We may be witnessing the beginnings of a more mainstream backlash against Windows and the general frustration they inflict on average users.
I’ll start by adding that I still have 2 windows installations used solely for playing World of Warcraft. My main machine dual boots to Debian Linux, where I do the occasional bit of coding in my spare time. Finally, I have my Powerbook, which gets fired up for general browsing, e-mail, and iPhoto. I’ve started taking it to work occasionaly, iWork’s Pages is more than capable as a wrod processor as I found out this last week to write up a document for work (plus free PDF output, hard to beat that).
Last weekend, Patty’s fiance Kevin heeded my advice to get himself an Apple laptop. He’s been wanting a laptop to finish his dissertation and doing other school related work.I suggested an Apple since everything pretty much just works and because its based on a BSD kernel (right?) its more securely designed. Applications don’t get installed without you knowing it. Saturday he got a new 12" Powerbook and seems initially pleased with it. He got MS Office and hasn’t had any significant isssues with that so far. It’d be nice to hear a coment from him with his first impressions, if not I"ll try to follow up with him offline. So he switched and Patty threw out that she might "want a Mac Mini" now.
Now, the mainstream tech press seems to be picking up on the benefits of the Apple experience. In the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Intel remarked that improving the security of the Windows platform was years away adding:
Pressed about security by Mr. Mossberg, Mr.
Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend
removing spyware from his daughter’s computer. And when further pressed
about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety
from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else."
A columnist over at Network World has also started documenting his switch to the Mac platform, echoing many of the same reasons that my mac-savy friends used to get me to switch.
I want my computer to function every time I turn it on. I want my
computer to not corrupt data when it does crash. I use a handful of
applications: Microsoft Office, e-mail, browser, FTP client and some
multimedia toys. Regardless of format, they should work without
crashing.
I live on the ‘Net. I do not want my browser to eat up all of my memory. In the WinTel world I need an assortment of third-party
tools to try to keep my PC alive. That’s just crazy.