What's the deal with Apple?

First of all please let me say that this is my personal opinion. This is not factual or supported by any of the people or manufacturers listed below. This is solely my conclusion after the experiences I have encountered.

Recently the comment, “I’m just going to trash this computer and buy a Mac.” Has been increasingly uttered by our clients. I have also heard people say they are safer and never have viruses. I believe strongly that the reason for these two comments is a lack of knowledge when it comes to this fruity PC. Please don’t get me wrong. I have watched Apple try to improve their market share in the residential computer industry for more than 20 years. I even won animating awards in High School using a Mac. They are a great product in their element. When editing video or audio media or producing incredible movies Apple computers are absolutely untouchable.
Why this blog? Well there are a couple things to say about why they are so good, and it only came to me in the recent years. I purchased and built the most expensive, fastest, and impressive Windows based desktop for gaming. Even though every piece and part matched perfectly it still did not look as good as an XBOX 360 or Playstation 3 on my TV. Why? I could not figure it out and it bothered me for months. Then it came to me.

In the retail computer industry there are many brands selling the Windows operating system like Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Hewlett Packard, Sony, Toshiba, even off brands like Alien Ware. But regardless of the brand Windows still gets a bad rap. Then there’s Apple. They don’t offer their operating system to any of those companies. Like XBOX and Playstation there is only one manufacturer and developer. Apple makes and sells their Macintosh computers as well as the O/S together. You won’t see a Dell with a Leopard operating system on it. I believe this is because Apple was smart and decided to control the hardware AND software. There-in lays the stability advantage. Microsoft has to come up with a new operating system every 3-4 years that is not only visually appealing but can function with minimal errors on EVERYONES hardware. Walk into any retail store and look at all the options available in Windows desktops and laptops. If you had any programming experience you would understand to make a product properly communicate with each and every micro-processor, video card, CD-Burner, etc you would understand the problem. It’s like walking into the middle of a riot and asking everyone to “Just get along”. This to me explains why Apple is so stable and Microsoft is losing the battle.

Then there are viruses, or the lack there of. Most annoying viruses that have come to be since the first personal computer entered the home came from people who wanted to learn how computers worked. They studied programming and learned how to build and dismantle programs. They developed programs like Lotus 1-2-3, Word, Quicken, even AOL. But they also learned how to damage and destroy computers using programming. That is where viruses came from in the computer world. If you look at the average number of DOS/Microsoft based computers back in the early 1980’s in comparison to the number of Apple based computers you would see what these programmers had to learn on. Because of this Windows has been fighting viruses for almost 3 decades now while Apple has relatively gone virus free. Now the market share Apple has been fighting so much to change is giving programmers more opportunity to learn a new type of O/S. It was only a matter of time before Apple started to warn users to load an anti-virus program on their Mac’s. It was also a matter of time before the headlines reported the first virus alert on a Mac. December 4th, 2008 Apple reported and then removed from their web page. As quoted by another blogger, “What's curious now is that Apple has zapped the support advisory which started this entire debate off its website. All you get now is a "not found" message if you follow the link:”


Furthermore, an Apple spokesperson has been quoted in the press saying:
"We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate. The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box." - Apple spokesman Bill Evans, Macworld, 3 December 2008.

If this information hit the media imagine the impact on Apple sales when one of their biggest marketing facts is that they are virus free.

As I said, these are only comments and thoughts of mine. We support Apple pc’s just as much as we do Microsoft. If you have any, please comment.