to believe and it's easy to see why. Viruses are such a fact of life in the Windows world that suggesting that we could actually be rid of them forever seems wistful, like the dream of finding the fountain of youth. It sounds to be a foolish, impractical wish and the fact that Apple computers are immune must be down to some fluke, some fleeting quirk of circumstance that will soon be corrected as the natural order of things smothers it and bears the aberration away.

Market share is a favourite excuse there.

But this is not the case at all. Once again, I have around ten pages of computer science class notes on malware and security babbling incoherent technical jargon as to why, but the simple reason why viruses are so rampant on Windows and MacOS X remains yet untouched is that the Apple operating system wasn't written by a company in a hurry.

Microsoft created Windows quickly in an attempt to compete with and then crush Apple. Unlike slower, more considered operating systems like UNIX, NextStep (which became MacOS X) and Linux, Microsoft skimped on the security to get it done in time. In their defence, this was before the world wide web existed so it was actually reasonable to assume that home computers wouldn't need much in the way of network protection. Indeed, Apple had the same problem itself at the time, since the original Macintosh operating system predated the web by ten years.

They had no such excuse later when they tried to destroy Netscape by rushing out a competitor to Java and Javascript called ActiveX. ActiveX was tied to Internet Explorer and forced on to every computer that ran Windows. It's lack of security quickly made it the vector for eighty percent of all viruses that work through a browser.

Even worse was Visual Basic for Applications, the scripting language behind Microsoft Office. Office, of course, includes Outlook, Microsoft's email program. The security on VBA was pretty much on par with Windows and ActiveX, which is to say roughly equivalent to putting a pile of gold in the middle of a field. VBA became the vector for ninety five percent of all viruses of any type. A bad Outlook email virus can send so many emails from so many infected computers that it will bring the internet itself to its knees.

And there is no defence or excuse possible for Microsoft disbanding the Internet Explorer team after they had finally dispatched Netscape. Internet Explorer languished for years without any updates, uncaringly letting through virus after virus because Microsoft simply didn't want to bother any more. Netscape was dead and the consumer could go hang.

Microsoft has learnt its lesson, I believe, but it is still left with the legacy of its bad decisions. Windows Vista was an attempt to leave many of the legacies behind and improve security, but in the process Microsoft had to break compatibility with a lot of software and drivers that were used to having dangerously unfettered access to the OS. This is one reason why Windows Vista has such a bad reputation and it's a great shame since Vista represents the first step to ridding ourselves of viruses once and for all. I expect further versions of Windows will continue to leave behind more insecure baggage from the nineties.

What I find interesting about the viruses-on-the-Mac debate is that a great many people find it so hard to accept that viruses are not simply a fact of life - that we do not have to be resigned to their existence as if they were somehow an inevitable consequence of computing. Allow me, then, to put the above few paragraphs in complete perspective...

Microsoft is culpable for the existence of over ninety five percent of all viruses, ever.

That is why there are so few viruses elsewhere. Not chance, not market share and not for lack of trying.

Apple Should Go After More Market Share

You know, by releasing a cheaper desktop computer or licensing the Mac OS to other companies like Dell or Psystar. Honestly, I'm not sure why people care about computer market share so much. No one even knows what Ford's market share is, or Pepsi's, or the market share for Phillips televisions. The bottom line is that doesn't matter if Apple has 1% share or 50% share. What matters to the share market is that Apple is extremely profitable, and what matters to the customer is that they have the choice to buy an Apple if they want to.

The trouble with market share is that it is not an end, but a means. More market share doesn't mean more money - it just means more market share. The cheaper a product is the less profit you can make on it. Both a cheaper Apple computer and a licensed version of MacOS X would make Apple less money per sale than their existing line-up.

In fact, Apple did once license their operating system and it was a move that nearly destroyed the company. Modern operating systems are hideously complicated and a lot of money is required to develop and maintain them. Apple was previously getting that money from selling their computers but once people started buying the "cloned" Apple computers, the money dried up. Apple simply weren't making enough profit on the operating system alone.

And yet, this strategy did work for Microsoft Windows. The difference is that Microsoft didn't start by licensing a modern operating system. They licensed DOS.

DOS was a simple operating system in a simpler time - before the mouse, before bitmapped graphics, before the web, before ubiquitous networking, and, heck, before we even knew it was possible to run more than one program at once. These days, university students write superior operating systems to DOS as class assignments.

Microsoft bought DOS for a pittance and then licensed it to anyone who would have it. They captured a huge swathe of the market and held it for ten years, giving them the time and the income they needed to develop Windows. By the time Windows 95 came out, they basically owned the market, leaving a couple of percentage crumbs for Apple.

So, where Apple funds its operating system on the higher profits of hardware, Microsoft funds it on lower profits and high volume. If they hadn't been all but a monopoly when Windows came out, Microsoft's strategy would never have been sustainable. Microsoft's situation was unique and their success with Windows has never been duplicated by any other similar platform - not even my Microsoft itself. Every other big, successful platform - the X-Box, Playstation, iPod, Blackberry phones - have an operating system tied to the hardware, just like Apple does.

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