Myth of The Mac..
Now Playing: Shostakovich: The Tenth
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others
Few computer myths ever die altogether but at least some disappear or become lame jokes. Perhaps one of the most persistent and - of course - erroneous fantasies of the wonderful world of computing concerns the near infallibility of any machine coming out of the Cupertino warehouses.

The Mac, if you believe the fanatics, is impervious to virus attacks; never crashes, and can be operated by anyone with an IQ higher than his or her shoe size. Having owned a G4 PowerBook for a little over a year now - after spending nigh two decades in the Windows' camp - I find the self-proclaimed ultimate in computing cool no better (but also no worse) than an equivalent PC laptop. Only a lot more costly. And don't speak to me of "cool" - this errant design from Steve Job's henchmen gets hotter than a toaster most of the time.

As for being save from viri and spyware - it isn't just recently that the Mac's have been targeted. True enough, anything based on Microsoft's operating system has always been easier to hack. But the real reason why Apple's hardware and software has been "safe" for so long has always been that there is no point in attacking it: few businesses use it. And why would anyone want to hack into some prep student's PC? Unless you are looking for utter boredom, nothing of interest would be found. Commerce and governments have always run on Windows, for better or - mostly - worse.

Sure, the speed comparisons were always hoping on the wrong foot, and now that even Apple switched to Intel (an announcement of an AMD-based PowerBook cannot be far behind!), that benchmark is totally moot. Yet where it matters: networking, business applications, even standard productivity tools such as MS Office and the likes, Apple still lags miles and miles behind Microsoft. Even when the Redford, Oregon, company is the signing author for the application. MS Office 2004 has not seen a decent update since it came out, and underperforms even older versions of MS Office on the Windows platform. Networking is another headache: go wireless with the PowerBook and find yourself constantly disconnected. Try to maintain your PC in a mixed LAN and your Mac will throw of mapped network drives after even short periods of inactivity. And without some third-party tools (or some deep UNIX hacking) you cannot even decide what you want to share with other users on your Mac!

Apple Mac's don't crash? If anyone seriously wants to make that claim they had better stick to an OS version predating OS 10 by a couple of years! The UNIX-based brainchild of none other than Mr. Jobs himself not only crashes with great regularity, it also takes a solid 40% of your battery's action span, and slows its host PC to a crawl unless you spend some serious money and max out its memory. Nor is operating it any easier than Windows. The learning curves on both are pretty much the same, with the exceptions being the I-series of applications. They are easy enough, as long as you are happy of following a very linear path because Apple clearly believes that its user base is not intelligent enough to make its own decisions. iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes - all assume that you have already bought into Apple's numbskull "philosophy" that your PC ought to be organized as its creators see fit. I still own and operate the PowerBook. Bought originally because I did buy into the hype that it would be a better machine for photo and video editing. And as far as video is concerned, I have to concur - there's nothing in PC land that comes close to Final Cut Pro. At least I have not found it.

Still, most of the time these days people stare at my screen because they wonder if they seeing right: eighty percent of the time nowadays I run Virtual Windows XP on the PowerBook, because I still need to work in the real world. At least until I find a buyer foolish enough to pay a large sum for a year-old, 17" PowerBook!