I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. Years ago I worked for Apple retail when Bootcamp was a thing and it was "unsupported" and not only was it behind security switches, but you had to go out of your way to download and set it up.
I had a customer come in one morning steaming mad and demanding a refund for her new macbook. She was mad because (to paraphrase) she has been told that she wouldn't have all the problems and crashes her windows machine had and wouldn't have to deal with viruses and a host of other windows specific issues if she used a mac. But after a few weeks she was still having all of the same problems. The more she described the issue, the more it sounded like she'd never even bought a mac, but here she was with a 3 week old macbook in a box. And beyond that, she described having some hardware issues that had been corrected with a firmware update months earlier. The first boot and software update should have corrected all of that.
So I asked her to show me some of what it was doing. She took it out of the box, switched it on and it booted right into windows. And then proceeded to dump a ton of malware popups all over the screen just as she'd said. It turns out, she did indeed buy the macbook 3 weeks earlier, and then gave it to her "computer smart nephew" to setup for her. Well Mr. Nephew apparently decided in his infinite wisdom that is aunt didn't need macOS, she just needed an expensive windows machine. And so he'd downloaded bootcamp, shrunk the macOS partition to the smallest size it could be, and then installed windows and configured the machine to boot into windows by default. She'd never used macOS and didn't even know it was there, and so had never gotten the firmware updates for the hardware, and was of course having all the same problems she had in windows normally, because she was still using windows, only this time without any malware software because "macs don't need Norton".
The end result is I showed the customer what had happened, got them squared away with the mac OS side an asked them to give it a try for a few weeks with a personal guarantee we'd return it if she still didn't like it. She became one of our best customers. But the moral of the story is twofold:
1) Not everyone who uses tech makes the decisions for how that tech is configured
2) "no support" is a good way to ensure that those #1 people hate your product
It was. There has been a time, when many people thought Macs were inherently safe systems, just because there was way less malware for it, than for windows.
I think part of the problem is that people have been sold on the idea that Macs are safe and "there aren't any viruses for the Mac." There is this ill conceived notion that naive users hold that they aren't at risk so they'll more more inclined to install malware without thinking about or understanding the consequences.
Now that the storm of comments died down a bit, I'd like to say that I agree with you. I've been attending the yearly Fosdem in Brussels, Belgium (an open source convention) for several years now, and this year a lot of the people working on open source had Macs. As a matter of fact the Macs were everywhere. Like you said, the geeks already switched to Mac. Many people have a PC, because someone they know advised them to get one, and because they knew that they could get help from the geek they knew if they got in trouble, but the geeks switched to Mac now. Combine this with the fact that those same geeks are telling people to stay away from Vista, and it doesn't look good for Microsoft. Just my two cents from Belgium.
It's not so bad, but tbh I would trust running some random executable more on Mac more than I would Windows, so some people might be conditioned by how safe Macs generally are.
I was always a windows developer. In my internship I was forced to use an Macbook pro and simply hate it.
I was doing an TCP stack for blackberry and working with serial/Bluetooth communication for testing was a pain, in the end I just installed Windows on parallels.
I really don't understand this cult of Mac. I really think that is a way to be "cool" and follow and wear the "nice start-up guys" mask.
I think you're very wrong if you assume that most Mac users also run Windows.
Anecdotally, the only Mac users I know who run a VM at all do so for IE testing, or occasionally for some other UNIX variant. Then again, i don't know many people who are super hardcore gamers.
It really isn't about the software. Software isn't what keeps people from using macs. You can boot windows on a MAC with bootcamp and it runs as a very nice PC with no limitations that I am aware of.
The real reason is COST. Macs are more expensive for any given spec. It is that simple.
Says, me, the visual studio user that has an iMac.
I suspect a lot of these people are in the OSS hacker demographic (in my mind this means a college student running linux with lots of free time), in which case, why would you bother getting a Mac?
Boot Camp is of course free, but only permits rebooting a Mac into Windows. For $70 one could purchase VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, and run Windows side by side with OS X. The author of the Washington Post piece does not make this clear.
Calling Boot Camp a "secret weapon" suggests that most people aren't aware that Apple computers can run Windows. This may be true in the wider world, although any Apple employee in a retail store could inform customers otherwise.
Expecting a writer not focused on technology to discuss gratis tools like VirtualBox and modern.ie is probably asking too much (although these would be well within the reach of Hacker News readers).
> One of the reasons I switched to Apple is I didn't want to spend time making computers, I wanted to spend time making things with my computer.
I can't up vote that comment enough.
Before VM Ware, I used to run a Windows 2k box, and a Mac OS X box. The fundamental difference was when I used the PC, I was always busy fiddling with hardware or software (the registry, etc.)
Using the Mac, I simply got work done.
"Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks"
Wait, so they're phasing out Windows for security reasons, and moving to Mac instead? It at least made sense when they were moving to Linux or ChromeOS, but OS X's security track record as of late is far worse than Windows.
Among the music makers, programmers and designers that I know, the vast majority still use Macs despite the annoyance of the 2016-19 laptop fiasco etc. I know one or two who have switched to Windows because they needed high performance machines and weren’t willing to pay Mac Pro prices, and a couple who tried and ended up switching back because they found the Windows experience inferior.
I don’t think I know anyone IRL who is worried about the Mac becoming locked down - iOS sure, but you can still basically do what you want on a Mac for most people.
The reality is that for most people the Mac is a relatively hassle free experience. You don’t need to worry about whether it has certain components that will affect audio performance etc. - my understanding is you still need to be careful with chipset etc. on PCs.
Almost everyone I know that owns a Mac dual boots Windows, uses it in a VM, or doesn't use OSX at all. Macs would not have anywhere near the success they have had without Windows compatibility.
Well this had to happen at some point. Though it has a small marketshare and is based on unix, given the kind of demographic that uses a mac, (richer, more connected, etc) it is very lucrative for trojans to infect a mac and steal personal information, identity. It's unfortunate that people have this misunderstanding that macs don't get viruses and are actually not careful when using a mac.
As a Mac user who migrated from Windows, I had no doubt that it was only a matter of time before Macs became more lucrative targets. Anyone who thinks that their OS of choice is unassailable is fooling themselves.
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