Confessions of a Former Apple Hater

This weekend I read an excellent blog post from Mitchell Ashley titled Confessions of a Former Apple Zealot. Give his article a read, it is really very well thought out and he touches on many important points regarding the whole Mac vs. PC debate. I wanted to post a rebuttal of sorts because my personal experiences are just the opposite: around the time Mr. Ashley was a lover of all things Apple I despised the company. Why? In a word: Appletalk.

Back around 1992 I landed my first job with a large company in the data networking group. Data networking, back around this time, was very different then it is today. For the record the World Wide Web had already been created, back in 1989, but it had yet to gain a foothold among the masses. Internet access was rare and generally only seen at larger companies and Universities. Most large companies had at least two concurrent networks that ran side-by-side, one for the IBM Mainframe enviornment and another for "everything else". The "everything else" network was Ethernet but it was not the Ethernet of today. Imagine 200+ users sharing three collision domains of 10 megabit ethernet, half duplex over 10base2 wiring.

A group of Macs one one of these segments along with PCs of the day could totally cause havoc on the PC side, and they usually did. The reason for this is the Macs, with their awfully implemented Appletalk protocol would simply blast the PCs off the network with unending and unnecessary barrages of broadcasts. Being a data tech back in the day was a never ending battle to keep the Macs playing nice over the network. It was a battle you would never win, at least until network technology improved with smaller collision domains, VLANs and the like.

Looking at the Macs it seemed they were far behind the times. The "professional" Macs were a slightly different breed then the "home" Macs; the Pro/Business level Macs had color screens at least where the most Macs I had seen in people's homes had tiny black-and-white screens, a useless one-button mouse and, well, not much else. Quite frankly I didn't see what all the "big deal" really ways regarding these backwards machines.

The Mac, in my mind, would remain the backwards throwback from the 70s machine until a key and crucial moment in Mac history and that was the release of OS X. Over the years I spent working professionally I would come to see the beauty of an old operating system called UNIX. The longer I used UNIX the more I questioned why PCs did so little while this OS seemed to do so much, and so seamlessly. 100 or more users could be logged into a central UNIX machine doing all manner of work and my session would remain responsive. That was pretty impressive!

Linux would follow in big brother UNIX's footsteps and emerge as the "consumer level" UNIX-like OS of choice and thus these two, along with their cousin BSD, would march happily along, a strange enclave of computing that existed somewhere between the "big business Big Iron" and the home PC.

Also during this time the World Wide Web flourished and prospered into the biggest "thing" that has happened online. Ever. People started to get online in greater numbers and as more people would manage to get online they started to adopt higher speeds of data transfer. For anyone who ever connected at 300 or 1200 baud, connecting via a modem at 56k seemed incredible. The Cable Modems and DSL lines of the world followed and we went from a society of devices that were online occasionally to a set of devices that remained online all the time, 24x7 though mostly PC owners would only access online content a couple of brief moments of the day. Around this time Apple would have a watershed moment, the release of OS X; more of that in a few minutes.

But this is where the Microsoft side of the world failed and has continued to fail ever since. To compare Microsoft's inability, even wont, to secure their operating system with the security achieved by nearly ever other is a comparison of (can't use "Apples" here), uh, Oranges and plant food. The two are so far apart they, in comparison, are not only different species but so different I am having a difficult time coming up with a comparison that really works.

As long as Microsoft machines have haunted the Internet they (MS) have relied on 3rd party companies to do what they themselves cannot: secure their own product. True, Windows 95 and the successors of that bloodline, Win98 and WinMe, could no more be secured then someone armed with a single sandbag could fend off the onslaught of an incoming tide. Allowing the company to write off the sins of the "Win95" family of OSes does NOT excuse the out-of-the-box ease of penetration of XP and Vista. Microsoft "Trustworthy Computing" has been with us for over four years I believe and I have not seen much improvement.

Why do people still use XP (and God help you, Vista)? Large companies with big budgets and IT staffs *can* secure XP and keep ahead of security issues with the product - for the most part. In fact a large company can make XP seem quite solid and easy to maintain; a technician does not come around to kick you off your computer to install patches any longer and this gives the "home user" the illusion to keeping a PC with XP or Vista up and running (well) is a trivial, hands-off affair when in fact it is anything but.

If I had a dollar for each time someone I, or my wife, works with had a question about their "(home) PC being slow" or "weird messages popping up on the screen" or "my web sites being redirected" I would be a rich man indeed.

People also think they *HAVE* to put up with this kind of digital misbehavior from devices they bring into their home and it is just NOT THE CASE. My house is living proof of this, as are the others I have convinced to "make the change". Why?

Because Apple released OS X, that is why. Apple used to like to call OS X "UNIX" even though it really wasn't. It was, however, a very close relative, so close that once you were on the command line all your old friends were right there waiting. But a command line is not what makes UNIX the powerhouse that it is (it is am important component of that, yes, but bear with me). UNIX was created to be interconnected from the beginning as such it was built, from the start, with an eye towards security. Having a multi-user OS was useless if one person could corrupt the entire system for all other users. As such a strong foundation was created on which a strong OS was built. Over the years, no, decades, UNIX was improved and hardened as Internet and intranet attacks matured. Solid and dependable, not to mention safe, UNIX still plays a major role in the Internet and will likely continue for years.

OS X was built with the same security model in mind: multiuser, safe and robust out of the box. Perfect? No, hardly. A better alternative for a home user to use online? You bet. The reason I switch my ENTIRE EXTENDED FAMILY from XP to OS X, even going so far as purchasing computers for them was MY OWN PIECE OF MIND. Before switching the family over the OS X my parents and sister were all running a combination of XP and Me on their home machines and they ALWAYS had questions, usually about something not working at a critical time. I can't tell you how many times they would have to reload their base OSes after a virus infestation or a bungled Registry. Now that my family has switched the frequency of calls to Help Desk Greg have greatly reduced.

Sure, there is the occasional tech related question, the "how do I do..." or "is there a way to do this" but gone are the panic calls at all hours, usually the night before something big was due for school or work, with a dead or unresponsive machine.

Microsoft, rather then pouring funds into their own product to reach this kind of level of security would rather fight, what appears to me, to be a multi-front dirty fight to protect their installation base rather then to improve it. Funding the SCO suit through back-door money transfers, etc, with a hope to kill Linux was one such dirty war. Another was to push, and keep pushing, websites to adopt closed, proprietary protocols that could work only with Microsoft operating systems to force users to use MS or not be able to use many websites. On the other hand Microsoft produces and releases their popular office software for the Mac so they aren't all bad, just paranoid about losing market share (and they should be).

Anyone who says there is little difference between OS X and a PC for the home user has not used both operating systems. End of story. There is a HUGE difference in usability and Apple, with OS X, has the clear advantage.