The New Era of the Macintosh

People are switching to the Macintosh. I am one of those people. In the last few months, both my close friend Kevin and I became switchers, abandoning windows and the PC world. After all the talk of a "halo effect" around the iPod, perhaps it should be expected. The strange thing is, neither my friend nor I own an iPod. So, if it isn't the iPod, what is it?

The truth is more complex than the "halo effect". In actuality a whole range of factors have converged to make right now the most Mac friendly period since the beginning. ¬ These factors can generally be placed into two groups: the factors that push people away from other options and the factors that pull people specifically to the Mac platform. Together, these pieces create the trend that has been incorrectly attributed to the iPod "halo effect".

The first group, the pushers, is well known. Every time a person receives a piece of spam, every time a PC crashes, and every time we hear about a new virus on the news, the PC world becomes a less friendly place. The amount of new spyware that exists on the internet is staggering. Exact numbers are hard to come by, mainly because they keep going up. One thing is certain: there is enough spy¬ware out there to support an entire ecology of anti-spyware products for the PC. Staying on the windows platform now requires a balancing act. The cost of dealing with these annoyances balanced against the cost of going somewhere else.

The most common place to go without getting new hardware is Linux. Because Linux distributions are generally free they should do well in this balancing act. And they do, at first glance. Sadly, Linux is still plagued by its own set of problems. Instead of spyware a person using Linux is still forced to deal with more difficult setup routines, software installs, and a lack of support for many pieces of hardware. In addition, most brand name software packages are not available for Linux. These issues may not be a problem for people with certain software needs or the more technically savvy, but for most people they appear an insurmountable barrier.