Going through high college and college with a PC became frustrating for me, even being a totally tech-savvy person. I built PCs for friends, knew Windows inside out, constant problems myself… I wasn’t the average user. Still, I had to warfare my truthful percentage of troubles, starting from viruses to difficult disk crashes, to steady reinstall the working gadget for one reason or some other. Some of the time, it changed due to how Windows would slow down over time. Many of my friends additionally echoed this issue.
I had never considered Macs in the course of that length, in the main because of the fee, but also due to obscurity. I didn’t understand every person that had or used a Mac outside of artwork specialists. In my Canadian elementary faculty, we had some Macs. However, no person used them. Like others, I extensively utilized my PC for video games, which the Mac never sincerely took to, even nowadays. So I dealt with the issues.
When I had finished my diploma, and back domestic, the concept of a Mac appealed to me, and I offered a white Macbook. I observed this purchase up with iMacs, a unibody MacBook Pro, and a MacBook Air. I even was given the Apple router, the Airport Extreme. Why did I do this? I failed to want to address the issues anymore. Even though I preferred gaming and the openness of the PC platform, I desired to have a reliable computer that I may want to treat as equipment. I regarded beyond the 9 24″ iMacs I again due to display screen issues, due to the fact the promise of reliability become simply too excellent.
Surely enough, they behaved like home equipment for the maximum component—no problems for a good time period. No viruses, no crashes. Sure, I had to look far and wide to locate software programs to do what I wanted, together with download from newsgroups or convert videos to particular codecs; however, I figured that was a part of the price for dependable computing. I would even look beyond the stressful things, like how sluggish the 2.Eight GHz dual-center iMac was at converting video compared to a PC of the same fee.
But then I began to observe something. Macs weren’t proof against viruses, the manner the advertisements might have you ever agree with. My Macs did catch a small, sort of harmless Yahoo virus that could send out messages even if we were offline. I became a blind eye to this. What passed off subsequent clearly opened my eyes. I became renting out my basement on time and placed my iLife CD and different Mac boxes and materials in storage, so I determined to download it from a torrent site. It had a pandemic in it. This virus slowed the laptop to a crawl, and I failed to word until I tried to restart in Boot Camp (the Windows partition). To my wonder, it turned into corrupted, and basically gone, at the side of any paintings that I had on that partition. I then tried to restart in Mac OS X, and that too turned into corrupted. I had even more stuff on the Mac partition, and I misplaced all of it (along with valuable photos).
You say, boo-hoo, you downloaded something from a torrent website, you ought to recognize better. Should I? Is that what Apple advertising is main for you to agree with? I wasn’t aware of the Mac virus. I did not assume I should have to be, based totally on how now not most effective Apple portrays themselves, however many Mac users. That may be from a torrent website, however the following day, something you download from every other website, an unfastened software perhaps, may additionally have an endemic. They will most effectively unfold more now that Apple computers are selecting up popularity. There are tens of millions of human beings buying Macs thinking that they’re higher computer systems, inherently resistant to viruses.
And it receives worse. The antivirus software program for the Mac is simply horrible. It’s at a totally early stage of improvement and rarely gets up to date. It would not seize viruses nicely at all. Basically, it’s vain and wouldn’t have labored in my scenario. So you haven’t any protection. I additionally suppose that if the Mac, who’s overpriced to start with and marketed as being virus-evidence, needs antivirus, what is the selling factor? PCs want antivirus, but at the least, the antivirus packages paintings and capture viruses, and you do not must surrender value, expandability, overall performance, or software program compatibility for no motive!
Now test this out. I had to get my records again from the corrupted Mac OS X partition, so I created a picture of the partition when I changed into reinstalling Mac. The installer proved the image and stated it became excellent. Later on, I was now not able to use it. It again sure technical mistakes, which I appeared into, and found out that other negative users had the equal enjoy! Nothing can be carried out approximately it. As it turns out, even Apple’s technical workforce had hassle decoding the problems with the DMG (there are big threads approximately this at Apple’s forums).
So, in the long run, I gave up the expandability, gaming, overall performance, and, maximum of all, software program compatibility for something that, in reality, messed with me worse than a PC might. The PC could have caught the virus, gotten rid of it, and I might nonetheless have the entirety intact. I ended up promoting the iMacs, and for the charge that I offered my 24″ iMac, I offered an Intel Core i7-powered device with 12 GB of RAM, strolling Windows 7 beta for some time now not using hiccups in any respect. I once heard anyone describe the virus difficulty for PCs and Macs as the subsequent. Using a PC is like being within the US Army’s nice tank, fully armored and heavily armed inside the middle of a crazy battlefield. Using a Mac is like being in an at-blouse and shorts within the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. I think that analogy is adept; with a Mac, the chances are a decrease of being attacked (for now); however, if you’re ever faced with an endemic (and you’ll be at some point), you could make certain you are going down large time.
