Rotten Apples

I don't know how many of you actually deal with mac users, but they're everywhere. and theyre smug. theyve been claiming for years now that MacOS has no viruses. and there's a good reason for that. noone wants to build a virus for an unpopular platform. everyone wants to write for the mass market where they have a much better chance to spread. The macs lack of viruses and exploits isn't due to it being superior in any way, its merely a matter of popularity.

Anyhow, recently, in the last couple of weeks hackers have taken it to the mac users and developed some trojans and viruses of various sorts. so smug mac users, up yours. you're just now starting a long journey down a road where hackers poke and prod your every orifice. windows users have been experiencing this for ages, and we're adapting. we have virus protection, automatic updates, etc. you have none of this. as my friend frank used to say.. "good luck."

Also in other mac news, apple has switched their hardware platform recently to intel. theyre selling intel notebooks and intel workstations, claiming theres up to a 4x increase in speed. which is completely contrary to the argument that all mac users everywhere have put up, that their old risc processors have always been faster than intel.

Since apple has switched over to the x86 platform, there are a few things to keep in mind. x86 is cheap, anyone can get their hands on one for a couple hundred bones, unlike risc. because its cheap, its the platform of choice for windows and linux users alike. because of the large userbase, the hacking community is also quite large. because the hacking community is quite large, they've already developed a way to get MacOSX to run on just about any old x86 box, and doesn't require apple's special hardware anymore. Linky

This is quite interesting. apple has always needed to tie together its MacOS with its own proprietary hardware, and in doing so, makes a larger profit. however since its development for the x86 platform, theyre going to have a very very hard time preventing it from running on generic non-apple branded computers.

Not to say that this isn't a good thing. its great for the users. budget conscious users get to try out MacOSX on their own hardware, and if they like it, great. more power to the MacOS, windows could use a bigger competitor. Apple also makes some really great hardware solutions, elegant, solidly functional workstations and laptops that anyone would love to call their own, so I'm not sure theyre actually going to lose much business on that end, its just that theyre competing in a larger market now. instead of a big fish in a little pond, they're a medium sized fish in a gigantic pond.