The Solution Is Obvious

I bought my first Mac for my wife in 1987. A Mac Plus, for her to use while finishing her MBA. An 80 meg hard drive the size of a dictionary. B&W monitor. Played the first version of Sim City on it incessantly. When starting my first company, we bought a couple of Performas from Best Buy (no payments for 6 months, an excellent start-up tactic); now I'm typing this on a 17" Powerbook that's less than 1" thick and uploading through the built in wireless connection to our home DSL.

Of course, during that time Microsoft has gone from just another software developer on the Mac platform to the behemoth we know and loathe, and Windows has gone from a two bit knock off of the Mac interface to controlling most of the faceless office desktops and expanded from there into most people's homes as 'good enough'.

However, during that time Macs have gone to a different generation of processors, completely re-written their OS once, and then completely converted it to modern OS based on an Open source Unix variant. Meanwhile, Windows has continually been evolving, but is still based on the code that formed it's basis 25 years ago. The problem, as so many have found out, is that back then the Internet was science fiction, let alone someone trying to access your computer over it. The epidemic of viruses, malware, and just general malfeasance perpetrated on the Windows platform is making many computers nearly unusable. My wife just got a brand new Dell from work, and within a week Explorer has been compromised and is installing an unknown amount of unauthorized crap. And this is common: the numbers are staggering. Walt Mossberg has an article here.

Now, to literally add insult to injury, Microsoft is joining the Religious Right in the war against homosexuals. Not only does this seem shortsighted, and setting themselves up for legal action, it's just reprehensible.

But as I stated at the beginning, there is a solution: Apple computers are affordable, powerful, elegant and well built. There are Mac versions of Word and Excel (Explorer too, but after you use Safari, you'll find explorer to be hideous and clumsy) and OS X is rock solid. Most of the people (admittedly not everyone) who switch to the platform usually regret not switching earlier; they find that they do a wider variety of things faster and with less headaches.

And a contemporary level of security that virtually guarantees no crap, with a minimum of fuss. There's a reason that most web site servers are run on Unix, and Mac OS X takes advantage of that.

As Mossberg said, if you're fed up, there's always the Mac.