Amerika

It takes about three years after they introduce a new marketing campaign for reality to intrude, which is why without 5-7 years experience, most people can’t see why Apple’s Macintosh machines are computers for untermenschen. They see the pretty cases, hear the disproportionate amount of self-promotional material from the Mac community, and see how their favorite neurotic celebrities (and other people who use their computer for three tasks, max) gab up about them. It’s like peer pressure in high school… after three years, you stop giving a damn, and then you graduate.

The latest hilarious embarrassment for Apple is that even with a far smaller userbase (2.8% versus over 90%) the Mac’s vaunted OS X is full of security holes, on par with Windows XP. But of course, we have to ask, if that many holes were found in an operating system that almost no one uses, imagine what would happen if Apple were in Microsoft’s place – even more of a disaster. Like most things promising hope and change with a vague plan, Apple is a marketing success, not a technological one.

The Apple happy camp has been bragging about OS X security and stability for some time now, but the results haven’t been as great as they had hoped. Once again, after the hype, we see the truth starting to emerge. In the 1990s they were claiming “greater productivity,” but after Windows 95 proved to be more stable and adaptable than their OS at the time, they abandoned that. Then the hype was all about how much “faster” than Intel the Mac’s CPUs were. Remember the “velocity engine”? The G5 didn’t live up to the hype, so now a new slogan is needed. OS X is the latest Jesus Christ the Savior for the Macintosh line, but here we see the facade beginning to crack.

In reality, Apple will continue to sell machines to the same 2.8% of the market, which are the people who are both insecure about their computer knowledge and pretentious enough to be fooled by a good-looking, expensive machine. It reminds me of what IBM was offering in the late 1980s with the PS/2. Both will hang on, but neither will actually conquer the market or move it ahead, which is now exclusively the province of Windows and Linux (though I’m still planning to get an Itanium so I can run OpenVMS, the world’s most stable operating system). Nothing left to do but laugh at the people still inexperienced enough to believe the Apple propaganda, and thus to shell out five times the cost of a good machine for a mediocre one with “art deco” styling.