Well, Apple have come out with a new set of their (in)famous Mac/PC adverts. Surprisingly, this time round I find that I’m not paralysed with rage — just mildly disgusted and disappointed — and can write about them. Obviously, I should make it absolutely clear that, as adverts, I hate them. They’re patronising, confrontational and almost exclusively focus on perceived shortcomings of the opposition. But, as usual, they also make some claims that are generating some … debate around the net, and I thought — as user of both Macs and PCs without (I hope) any particular partisan leanings — I’d be well placed to pick them apart and give an objective review of their claims.
So without any further ado, here are my thoughts on the ads:
Legal Copy
This one is weird. I’m not quite sure what it’s trying to claim. That Apple machines don’t auto-update? Not true. That they don’t make you agree to click-through licenses when they do so? Also not true. About the only justifiable claim I could see here is that PCs tend to have a higher volume of auto-updates. But then the vast majority of them are Windows Defender updates that don’t have a click-through anyway. If I had to make a call, I’d say I do more clicking-through of licenses loaded with Legal Copy on my Mac than I do on my PC.
As far as I can see, this one is out-and-out dishonest.
Biohazard
This is probably the most contentious issue raised by the new (and old) PC/Mac ads. Apple have always insisted that Macs don’t have viruses, and that PCs are much more at risk of infection or being hacked. But then they do things like quietly post advice to run anti-virus software on their support forums, and PC users are understandably quick to jump on that as evidence that Macs aren’t so safe as Apple would have us believe. So what is the deal? Can a Mac really hang around in his casuals while nearby PCs are forced into isolation suits?
I’m going to say yes, but with a honking caveat. The fundamental truth of the issue is that there are almost no malware threats to the Mac; there have been about five actual cases of OSX malware making any headway at all in the wild. Compare that to the thousands of different PC malware threats released into the wild every month, to the tens of millions of PCs actively enlisted in botnets and the difference is so stark as to almost make Apple’s complacency justified. Almost.
The point is that the reason OSX is largely safe from malware attack is that there is no malware to be attacked by. It’s not that OSX is some magical virus-proof wonder-OS; it’s that it has too small a market-share to be worth a cyber-criminal’s time. If Apple continue to grow their market-share then sooner or later someone’s going to go for them, and I suspect that when that happens Apple, and the wider Mac community, will be woefully unprepared. There’ll be a few hectic months while everyone and his dog gets infected, Apple rush to get a fix out, play catchup for half a year and finally get on top of the problem. At least as much as any other platform has.
I’ve heard it suggested that telling people they don’t need virus protection is irresponsible because it means that when a threat does arise, people won’t be protected. I don’t really agree, for a couple of reasons. Firstly and most generally, I’m not convinced of the utility of anti-virus software on any platform. Consumers spend millions of dollars a year on Windows anti-virus software, and infection rates are still through the roof. Not only that but anti-virus software itself feels a lot like malware to me; it insinuates itself in every corner of your OS, gives you no control over what it does or when, often kills a machine’s performance, and all for what seems to be very little gain.
So given that anti-virus software is expensive, ineffective and detrimental to a machine’s day to day running, I fail to see how advocating it’s use on a platform that doesn’t currently need for it would be a responsible act. Especially given my second point, which is that no-one really know what Mac malware will look like when it appears, and until they do, how can anyone write software that has a fighting chance of countering it? It’s true that there are certain standard patterns to malware design, and by looking out for those existing software might get lucky, but my guess is that it’ll take six months after the first real wave of infections for the anti-virus companies to get up to speed on the sorts of exploits real malware takes advantage of and how to close the security holes.
Those six months should be plenty of time for Apple to reverse its message on viruses and get started on what will, in all likelihood, be a continent-sized pile of humble pie.
So, er, to get back to the point of the advert, is it true that Macs don’t have to worry about viruses? I’m going to say yes. But with caveats.
Stacks
Another odd one this. I get the feeling they were just trying to advertise that iPhoto has this neat new feature, but had to dress it up in their usual confrontational format to make it fit the ad-campaign. I mean, everything they say and imply is sort-of fair enough; iPhoto does ship with every Mac, and does have facial recognition, where an out-of-the-box PC is much more limited; it’s just that that’s not a particularly convincing point to make. Yeah, I guess organising photos by facial recognition is sort-of neat (when it works,) and it’s nice that it ships with Macs by default, but it’s not like the technology is unheard-of on the PC; there is free, easily available software (Picasa), that does it just as well.
This also is my favourite of these four new ads, because it highlights the overarching mistake Apple has made with the whole campaign; the PC is just a much more likeable character. It’s always true, but I think doubly so in this one.
So are the advert’s claims true? Yes, I think so, just also pointless.
Time Traveller
Appalling.
This sort of mud-slinging just pisses everyone off. It effectively says “PCs hang and crash all the time,” which, without justification or stats, is just the advertising equivalent of “PCs smell of poo!”
Having said that, I have to add: subjectively, my experience has been that my Macs have been more stable than my PCs. That’s not to say that I’m a typical case, or that my experience is necessarily representative; it’s just what I’ve noted over the past half-a-decade or so.
I’m not going to let my subjective experience colour my judgement on this one though; it’s just not justifiable to make these kinds of claims without support. False.
The End
So there you have it. I reckon roughly a 50% hit rate on truth, only one advert that actually has a convincing argument for buying a Mac, and even that one is so heavily caveated as to make the statement in isolation borderline dishonest.
It’s a real shame Apple insist on sticking to this advertising campaign; as far as I can see, all it does is alienate people. It’s doubly frustrating to me because Apple make great products that I really like. I love both my Macs, and while not everybody is going to like them, they are definitely good enough to sell on their own merits without needing to constantly bad-mouth the opposition. Now, if only Apple would actually tell people what those merits are.
So it turns out that the MacBook Air’s battery is a single discrete block (albeit a very thin one) that runs across the bottom of much of the case, and it’s relatively easy for an end user to swap out. Some people are calling this good news, but to me it just means that there really is no reason bar cost for not making the thing user swappable in the first place. I guess it might have meant weakening the case, but I’m not convinced; this is Apple, after all — I’m sure they could have come up with a neat battery removal mechanism if they had the will (I’m thinking a covered slot on one side of the device that you slide the battery into — like a really big PCMCIA card). I guess they’re just experimenting to see if people are prepared to put up with it. Lets hope people don’t an Apple fix this in the next version.
Of all the announcements this year, this one is definitely the biggie (although arguably, not the most significant — the AppleTV could easily trump it in long-term industry impact.) Apple’s new ultraportable was the announcement everyone was waiting for, and it’s generated the most media buzz, most of it positive. There’s no denying the machine is desirable, one thing Apple know how to do is design, and the Air is impressive even by their standards. It’s also a pretty impressive feat of engineering; a 13.3″ laptop, averaging about 1cm thick and weighing a just over 1.3kg that manages to squeeze in a 1.8GHz Core2 Duo, 2GB RAM and a full-size, backlit keyboard, as well as a screen as good as you’ll find on any laptop. Oh and the battery life is quoted at an extensive (for the size) 5 hours. It really is an impressive piece of work.
Obviously, to get the size down so far, a couple of compromises have been made; it lacks an optical drive (to mitigate that can mount one from a nearby desktop machine over WiFi — a neat trick, but I wonder how fast the access will be,) has no speakers and sports a redesigned, smaller power connector, probably making the device incompatible with any existing MacBook adaptors you may have.
The basic model comes in at £1200, which isn’t excessive for a machine like this. It’s obviously much more expensive than the current crop of ultraportables from the like of Asus, and Packard Bell, but that’s not really the market segment it fits into. This isn’t a low powered palmtop, running a pared down Linux distro on A 500MHz via chip; it’s a full-spec PC squeezed into an ultraportable notebook form-factor. The 12″ Vaios and Thinkpads are this device’s competition, and in that context, the price looks fairly competitive.
But I wouldn’t buy one.
Why not? That’s a very good question. It looks great, it’s got all the features I care about, is incredibly lightweight, runs my favourite workstation OS, and fits comfortably into my acceptable laptop price-range. The problem is simply one of longevity. Apple consumer goods have been coming without replacable batteries for a while now, and I’ve always been more-or-less OK with that because iPods and iPhones, at a couple of hundred quid, pretty much fall into the “replace every couple of years” price bracket anyway. Is that because I have more money than sense? Quite possibly, but when we’re talking about what qualifies as disposable technology, even I draw the line somewhere significantly south of a £1200 (or more) laptop.
It’s a shame; in so many ways, this would be the perfect laptop for me, but I can really see this really hurting its sales badly — I just can’t imagine anyone parting with that much money for something that’s only going to last as long as its battery. I know I won’t.
Update: OK — so it turns out that Apple will replace the battery for $130 (US, so I guess about £80.) That’s the cost of the battery, so fitting is effectively free. Also, a commenter called Andrew on Engadget pointed out that there’s almost certainly no discrete battery to be replaced; in order to get the thing as thin as that, they’ve likely spread the battery out across the whole inside of the case; everywhere there was a bit of space will have a battery cell in it.
So, maybe the decision was a genuine compromise, rather than a rip-off, and it looks like Apple have made the commitment to make sure people canget a new battery at low-ish cost, but I don’t think this really changes my opinion. People like the flexibility of swapping batteries out, they like the feeling of security of having a spare. Personally, I just wouldn’t be comfortable knowing that my ability to replace a dying battery is dependant on a third party continuing to offer a service that they’re only offering out of good-will in the first place.
Not as bad as I first thought then. But still a stopper for me, and, I imagine, for a lot of other people as well. In a way, it’s even more of a shame if they have a good reason for it not being replaceable; it means that the product just isn’t viable, rather than has been spoiled by a misguided attempt to upsell.
Just before Christmas, I switched my news aggregator from Bloglines to NewsGator, largely because their iPhone client is better. Being a Mac user, I also grabbed their famous OSX client, NetNewsWire. In all it’s been a very satisfactory switch; NewsGator for iPhone works great for checking my feeds on the train (which was the main driver for my getting the iPhone in the first place,) and NetNewsWire lives up to its reputation — it really does have a great news reading interface. Also, being a Mac only application, it cuts down on the temptation to read during work hours (on my Work PC,) which can only be a good thing.
The only fly in the ointment was that NetNewsWire was shareware, so I was going to have to pay to read my news. After about an hour using it, I knew that it was well worth the asking price and that I wasn’t going to resent paying at all, so that ceased being a problem, and I got stuck into my trial period.
Having already decided that NetNewsWire was worth my money, it came as a bit of a shock to discover that somewhere during my trial period NewsGator have made it free. That’s right during exactly the right thirty days, a fantastic piece of software has transitioned from Shareware to Freeware.
I know I might sometimes overuse the phrase, but, you know what? Sod it, this time it’s really appropriate:
FTW!
PZ Myers, renowned atheist, God-hater and evilutionist, getting involved in a religious war.