Posted on 08/20/2008 8:20:08 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple has begun airing three new "Get a Mac" ads on U.S. network and cable television.
In "Pizza Box," PC stoops to disguising himself as a pizza to get college students to even look his way.
Apple "Get a Mac" ad: Pizza Box
In "Throne," PC sits atop his throne, but Mac puts a damper on his fun.
Apple "Get a Mac" ad: Throne
In "Calming Teas," Windows PC offers user "calming teas" to deal with the mess that is Windows Vista.
Apple "Get a Mac" ad: Calming Teas
See the ads in various sizes and qualities via Apple.com here.
I can’t say I hate iPods, and my wife’s may just need rebooting. She’s traveling, so I can’t look at it right now.)
But Apple is doing all the things that people criticise Microsoft for doing — ramming a browser down the throats of their customers, making iTunes difficult to use with multiple players, etc.
In other words, screw the customer and maximize profit from selling songs.
Do you know what a straw man argument is?
You argued that there are no viruses for Mac because there are too few Macs. Swordmaker pointed out that viruses have been written for far smaller target populations. That's not a straw man; it's a direct rebuttal.
the fact is that Mac's market share is just not big enough to attract signifigant hacker interest.
You really don't have the first clue how hackers think. Windows viruses have no bragging rights any more -- they're the domain of script kiddies and zombiebot spammers. It's just too easy. But getting a self-replicating virus on Macs, now that's a way to build a name for yourself. It's the difference between climbing Everest and climbing Pike's Peak.
You don't think tens of millions of computers, the vast majority running no antivirus software whatsoever, is a tempting target?
I don't see many iTunes updates except when they add a significant new feature -- I think the last one was when they added the iPhone apps store. Since I run Safari, I haven't had that issue, but if you're using the iTunes store, iTunes *is* a browser, albeit a specialized one. I'd imagine it has to have the Safari engine installed to operate.
Bundling a browser with another application is not comparable to inextricably bundling a browser with the operating system. You can delete the Safari browser and run the rest of OS X just fine -- something that wasn't possible with the Explorer bundle that got Microsoft into trouble.
I would like to see Apple provide support for more non-Apple players in iTunes, and I'd also like to see more players support AAC. But bundling utilities with a peripheral is pretty much standard operating procedure -- you won't be able to use HP's printer utilities with an Epson, or run a Microtek scanner with Canon software.
I think that over 400 million machines verus only 35 million machines makes PC a much more tempting target.
the problem is that iTunes updates pop up with the Safari option pre-checked. This is sleazy and offensive. There's no way to tell them to stop doing that, and all you have to do is forget to uncheck the box and you have yet another unwanted program installed.
The iTunes program is offensive in other, needless ways. If you own more than one iPod per family, you can't have separate libraries for each. If you can, it's pretty well hidden. There's no easy way to reverse synchronize if you have disk drive problems. The MP3 encoder sucks. Sound Check does the opposite of what it claims to do. Support for audio books sucks.
Some of these are quibbles. It's basically a fine program, but I get the impression that the things I object to are deliberate. Hence my comparison to Microsoft.
Sure. And that would adequately explain why there are only several hundred Mac viruses compared to tens of thousands for Windows.
It is not adequate to explain why Macs have zero.
Maybe so, but I would argue that the dramatically smaller market for Mac has so far to date not been big enough to attract the interest of the hackers. But as Mac approaches 9%, perhaps things will change.
I just a retired guy with a home computer running Windows 98 that has just passed it's tenth birthday. However, I do find myself wondering if Mac is as superior as is claimed, virus free and all, why doesn't it have the lion's share of the market?
And didn't I read that in some sort of contest, a hacker was able to hack into a Mac?
Nope. You asked for Mac in a box, not OS X in a box. OTOH, you can get that too, but it won't run on your existing machine without a hack.
This obviously makres PC a much more attractive target for hackers.
No. The "security by obscurity" theory has been examined and shot down many times before. It's wishful thinking among Windows users.
The figure is actually 27,000,000 Macs in the US (the rest are installed in the rest of the world), which is around 14-16% of the installed base (around 168,000,000 to 196,000,000 computers in the hands of consumers) among US consumers are Macs. This has been confirmed in scientifically designed surveys done by Popular Science and Consumers' Reports, as well as the findings of the Software Publishers Association that 18% of all software sold is for Mac. Those results were from about three years ago, before Macs started skyrocketing in "market share," the percentage of computers sold each quarter.
Add in the fact that the majority of Windows PCs are protected by some form of anti-malware while at least 90% of Macs are not. Business PCs are usually not only running anti-this and that, but are behind some industrial strength firewalls on the entire business network. Macs in the hands of consumers are running bare naked, for the most part. That should make the Macs 'sitting ducks."
Sorry, this is a strawman argument. Try again.
No, it's not. It shows that malware authors have been attracted to write viruses and malware for far smaller installed bases than the 35,000,000 Macs that are out in the wild, and they do it quite often. They have written for installed bases where the total number of targeted machines has been under 30,000. Yet they blithely ignore a vulnerable, exposed population of powerful computers totaling more than 35,000,000 that should be easily.
The reason they are not cracking the Mac installed base is that it is several orders of magnitude harder to do. So far, no one has succeeded in writing a successful self-replicating, self-transmitting, self-installing malware for the Mac. While you can get a Mac user to download, install, and run a Trojan, he has to ignore several very obvious system warnings to do so, that is still a retail, one computer at a time proposition. First the malware author has to attract him to the malicious website, then he has to entice him to download and install the malware. What has he got for all that work? ONE computer. With Windows, and Active X, he may wind up with thousands, as it sends itself in email, etc.
If the Mac were so vulnerable, where are the exploits? Why are not 8% or 16% or 18% of the malware out there written for Mac OSX? Where is the Mac's "fair share?" When Apple was using its old OS, MacOS, there were around 114 viable viruses. Apple's installed base numbers were far less than they are today, yet there are ZERO viruses and ZERO spyware in-the-wild for OS X Macs. Being able to build a spam-bot out of 1,000 to 2,000 computers makes a powerful spam spreading machine... yet there has NEVER been a spam-bot found among Macs. If someone could write a self-replicating, self-vectoring worm or virus to infect all those exposed Macs, which are literally next door to each other on the Internet, it would have been done. Writing one that will capture just 1% means they'd have 350,000 computers doing their bidding. That's a very attractive target. It hasn't happened. It certainly is not because they haven't been trying or that there just aren't enough of them to make it pay.
So if Mac is so superior, why doesn’t it have more than 8% of the market?
You're running Windows aren't you? The TrueType font system you use is an Apple product.
Yep, you did. However it took the "hacker," who is an ex-NSA computer security specialist and his team of two other ex-NSA computer security specialists, three weeks to prepare that attack. The vulnerability was actually in Safari and Java... but it was closed less than two weeks after he exposed it. It also was a "retail" attack, not a "wholesale" attack. He also stated that the exploit would have work equally well on Windows and Linux machines.
So you think that the alert, inundated with malware, saturated market is better than the untapped, complacent, unprotected market? I'd rather have 35,000,000 vulnerable, naked machines to write to than 400,000,000 that are hiding behind layers upon layers of protection.
Inertia and ignorance.
I don’t know why MP3 makers have not gone to SD slot based machines.
I use my cell phone with a 16 gb card (microSD) with ALOT of room to spare.
Ipod seems to be just a “must buy here” device.
betamax is still dead.
How can you call that a strawman? It's an example of a system with very few out there that got hit with a virus. It proves the hackers do pay attention to low-marketshare systems.
Mac OS 9 and its predecessors had over a hundred viruses in the wild with little marketshare. Why doesn't OS X, with even more marketshare, have more viruses in the wild than OS 9?
This may be old, not sure.
(Copied from email, so errors aren’t mine...)
New tagline for the occasion, also.
Recently met an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows VISTA on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows VISTA CD. To my surprise he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned on the oven. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: ‘Do not worry, it is unharmed.’ After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: ‘Take a close look at it.’ To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw a inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450920F923A40EE10E510CC98D444AA08E1324
‘I cannot understand the fiery letters,’ I said. ‘No but I can,’ he said. ‘The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:’
* One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
* One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
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