Re: A2Central News

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <1fCdnQicDY7fj5HYnZ2dnUVZ_rWdnZ2d@bresnan.com>,
Terry Olsen <tolsen64@hotmail.com> wrote:

>> It's happened to me that I've been considered a brainwashed idiot for
>> going from the Apple II to the PC rather than to the Mac.
> 
> I don't get this either. Back when Apple was in the process of dumping it's 
> loyal II users and trying to convince them to jump on the Mac bandwagon, 
> there was serious hatred for Apple. On the BBS's I frequented, people were 
> swearing never to buy another Apple product. The cry of the day was "I'll 
> turn Blue before I ever buy a Mac". The word "Blue" of course was referring 
> to Big Blue, IBM. One of the BBS's I was on was called "Sculley's Hatred". I 
> don't know if that was referring to Sculley's Hatred of the Apple II, or 
> Apple II users' hatred for Sculley.
> 
> I'd like to know what happened to those people who swore never to buy a Mac 
> and then did. What was it that swayed you? I never took a 2nd look at a Mac, 
> so I don't know if it would have been the "platform that fits me best".

I never ever "swore never to buy a Mac".  I'm a pragmatic person who
sees the computer as a tool rather than a religion.  So I kept an eye
on the Mac, but just never saw a reason for myself to buy one.  But
the situation for others may be different -- a number of years ago, my
wife wanted a laptop for herself and she asked me for advice.  I asked
her back who she was going to cooperate with the most.  It turned out
almost all of her coworkers used Macs.  My advice was that she should
get a Mac too -- it's just a hassle to use different systems if you
cooperate a lot.
 
> I went to Best Buy last night looking to see if they carried any of those 
> $50 VRFM9 USB/MP3/FM Modulators. The 19 year old kid then proceeded to start 
> preaching to me about the iPod and Macs. When I told him I preferred PC's, 
> he laughed and remarked that I must not mind the BSOD. I told him that I 
> haven't seen that since Windows 98 & Windows NT. He laughed again and 
> practically called me a liar.  He then called his buddy over and asked him 
> "Have you ever seen Windows XP BSOD?" to which came the reply "Oh, all the 
> time!"

Besides being young and naive, remember that he also was a salesman, and
salesmen often talk too much about stuff they know too little about....

> It takes an idiot to do that to XP.

No, it doesn't take an idiot to do that on XP -- all you need to do is
to e.g. install a buggy device driver.  I've received a BSOD on XP
maybe three or four times during 5 years -- all the times when
installing a device driver under development where the debugging
wasn't yet completed.  But perhaps only idiots develop device drivers
for XP.....   :-)

> He then went on to tell me how the Mac is "un-crashable".

....another example of the salesman's pitch at work....

> Well, maybe he 
> hasn't crashed his, but there's lots of blogs out there with stories of 
> crashed Macs. Of course, they all blame 3rd party software or hardware for 
> their particular crash.  All examples of the "Apple can do no wrong" 
> mentality.
> 
> He also told me how there weren't any viruses on Macs.

...another salesman's pitch .... less informed customers probably believe
him....

> I called him on that 
> one because I know that there have been. See 
> http://antivirus.about.com/od/macintoshresource/. Then he told me that "all 
> I have to do is reboot and the virus is rendered useless."  That's funny. I 
> thought there weren't any viruses on Macs,

The salesman was caught lying, and tried to sneak out of it....

> and isn't rebooting considered faux pas for a Mac user?

There are much fewer viruses targeted for the Mac than for Windows though,
for one very simple reason: Windows is a majority platform, and is therefore
the preferable target for any virus maker who wants his virus to spread
as much as possible.  The Mac is a minority niche platform, and therefore
a much less attractive target for viruses.

> Then he boasted about how he had Windows XP loaded on his Mac. Hmmm... I 
> thought Windows XP sucked. Why would he load a piece of crap like that on 
> his beloved Mac?

This is getting amusing...... :-))))

> "So...", I replied. "I've loaded OSX onto a PC." 
> "Ahh...but can you dual-boot?", he asked. Why would I want to? For me, 
> loading OSX onto a PC was just a novelty. So that I could play with it for a 
> while. I found nothing spectacular about it and moved on.

Even if you don't want to, PC's have dual-boot capability.  The most
common situation is to dual-boot Linux and Windows.

> The point is, a computer platform and an operating system are what you make 
> of it. You can be a smart user and avoid crashes & viruses. Or you can be a 
> stupid user and have all kinds of problems, no matter what your platform of 
> choice happens to be. 

The target for Apple's ads for the Mac has often been the "stupid
user" ...  excuse me, I mean of course the "normal person", aka the
"computer illiterate user".....

-- 
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