“I’ve been forced to suffer through the MS-windows one size fits all shoehorn over the years, and must say that it really just doesn’t suit me in any way, not to mention all the crap that people have to do to keep it from becoming a random spam generator for some Russian mobster. “
I understand that. On the forced to at work that’s mostly due to 3rd party vendors and the Russians, well usually employee’s doing something they shouldn’t. I’m only saying that the expense of Mac isn’t justified to me. When I say expense I mean the hardware and 3rd party stuff due to licencing fees, mostly hardware. There is a unix os under that mac and its ok. What would the expense be for your employer to switch to all Macs? Alot more than Linux, an os with most of the Mac os benefits and many of its own. I handled the IT crap at a junkyard. A very big and expensive junkyard with all 5 year old or newer vehicles that was extremely IT oriented. In the end its still a junkyard and porn sites drove me nuts with the viruses but it wasn’t the end of the world. The only hard one to get rid of is the one we haven’t seen yet and we only see it once. Mac’s are very uncomon in most work places simply due to expense, lack of upgrades available and lack of third party software. They are uncomon in the home because of expense and performance lags behind PC’s. These two things are really my only point. When Apple says its ok to put its OS on my home built PC’s I’ll take it seriously, not a chance before that happens.
*Another note on viruses, they are out there for Macs. Macs get hacked alot too. I understand a compromised Mac is harder to fix due to its nature. If anyone has a comment on that besides more mines better than yours I’d truly like to know.
Sorry, you are wrong... On several levels. I've been a cross platform computer consultant for 28 years and I can assure you that most of what you've posted on Macs in this thread is just plain myth. You demonstrate you really know very little about Macs.
The only true viruses that have infected Macs were for Apple Mac OS 9 and under which ran Macs prior to 2001 before the introduction of OSX. . . for an OS that is totally unrelated to modern Macs except for being published by the same company. The two OSes, Apple MacOS 9 and under and Apple Mac OSX share no code, no architecture, or even theory of operation. They only superficially share a user interface.
Your claim that "Macs get hacked alot" is false to reality. Yes, there are a few well publicized Mac hack events... But they are well publicized BECAUSE it is news when it happens.
Macs are UNIX under the hood, an industrial strength OS that has undergone a 44 year open-source trial by fire, exposed to every attack vector many, many hackers could think of... And patched as they found weaknesses. Finding new avenues of attack is far from easy. The only successful new ones have been Trojans, social engineering of the user and just one that requires the user to be running as an administrator user that does not require an administrator password, in which case it WILL start the installer, but still requires the user to physically install it by clicking continue... Three times, ignoring warnings.
As for "compromised Macs being harder to fix?" You're joking, right? Most Mac users can handle most Mac problems themselves. There is no registry to get compromised or corrupted. A clean install of the OS can be done in 45 minutes or less without wiping the hard drive or losing any data. There is never any need to defrag or optimize the disk. Deleting a broken or compromised application is as easy as dragging it to the Trash Can and emptying the Trash (one DOES need administrator access to do that).
Incidentally, there is MORE software that will run on Macs than will run on your PCs. My Mac can run all Mac OSX software, all Windows software (two virtual machines, one Windows7, one WindowsXP), and one variety of Linux, as well as all UNIX software... all simultaneously. If I want, there are other virtual machines I can run on my Mac on demand for other OSes (and have) including MS-DOS, THEOS, C-64 software, Apple Mac OS9 software, Atari software, Amiga-OS, etc. These run within virtual windows under OSX... sandboxed.
As for your claim of speed, several reviews from recent Magazines have claimed that the fastest Windows PCs they have ever tested have been Macs.
As for the costs of Macs, I think that's largely one of perception rather than reality. When you compare appples to apples (no pun intended), price-wise there is not really that much of a premium for Macs over a name-brand. We've seen that illustrated here with side-by-side comparisons more times than I can remember. I built my own desktop when I upgraded about a year ago primarily because I had very specific requirements in mind, and wanted to make sure I had a box that would last for 10 years like my previous desktop did. If it had been primarily intended for my wife or MIL, I would have gotten a Mac, because it would have worked just as good for about as long, and would have cost about the same in the end.