WSJ.com - Personal Technology: With New Mac Mini, Apple Makes Switching Attractive, Affordable: "f my e-mail from readers is any indication, more Windows users are thinking of switching to Apple Computer's Macintosh models than at any time in a decade. A significant minority of Windows users are so fed up with battling viruses and spyware, or so impressed with Apple's iPod music players, that they are seriously tempted to jump to the Mac.
But some are put off by Apple's prices. The widely praised iMac G5 starts at $1,299. And the lowest-priced Mac, the eMac model, is $799. When you compare them with truly comparable Windows machines, their prices are competitive. But they look very high compared with the cheapest Windows machines, which are under $500.
So, this weekend, Apple will start selling its lowest-priced Mac ever, a tiny but full-featured desktop computer called the Mac mini, priced at just $499. But there is a catch. The mini doesn't include a monitor, keyboard or mouse. Apple says it was designed to work with the monitors, keyboards and mice from Windows PCs that it assumes switchers already own.
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In addition, the mini comes with Apple's latest operating system, called Panther, which has so far never been attacked by a successful virus and has been plagued with little or no known spyware."
I'm surprised this type of conventional wisdom (i.e., the virus/spyware part) isn't more widely challenged.
Maybe it can't be challenged? I wish I kept the link but the main point of it was that OS X is based on BSD and the BSD network stack has been contantly refined for the last 20 years to remove holes that still seem to abound in the Windows OS.
ReplyDeleteI agree re BSD; it was the "never" part of Walt Mossberg's column that I took issue with. Thanks for the comment.
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