The Frugal Minimalist

minimalmac:

• I don’t think enough emphasis has been placed on the real and advantageous reasons (in their mind at least) Apple might have for creating a Mac App Store and making that the only way to install Apps on a Mac as it is with the iPhone/iPad. This is not only about control for the sake of control – which they clearly prefer. It is also about control for the sake of quality and security. The Mac OS only remains fairly secure and virus/malware free mostly through obscurity. The folks who would want to exploit the many known security holes just don’t see enough money in it for it to be worth the time. That said, as Apple’s marketshare increases, so does that metric. Certainly, if the only way to get any executable on the Mac required going through the App store, or installation of a specific Ad Hoc Profile that requires the user supply their UUID, and then that had a forced expiration date and creating such required Developer Program membership… I think you see where I am going. The system in place for the iPhone is an incredibly secure one in comparison to the Mac OS. There is a lot of value in that – especially from a marketing perspective.

Everytime this point is brought up, that Macs are only more secure because of obscurity, I die a little. Macs are more secure because Mac OS X is more secure than Windows. Back in the pre-OS X days, Macs had an even smaller market share and yet they had a ton of viruses and the like. If Macs are only secure because no one sees the value in exploiting the vulnerabilities, then why did Macs at one time have to deal with viruses in the same way Windows does now?

Also, I’ve heard the argument that there isn’t enough money in virus authors to target Macs, and that may be true. There may not be a lot of money in it. But, after all of the “Macs don’t get viruses,” and “Macs are way better than PCs,” talk, don’t you think that one person, ONE single person, would have written a virus in order to shut Mac users up? And I’m not talking about a trojan, whereby the badguys trick the user into installing something bad. I don’t run any antivirus software, and I’ve never had any spyware either.

It can’t all just be because “no one” uses Macs.

Minimal Mac posted recently that he believed the iPad is the device of the future. He talked about working with clients every day who fail to grasp even the simplest concepts of the desktop OS. He counted four separate ways to quit an application in Mac OS X, and compared that to the one way to quit an app on the iPhone or iPad. I do agree that there are many people out there that would simply be better off with something like the iPad. No windows, no file-system hierarchy, no thousand ways to do anything. These people want the one way to do something.

I agree, to a point. I think the iPad will be successful, and that it will change the way we do casual computing, but I think Apple may be targeting the wrong group here. Making things super simple is something I truly appreciate and enjoy. The iPad will certainly make things easier for a large group of computer users: the older group. The younger portion of the world has, for the most part, grown up on computers. We know how to do so many things that my parents would have trouble figuring out on their own. Younger kids are even more computer saavy, and I wonder if they will need the assistance of a simplified environment.

That said, I know groups of kids my age that struggle with basic computing as well. Perhaps there will always be a group that struggles with simple tasks on the computer, and this will be the device for them.

That all being said, I think I would love an iPad. Watching the demo video really made me think ,” This is the future of casual computing.”