Computer Note Book

Everyone has seen Apple’s Mac commercials by now. You know, the "Hi I’m a PC/I’m a Mac" commercials with the stodgy, less than humorous guy in a suit representing PCs, and the hip, trendy Gen-X guy representing the Macintosh. They cover themes like viruses, games, applications, and other computer related themes, usually with some humor and wit. Apple tries to pass these ads off as the "Truth" ads. The truly funny thing about this is how full of it Apple really is, and how with just a little thinking, you realize that all of Mac’s points *for* the Mac, really work *against* it.

The biggest thing you see mentioned in the ads today, are the applications. PC can do cool things like spreadsheets and word processing, while Mac does home movies and music and other *really* cool stuff. This is somehow meant to show that one can be just as productive, if not more so with a Mac. The thing is, since when was fooling around making movies and ripping CDs to iTunes "productive". It is not, and I bet most bosses would agree.

Next up is games. Funny, you actually do not see this brought up too often, if at all. Why? Because nobody publishes games for the Mac, though this may change, due to a point I will be making later. The last publishers I recall making games for the Mac were Blizzard and iD, who made games like Warcraft and Quake, respectively. Now, you might be able to find some crappy solitaire games, and there is always that "cool" standby, the Apple puzzle. Good times to be had there for sure. All games these days are made for the PC in Windows or Linux format. Enough said.

Viruses and spyware are another favorite of Apples to trot out. But this is an easy one. Take a look at the statistics, market share to be specific. Sure, Mac is gaining popularity (that point I mentioned in the bit about games, yeah, it will be pertinent here too), but it is still vastly in the minority in market share. Hackers go after the easy target, and that happens to be PCs running Windows, because they so far outnumber Macs. So duh, of course Mac does not get spyware and viruses. Does not mean they cannot, which is what Apple tries to infer.

Here is the final nail in the coffin. If you have paid attention to news in the tech sector, Apple switched to Intel processors (this is that point I was talking about). Yep. Macs use Intel Core 2 Duo 64 bit x86 CPUs. With a simple boot program, you can run Windows XP on the same machine you run MacOS X on. Oh yeah, Mac OS X? It is just a variant of an OS known as BSD, which in turn is a variant of Unix. Yeah. Apple has pretty much seen the light and come over to the PC camp. All they are doing is selling pretty machines with a pretty interface loaded with applications for slackers to waste time on. How is that for "truth"?