Mac Vs. Pc Commercials

[Dimwhit]

"Oh viruses never affect Frodo!"

This is my favorite complaint when people say Apple lies.

Do me a favor, do some research and list all the viruses that have spread to Macs in the last year. Or, if you prefer, ever. Be sure to mention how malicious they are, just for fun. I'm curious to see what you come up with.

Apple has never claimed that Macs can't be infected by viruses, just that they aren't (the odd one or two benign viruses excepted).

But feel free to prove that wrong.

Edit: Sorry, caught me in a mood. Feel free to ignore.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Is that what that thing in the plastic cannister was? All those parts you had to assemble?

Wow. I thought it was a bionicle.

Tony M

Nope, that was the Borg attachment.

It looks small, but you have to get a friend to add the parts to and then hook it up to the USB port to get the thing working.

 

[tonym]

Nope, that was the Borg attachment.

It looks small, but you have to get a friend to add the parts to and then hook it up to the USB port to get the thing working.

Oh. I just called my sister to tell her that, but she had already figured it out.

She also said that when she plugged the borg-thing into a USB port of her Windows-PC to get it working, the borg-thing instantly contracted a virus. It then started screaming in agony and threw itself into the paper shredder, to end its torment.

My sister feels pretty bad about it. Evidentally, the previous day she had turned-off her firewall before installing a new program, and forgot to turn it back on.

Being a Mac user, I'm not sure what a virus is, but it sounds like something bad.


Tony M

 

[Simplicity]

This is my favorite complaint when people say Apple lies.

Do me a favor, do some research and list all the viruses that have spread to Macs in the last year. Or, if you prefer, ever. Be sure to mention how malicious they are, just for fun. I'm curious to see what you come up with.

Apple has never claimed that Macs can't be infected by viruses, just that they aren't (the odd one or two benign viruses excepted).

But feel free to prove that wrong.

Edit: Sorry, caught me in a mood. Feel free to ignore.

I'm a computer security expert. I've got a graduate degree in it. I work for a large networking company doing network security programming. And the ONLY reason Macs aren't affected by the wave after wave of viruses is that they are virtually unused by the general population. If Macs were the most popular platform, you'd better believe they'd be the ones being hit.

The argument of "people don't bother to write viruses for us because they'd never spread due to our unpopularity" just doesn't hold a lot of water for me. The programming flaws that are seen in Windows exist because of the programming languages used to write programs and because of sloppy programming. Apple uses the same languages, and they use programmers from the same pool of talent (though my guess is that they pay less than Microsoft).

 

[Enforcer]

There's one physical button. You can't "enable right-clicking" when there's only one button. You can enable some stupid hold your finger down and click. Or double-click = right-click. It seems to be the rage with Mac users. Maybe, Apple could set up some kind of Morse code for mouse-clicks. DIT for left click and DAH for right. Or maybe they could have some sort of DDR-like minigame you could play with your fingers to earn a right-click.

Why is it stupid? Oh! Because you say so. I beg forgiveness. It actually couldn't be easier to use. And, my Dell Inspiron trackpad had a similar option (make one corner of the pad do a right-click), despite it having two physical buttons. Well, before the Dell's motherboard died. Again.

Wheras PC users just click a button that comes with all machines ON the machine. We can even double-click our right-clicks! Eventually, Apple will ditch the one-button idea, like they did with their proprietary CPUs. After that, they'll change their OS and everyone will start to wonder what the big deal was about.

Change their OS to what? Roll it back to Vista? How many Mac OS X Tiger features is Vista copying? Let's see... Spotlight, Dashboard, Expose, requiring a password to install software. That's four off the top of my head. Why copy clueless computer people like Apple?

If Macs were the most popular platform, you'd better believe they'd be the ones being hit.

But it's not, so they aren't. And that means that despite your hypothetical, my computer is safer from viruses than any Windows machine. Will that change one day? Maybe. But for now I'll get my gloat on.

 

[Dimwhit]

And the ONLY reason Macs aren't affected by the wave after wave of viruses is that they are virtually unused by the general population. If Macs were the most popular platform, you'd better believe they'd be the ones being hit.

I totally agree. But the fact is, Macs just aren't affected by viruses right now. That will change as they become more popular (assuming they get enough market share), but right now, it's a legitimate selling point to say that if you buy a Mac, you wan't have to deal with viruses.

From everything I read, they're not claiming to be impervious to viruses, there just aren't any for Macs. And that's true. And a damned nice thing, too. I love not having to deal with them.

 

[TogaMario]

Windows being effected by virus after virus is a penalty of that freedom we enjoy. Same with the unwitting people who easily send their computers to an unusable state too often to count (and far more quickly than I could ever give them credit ... namely, my parents). That's why I proposed a "Save me from myself" mode. Of course, then there's the 13 year old in a foreign country that thinks it's cool to disrupt millions of users experience because he figured out how to buffer overflow a pornographic jpg (or something similarly rediculous) and of course he prides himself on circumventing defenses.

 

[drothgery]

Change their OS to what? Roll it back to Vista? How many Mac OS X Tiger features is Vista copying? Let's see... Spotlight, Dashboard, Expose, requiring a password to install software. That's four off the top of my head. Why copy clueless computer people like Apple?

Spotlight was ripped from early versions of Longhorn, and requiring a password to install software is simply the conventional mode when running as non-admin (and is the case even now in Windows). The only change in Vista is that it's not creating users as admins by default.

 

[IronWolf]

Spotlight was ripped from early versions of Longhorn

A case where they can't quite keep up with what other OS's are doing and have been doing.

requiring a password to install software is simply the conventional mode when running as non-admin (and is the case even now in Windows)

Of course with people running with administrative rights all the time it didn't really make that much of a difference.

The only change in Vista is that it's not creating users as admins by default.

And it is about time they caught up to this.

 

[ssampier]

No difference?! * sputter *

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Owning a Mac in a PC-world is revolutionary. It is defiant. Owning a Mac is saying, "I demand a choice!"

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