BusinessWeek has posted a five-article special report entitled “Apple: The Next Generation.”.
BusinessWeek publishes Apple special report
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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For a company with such a low (computer) market share, they do a good job of getting in the news.
Yeah, they sure do.
While the popular analogy to account for this is to compare Apple’s share to <insert fancy car here>’s share. I’ve always thought of Apple as the “rock stars” of the computer world.
Think of em, kinda like, the band U2.
If you look at U2’s market share compared to all the other music in the world sold, it is super-tiny. Yet, when they tour or put out a new album, they make lots of news. Apple is kinda this way, there are countless computer vendors out there. Sure you have your Dell, Gateway, HP, Sun, etc as your “big boys” but these are just a few companies out of several that are putting out complete computer systems (not to mention all the companies that are just putting out components!)
Apple is just a popular band even if 97% of the world doesn’t buy their music…
Linux / OSX , we have a future.
They get in the news so often because they innovate better than any other computer/os company in existence.
i got my first real mac (1GHz TiBook) a year ago, and its been a great year to be a mac user. first was not being affected by the worms last summer/fall. a final release of Safari. then panther, which has been a great OS (with some flaws, of course). iPods everywhere, and tons of eyes on Macs at the apple store. major advancments in iTunes, Konfabulator, Desktop Manager, and tons of other great projects. just a few weeks ago we had Gentoo MacOS.
i’ve never doubted my PowerBook purchase (well, until the AlBooks came out
, and i’m just hoping this next year is half as good.
just not directly. recall last week or so when the MyDoom variant attacked google and others and brought the internet to its knees? I was hurting then because I could not get my e-mail, hit my websites, etc.
sure, my computer was not a zombie, but big deal, I still could not use the internet productively.
i think it is a big deal. there’s a difference between “using the internet productively” and using your computer productively. its one thing if a public service is taken out, but i’m more concerned about my personal property and data.
if a highway is destroyed, it doesn’t mean you can’t drive your car. maybe you can’t get to where you want to go atm, but you can still get places. if you’re car is unusable however, it doesn’t matter what shape the highway’s in.
i’m glad i can say with 100% confidence that none of my computers were contributing to the MyDoom madness (my Windows work laptop only goes on the net to submit time reports).
Will that firewall thing prevent you from all worms/viruses?
Great to read all the good news about Apple these days. I do hope that this means the Mac will get a much bigger market share in years to come.
Switching to the Mac was the best choice I have made about pc’s. I switched a little over a year ago. For me, Apple makes the best os around right now. I still mess around with Free and OpenBSD and there are some versions of Linux I’m thinking of trying. But I’ll still come back to Mac OSX because it just works and is darn good looking as well.
True story: a brand new Windows box with a brand new Norton Utilities just installed is connected to the internet. It attempts to download new virus definitions and windows updates. Before it can do so it has been infected by a worm.
You should also read what Bruce Schneier has to say about Firewalls in “Secrets and Lies”, they are not a cure all.
The point is that you should not have to do loads of changes to your set up simply to be secure, defaults matter. It should be secure by default. For example Microsoft claims that IE is an intergral part of the OS, you should not have to replace an intergral part of the OS to make the OS secure.
Let me get this straight. Norton firewall was active, yet the computer got infected with a worm? Is there a publicized hole in Norton’s firewall?
“They get in the news so often because they innovate better than any other computer/os company in existence.”
JLG once said that Apple does a lot of the computer industy’s R&D. I’d add they also take a lot of the risks for the computer industry.
I suspect things would get pretty stale pretty quickly in the PC world is apple ceased to exist.
But extra awareness is *good*.>>
Yes. Who can deny that? Now, think of a good way to make all computer users extra aware.
For example, many Mac users know that all ports are closed by default, but don’t know that turning on filesharing on local network for example will open ports (and yes, there was a buffer overflow in de AFS protocol a while ago).>>
Yes, but on which OS is the lack of extra awareness less likely to come back and bite the user in the ass?
—
A friend of mine is a clueless computer user in need of a new computer to replace her W95 machine. (She doesn’t even know how to defrag her harddrive or clear her cache.) She’s also on dialup. Downloading 60-70mb of updates really isn’t an option. She pays AOL extra every month to have them screen her emails for viruses.
She needs a new computer. I asked her her budget. I am doing everything I can to steer her towards an eMac.
An eMac she can set up in 10 minutes. She can firewall it with the click of a mouse. She can plug in and use that digital camera she got for her birthday.
Windows XP means buying firewall and anti virus software. It means an “activation” phone call. It means *I* have to go to her house and set the freaking thing up.
well, i didn’t mean to start a flame war, i just wanted to comment that i’m happy about being a mac user and it appears business week is pretty excited about apple as well. i just wish i would have bought apple stock 14-15 months ago, i’d have doubled my money
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=2y
Picking winning stocks after the fact is rather pointless. For example, if you had bought Redhat you would have trippled your money.
But extra awareness is *good*.
Of course extra awareness is good; no one disputes that. The problem is that most computer users don’t have that extra awareness. Nor should they need it.
Even if you didn’t know up until today, you ought have learned from this thread that a firewall is build into XP already. If you dislike that one however, you could get many of them free for home usage. Same is true for anti virus software – With you advising her it’s pretty obvious that a computer-illiterate person like your friend will think a Mac is cheaper/easier/better…
I tell you what: I will prefer my Donkey Kong I + II Console from the eighties any time over a 12″ iBook since its sreen is waaay larger — hell 12″ for 1200 Euros in the 3rd millennium!! If I’d go for such a deal, my father would have the police withdraw my driving-license as a precautionary measure for my own good… DIE MAC DIE
Great to read all the good news about Apple these days. I do hope that this means the Mac will get a much bigger market share in years to come.”
Mac market share is irrelivant… Because even if they were selling 5x what they are now… their *market share* could be lower if PC *market share* rises.
You people keep using the word market share for install base. Apple’s install base is much larger than its market share.
This is just so uneducated.
What? How should you know about my level of eduvation? Don’t be preposterous.
First off, there are no viruses on a fresh Windows install, hence you don’t get hit by them whilst getting your updates
There are some as soon as you connect to the internet. And i don’t care HOW they get onto the system, it should just have decent protection, especially with such a large install base. And if there is a firewall shipped with Windows XP, why isn’t it activated by default? Why isn’t there even any notification that there is a firewall? This is Microsoft’s fault, and ALL internet users (not all computer users use the internet) suffer from this.
It’s quite ridiculous to observe how the Windows guys try to explain it’s the user’s fault that Windows is unsecure without additional software…
and unlike popular belief, the plural of virus is viruses *only* in english + never virii in *any* language. So, in order to get your fresh Windows updated, all you have to do is enable the build-in firewall against self-spreading worms – then there is no race against time.
I know that it’s viruses, i just wrote both options to avoid 1000 posts claiming it would be virii – and then you come along and call others uneducated while being too dumb yourself to know it’s built-in. Personally i couldn’t care less, but some people don’t like such behaviour.
let me inform you that BeOS has no security features what so ever. The only thing safe about BeOS is that “noone” uses it, so get a clue.
Not quite so. While the BeOS has no firewall and is single-user, unlike a specific popular operating system it doesn’t come with built-in security holes en masse. Get a clue yourself. And think before you write, especially if you are so educated.
I take it from your IP you are Austrian and speak german
Well then don’t always judge from little indications. I am German and live in Austria.
Hi all,
Well, what it all comes down to, is that running Mac OS X (as opposed to Win), you don’t need to change ANYTHING from default settings to be PERFECTY safe (for now) from viruses, worms and spyware. Windows can be made (and, with work, maintained) TOTALLY 100% virus/worm/spyware-free. But it takes some effort and knowledwege to do that. Much more effort and knowledge than most people have (not out of ignorance, but out of lack of interest). On Mac OS X, most internet ports are closed, it automatically downloads updates (in a non-abusive way) – and of course, lacks the horribly bug-ridden IE5/6 and Outlook software packages (together with ActixeX and other sinners). Several parts of Win is ALWAYS going to be leaky no matter what, at least until the early-90’s code is rewritten from ground-up, like the effort with Longhorn (2007 ->). The code in parts of Win was written before intenet safety was an issue, and although MS have some of the best software engineers totally, they are NOT going to be able to plug all the holes, not by a long shot. Therefore, (among other reasons) – Longhorn was planned, a total (clean) rewrite of the codebase. When Longhorn arrives, the playfield MS/Apple may equalize (or even flip to Longhorns’s flavour). But for now, Mac OS X is SO very much safer to use than any Windows incarnation. And no, it is not “security by obscurity”- it is security by quality (but what to expect when using a codebase that had been hadened and debugged by many for 20+ years?). Learn from the last sentence, MS, it took Apple approx 15 years to do so. NIH (not invented here) is not always the best solution.
I tell you what: I will prefer my Donkey Kong I + II Console from the eighties any time over a 12″ iBook since its sreen is waaay larger — hell 12″ for 1200 Euros in the 3rd millennium!! If I’d go for such a deal, my father would have the police withdraw my driving-license as a precautionary measure for my own good… DIE MAC DIE>>
What this has to do with anything in my post is beyond me.
Does somebody need their meds?