New Apple Campaign Target PC Flaws 819
sodul writes"Apple just started a new campaign to emphasize the advantages of Mac versus a regular tasteless PC. The ads represent a young cool looking man (Mac) and a white collar in his 40's (not cool, PC).
In one of the ads the PC repeat itself several times because it had to reboot. In an other one (and maybe the most aggressive of all) PC is sick because of a virus, while Mac is healthy.
You can watch the new spots on Apple's site "
Re:Doesn't work (Score:5, Informative)
Well the PC guy (John Hodgman) is an expert. He's the daily show's resident expert and the author of "The Areas of my Expertise". Which was reviewd on slashdot [slashdot.org] and by the Onion [avclub.com].
Re:Is Apple on the offensive (Score:2, Informative)
John Hodgman (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dumb. PC==Mac. Mac==PC (Score:3, Informative)
It seems to me like lots of people who make the PC==Mac argument know what PC stands for & have been using the term PC to describe Macs through Apple's motorolla, ppc and intel days.
Have a look at these old Apple Manuals/Advertisments [computerhistory.org] and you will see that Apple has been calling their products Personal Computers since day one.
It is only the post 1992 Mac Fanboy crowd that started differentiating - and quite frankly, I'm dissapointed that Apple is starting to join in.
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Informative)
I'll let others flame you about the start menu and shortcut keys (If you want MacOS to behave exactly like Windows, why not just use Windows?) but:
a) Right-clicking should work the same as ctrl-clicking.
b) MacOS doesn't have "windows-style "uninstall" functionality" because uninstalling is trivial.
Re:Is Apple on the offensive (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:3, Informative)
...except when it's not. See any system utility like a firewall or antivirus. You get a bonus uninstall round!
Re:Is Apple on the offensive (Score:4, Informative)
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my entire desktop and laptop drives to an external hard drive. This works very well and if something happens, I can simply boot from the external drive and everything is exactly as I had it on the other disk. I've tested it a few times and everything worked exactly as expected. So, the ghosting software you talk about is very easy to do on Macs, unless I am missing some other aspect of what you want to do.
Or, you could use rsync (installed by default) to sync two computers over the network. I use this to sync various things on my laptop and desktop.
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Informative)
Why? On a Mac, I can use my thumb to hit the command key (the clover leaf), and use any other finger to hit any other key. It is a very simple reach, and works even on my laptop, where the size of the keyboard limits me to only one command key. Under windows (or Linux, for that matter), the control key requires a pinky finger, and a rather large reach (compared to, say, the shift keys). I much prefer the modifier key right next to the space bar. I am glad that Apple have decided not to change this. And, honestly, it doesn't take that long to get used to a different system, and if you are constantly switching back and forth from one kind of machine to another (I have Windows machines at work, Macs at home), it ceases to cause any confusion after a day or two.
In fact, most of your complaints are fairly trivial, and represent the cost of moving from one OS to another as much as anything else. Why would we need an uninstaller on a Mac? Most, if not all, dependencies are contained in the application bundle. To uninstall a program, move it to the trash. There is no registry to get corrupted, and no
Again, the complaints that you raise seem fairly minor and trivial, and would only really bother people that have been using Windows for a long time. Apple is not really targeting the hardcore Windows market, as far as I can tell. They are trying to target those people who do not have a great deal of computer experience, like the archtypal grandmother, or the computer illiterate English major. These people are not really going to care that the keyboard shortcuts are different (how many of them even know that there are keyboard shortcuts?) or that there is no Start Menu.
Re:Is Apple on the offensive (Score:3, Informative)
Haven't tried NetInstall because we're too busy to get the server working, but I've heard that it works for Intel Macs as well.
Re:Don't get the Macbook Pro... yet (Score:3, Informative)
Your advice (don't get first versions of new hardware) is sound, but I don't hear any kind of whine from my MacBook. I got my MacBook Pro last week, and so far, I'm extremely happy with it. The only thing slightly annoying is that some applications have crashed on me once or twice, probably because they're fresh ports to the Intel chip.
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:3, Informative)
If your application is putting stuff elsewhere, complain to the maker of that program, not Apple!
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:1, Informative)
It's been in there the past year, too, so this isn't some amazingly new feature I'm telling you about.
Re:The sick with a virus ad... (Score:4, Informative)
Please do not comment about what is going on underneath the hood of the OS unless you know something about the underlying architecture.
Re:Apple should be honest (Score:3, Informative)
All components are packaged as bundles (special directories) which have info.plist file which advertises what services they bundle provides to the system. These plist files are dynamically scanned by launch services and other components in the core OS to autodiscouver new components. When you trash and reboot, the connection to these components and the system is severed and you can empty the trash to get rid of them permanents.
Re:Is Apple on the offensive (Score:1, Informative)
There is a 3rd party OSX finder replacement [cocoatech.com]. Enjoy.
Re:Doesn't work (Score:3, Informative)
Here are some of his clips from the Daily Show [comedycentral.com]
Cmd-C, V came first (Score:5, Informative)
Also, Cmd has been the traditional shortcut key on Macs for a long time, since the days of Apple II, when it was the Apple key, so there's a long history there. In fact, the Control key didn't even exist on Apple keyboards until years later.
Re:Doesn't work (Score:4, Informative)
Don't like Finder? Try PathFinder http://www.cocoatech.com/ [cocoatech.com] or RBrowser http://www.rbrowser.com/ [rbrowser.com]
Don't like Safari? Try OmniWeb, Firefox, Camino, Opera, iCab, or even IE5
Don't like Mail? Try Eudora, Thunderbird, GMail, Entourage, Notes, or any number of other mail clients
Don't like Quicktime? Try VLC, RealPlayer, or Microsoft's crappy media player [although QT is better than either of the latter 2]
Don't like Dashboard? Try Konfabulator
Don't like Keynote/Pages/AppleWorks? Try ThinkFree Office, OpenOffice.org, or Microsoft Office
You could replace nearly all the major applications and many of system components of Mac OS X, but then it wouldn't really be a Mac anymore, would it?.
Re:Virus writing is a business (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, but very little still compared to the level and sophisitcation of IE exploits.
By stating virus writing is a buisness I am attaching to that all the typical behavious software releases have in relation to the mac - in that even though the market share for a platform grows it sometimes takea while for a company to ramp up to that new platform. Thus the greatly diminished virus profile on Firefox and also the Mac. I am not saying we'll neve see anything, just that it comes later in the marketshare percentage than you would think because for the most part it's not some really motivated kid working nights and evenings to get a virus done because he's driven, it's some guy deciding to hire X more russian hackers for X dollars to probe for Mac weaknesses.
Actually some time ago in jest I proposed that the russian mafia all used macs and that's why we didn't see spyware - they didn't want to soil thier own nest.
I also don't see anything in the Mac that makes it technically more resistant to viruses than Windows. You don't need administrator access to do many of the things viruses/bots usually do, and the security system it inherited from FreeBSD is basically all they've got.
Now that part you got wrong. First of all, there's nothing like the registry - a target that gives you keys to the kingdom if you access. Furthermore as noted ad nauseum mac users are not running as admins and so have less access to the system as a whole to install things like rootkits. Even if a virus is encounterd a user would at least have to enter a password for that virus to have much of a lingering presence.
Also, it's much harder to truly hide the precence of a virus under OS X as it's harder to hide a process where it cannot be seen by at least some tool. Windows makes that simpler.
Given that stock Linux, MacOS X and Windows are all equally crappy when it comes to security, all with "bolt-on" security systems designed in the 70s for a totally different threat model, I would be very hesitant with making any claims that Macs are more secure than PCs (which basically means MacOS is more secure than Windows). Right now they ALL suck! Apple have had more than their fair share of stupid exploits, often ones which worked in the same way as Windows exploits released months or years before.
But it's kind of hard to argue with the reality of the situation in that there are well over 10 million macs in use today and yet we do not see any viruses. Market share is a part of that but if they were as easy to infect that would not have been an impediment after the first million computers came online. You know how much each zombie computer fetches on the black market?
Yes Apple computers also have exploits, but not ones that are as easy to reach and not ones that are actually being exploited. You have to make a distinction between an expploit being used in a while vs. a theoretical attack that no one is using because it's too hard to reach and wouldn't effect enough people. An example of that on a Mac is an SSH exploit - while a problem SSH is not enabled by default on OS X so the practical result is that no-one writes SSH exploits for the mac because it would not have enough payback.
I'm putting my hopes in MAC security frameworks like SELinux and AppArmor
Ultimatley that will probably be the best approach, or at least part of a whole defense in depth approach that we will all need.
Re:Devil's advocate (Score:1, Informative)
I don't know how you can claim that an Intel Mac is "IBM PC Compatible". Of all the software that ran on the IBM PC [wikipedia.org], how much can you run on an Intel Mac? You need special software [apple.com] (including a new firmware) just to be able to install any PC operating system. They don't have a BIOS, which is one of the things that makes an IBM PC compatible IBM-PC-compatible.
First you told us PowerPC was the only way
They did? When? I don't remember Apple ever claiming to be the "only way".
x86 was crap, then you decided to use x86 becuase it was cheaper/cooler/faster
It *was* crap, compared to many of the PPC processors, back then. You seem to have forgotten the "10+ years pass" that occurs during your comma.
Next you told us MacOS was the only way to make the x86 Intel CPU's work well, then you released a tool so we could all install windows and see it run much faster than MacOS.
They'll still tell you that Mac OS is the best (not only!) way to use an Intel CPU. If you've ever looked at their Boot Camp webpage, you see that they make that abundantly clear.
Conclusion: If you twist their words a lot, and leave out a few decades of history, Apple's marketing message sounds weird. Umm, OK.
Re:Doesn't work (Score:3, Informative)