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Thread: Is it time for a Mac?

  1. #46
    Quote Originally Posted by Rich Engelhardt View Post
    That's another one of those myths that may have been true once upon a time, but, it won't die no matter how many times the truth is told.

    Microsoft responds to a critical threat just as fast as anyone else responds to one.

    IIRC, Microsoft calls it an "out of band update".

    As far as numbers go, feel free to peruse the archives at Us-Cert and Cert and note how many Mac threats vs Microsoft threats there have been over the years.
    Yes - Microsoft has had more, but, as the Apple presence has grown over the last few years, so have the number of and severity of the threats.

    Apple has always done a more than stellar job of having all their devices "talk" to each other. (LOL! They sometimes had huge problems talking to anything else though(AppleTalk)!).
    It just a matter of time before some exploit rides in on an I-phone and takes out every Mac and I-whatever in the building - or beyond.

    A very smart ex co-worker of mine once told me, "You can have security or you can have communication. As one goes up, the other goes down".
    This is very well put, I agree 100%.

  2. #47
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    Phil - thanks.

    It's funny because I always seem to find myself looking like I'm a fan of Win/Tel, when in reality - I don't care for either.

    I've always felt that the Motorola architecture (what Mac was based on) for a processor was/is superior to Intel and that Unix was/is the best operating system there ever was.

    As I mentioned earlier - there's all sorts of valid reasons to go Mac.
    However - the OP said he wanted freedom from both virus threats and updates and is willing to spend "Apple bucks" to get that.
    IMHO, considering that he's probably going to have to shell out for all new software to go with a Mac - he's going to spend a ton of money for exactly - nothing.
    My granddad always said, :As one door closes, another opens".
    Wonderful man, terrible cabinet maker...

  3. #48
    +1 for Phil,

    Viruses (or more likely trojans) aren't as common on Macs as the people that devise such things want their *creations* to be wide spread, it would be similar to genetically building a real virus that only infects white tigers....what's the point, once you have got to the 20 or so tigers there is nowhere left to go and no reputation to be gained from it.

    Don't be under the impression that the creators of computer malware are maligned kids with too much time on their hands, most of them are far better programmers than any of us will ever be and in general come from the late 20's to early 40's age bracket. Many are also in jobs of significant responsibility (one of the more ,well known, malware authors is a research scientist at Harvard).

    "They are only kids who know nothing, I'll be back tomorrow to deal with this" was the response from one well know AV celebrity

    He was back the next day... sadly most of his data wasn't.

    cheers

    Dave
    You did what !

  4. #49
    Microsoft has kept IT pros hoping recently. While the monthly Patch Tuesday update load has been surprisingly light for the last four months, we’ve started getting some emergency security advisories and updates that have been released outside the normal cycle schedule.
    http://www.gfi.com/blog/microsoft-re...f-band-update/

    Vs.

    Critical Security Update for OS X Mavericks - v10.9.2 and Security Update 2014-001

    Wed, 26 Feb 2014 01:15:47 +0000

    Apple has release a Critical Security for OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion and Safari, addressing an SSL vulnerability and other security vulnerabilities.

    For more information see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6150

  5. #50
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    Vs.

    Critical Security Update for OS X Mavericks - v10.9.2 and Security Update 2014-001

    Wed, 26 Feb 2014 01:15:47 +0000

    Apple has release a Critical Security for OS X Mavericks, Mountain Lion and Safari, addressing an SSL vulnerability and other security vulnerabilities.

    For more information see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6150

    Again - the truth is something else entirely.


    http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-...S-X-and-iTunes

    http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-...c-OS-X-and-iOS

    http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-...Updates-Safari

    http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/current-...Updates-Safari

    https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/bulletins/SB14-188



    That's at least what, 5 updates you missed?
    My granddad always said, :As one door closes, another opens".
    Wonderful man, terrible cabinet maker...

  6. #51
    I think some are getting probability and possibility mixed up.

    Are there things that can impact a Mac? Sure. Is the average user going to interact with them? Probably not. That's my entire point. The geeks in the room keep stating studies and reports that show active things out there, but yet the reality is people use them every day without issues, day after day. I don't think I've ever met a PC user that hasn't had malware or a virus. On the flip side, I've never talked to a Mac owner that's had one. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, it just means in my world, I've not found that person, where every one else I know with PC's (self included) have had issues.

    Is it possible? Yes. Is it probably at THIS point in time? No.

    David, you asked what the issue with the spoofed emails (yes, it is spoofing, not phishing, well, actually phishing is done from a spoofed email address), the issue is that if you click the link from your "bank" that's telling you that you need to update your account information because it's been breached, when you click on the link provided, it can download malware or a virus onto your computer. Telling a 70 year old person that they "Need to check the url in the email" is meaningless. If you click that same email from a Mac, 99.99% of the time, nothing is going to happen.

    You need to put yourself into the world of people that are average users, not super users and almost this entire thread is full of posts from super users. Do I suspect super users to have issues with any operating system? Sure do. However, you aren't the target market for easier to use computers.
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  7. #52
    I am by no means a super user. I'm just a user who has used computers for a while. I'm not a programmer or engineer, I just apply some sense when I buy and use computers. Part of that sense is not buying into apple's extremely bloated prices and follow-up scheme that has you paying for every single thing you do. It's never taken much time for me to apply that sense or avoid trouble, and my wife who - if there is such a thing as a power user, she is a "powerless" user, has manage to avoid it also.

    If the elderly are going to take up computing from out of nowhere, mac is probably a good option.

    There are other things where I suspend thought and turn over my money (sharpening stones, fine carbon steel without much alloying, hand made tools by people who are true tradesmen of such things....), but computers and phones are definitely not one of those things. Add cable TV to that. I have not personally met anyone who has had a PC and had money taken from their bank account. My parents and grandparents, I guess, are between the generations you speak of - my parents are competent trouble-free PC and android users (also hard to separate from money at times) in their mid 60s, and my grandparents wouldn't have touched a computer if you paid them. I have one BIL who uses mac and literally everyone else I'm related to uses PCs. The sum total of expense that I've ever seen is that my dad took his laptop to staples or something 5 years ago and paid them $60 to "clean and tune up his PC" or something. I have no idea what that means, but he's saved thousands of dollars over the last 15 years by going the route he's gone, and I guess I don't really need to save money but he *definitely* doesn't. I just don't turn it over where there's no need, and neither does he.

  8. #53
    Quote Originally Posted by David Weaver View Post
    I am by no means a super user. I'm just a user who has used computers for a while. I'm not a programmer or engineer, I just apply some sense when I buy and use computers. Part of that sense is not buying into apple's extremely bloated prices and follow-up scheme that has you paying for every single thing you do. It's never taken much time for me to apply that sense or avoid trouble, and my wife who - if there is such a thing as a power user, she is a "powerless" user, has manage to avoid it also.

    If the elderly are going to take up computing from out of nowhere, mac is probably a good option.

    There are other things where I suspend thought and turn over my money (sharpening stones, fine carbon steel without much alloying, hand made tools by people who are true tradesmen of such things....), but computers and phones are definitely not one of those things. Add cable TV to that. I have not personally met anyone who has had a PC and had money taken from their bank account. My parents and grandparents, I guess, are between the generations you speak of - my parents are competent trouble-free PC and android users (also hard to separate from money at times) in their mid 60s, and my grandparents wouldn't have touched a computer if you paid them. I have one BIL who uses mac and literally everyone else I'm related to uses PCs. The sum total of expense that I've ever seen is that my dad took his laptop to staples or something 5 years ago and paid them $60 to "clean and tune up his PC" or something. I have no idea what that means, but he's saved thousands of dollars over the last 15 years by going the route he's gone, and I guess I don't really need to save money but he *definitely* doesn't. I just don't turn it over where there's no need, and neither does he.
    Just because it hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, doesn't mean it's not happening. As a person who was the first call made to by friends and family, non of which were computer savvy, I'd like to have all the hours back I spent trying to fix their computers from viruses and malware that all they did was "click on a link in an email from a friend".

    Removing malware is a lot easier today than it was before, but I know one particular issue wasted about 8 hours of my life on. It was a nasty one that hit XP.

    If it was as easy to keep out of trouble as you suggest, there would be no McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc. You should consider yourself quite lucky.
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  9. #54
    I guess it's all a matter of perspective. What was causing my dad to spend $60 was likely some kind of spyware or toolbars, I didn't ask him. Years ago, when you got a virus, you could literally track down the executable and just eliminate it. Back then (windows 95 era), both macs and PCs were pretty much junk. Our lab at school had some slow PCs and an equal number of macs. The PCs ran NT 3.51 (why I remember, I don't know). You had to line up and wait to get a very slow PC and nobody would get near the macs (they had some OS issue or something at the time) - it may have been that folks were using spreadsheets. If you could tolerate unix, the math lab sparcs were always free, but they were generally beyond my paygrade without specific instruction.

    Anyway, I don't know when viruses got better, but I know they used to show up if you were doing things you shouldn't back in the old days, or trying to go to a site to get something for nothing. Email phishing is probably a lot more prevalent now, but I use only AVG free and run malware bytes every once in a while, and have instructed my wife to go to the bank and credit card site manually if she ever wants to go in. That's pretty much been it.

    If your friends and family are calling you for tech support, then I'd tell them to get a mac, too, though - but in my case, I'd tell them that because I could literally say "i'm not familar with what you're talking about because I don't use macs on a regular basis".

    And a random summary comment - about 5 years ago, I did what I usually do, I bought the fastest PC laptop that I could find in the 600-700 range (I use PCs a lot of hours, I guess, I don't know what qualifies as hard use these days if you're not running a file server off of your PC), and my BIL who is a mac *fanatic* bought some kind of desktop all in one thing (I don't know what they are called now) mac brand, and paid $2200. I endured a whole bunch of browbeating about how PC users were generally unsophisticated that seeing someone using a PC laptop instead of mac usually clued him in that the user wasn't very smart or they were poor. A little over two years later, his mac went kaput. That's unusual for a mac from what I hear. He bought one to follow it up, except it cost $3k instead of 2200. I don't know if that one's still going or not, and maybe since the first one lasted less than three years he got something toward a new one from mac? Who knows. After 7 years, my PC laptop (which was refurbished to start) went kaput last year and I had to replace it. It's the first PC that I've had that didn't make it to 10 years old (the age when I throw them out), and I have to admit that I was kind of disappointed, but had little interest in trying to fix it - for obvious reasons, and just removed the harddrive and threw the rest away. We put our old ones in the guest room so people can check their emails, and now our regular guests have to bring their own (most people just get on some sort of hand device now, anyway).

  10. #55
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    I have nothing more to contribute - buy what you want for whatever reason you want.

    I'm done with computers 100%. I put in my time in the industry (22+ years) supporting them & I'm pretty determined to not get back into it.
    My granddad always said, :As one door closes, another opens".
    Wonderful man, terrible cabinet maker...

  11. #56
    Macs die, we may as well install a revolving door for people that come here after being told at the Apple store that the miniscule amount of water that spilled onto the keyboard means the motherboard has to be replaced at a cost of $800+. MacBook keyboards are like liquid funnels, getting the water in just the wrong spot. We also see MacBook machines carried like a book that can get 1-2 drops of coffee or whatever in through the vent and it will ruin a machine. In fact, in that last 2-3 weeks I've auctioned/sold three MacBooks that were destroyed by miniscule amounts of water. I've never seen a Windows notebook that is as susceptible.

    Oh, and Apple appreciates you bought the AppleCare extended warranty, but it doesn't cover water damage like most other brands of extended warranties, sorry.

    Oh and iMacs that have bad hard drives, where the round trip to replace the drive takes a good tech 30+ minutes, when most PC's can be done in literally 1-2 minutes. Apple is all about the aesthetic, to heck with serviceability.

    Oh and David mentioned his relative commenting that he thinks people using PC's are either dumb, poor, or a combination thereof. I'd have to say that least when it comes to critical thinking, my experience has been the opposite. Easily overwhelmed people seem to gravitate towards Apple. Not all, but that has been my experience (on average).

    Finally, some keep insisting that malware on the Mac is nonexistent. I can only agree that it hasn't been as substantial as on the Windows side. But this article is a history of major malware strikes on the Mac:

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011...lware-history/

    Anyone believing the Mac is immune should READ THAT LINK.
    Last edited by Phil Thien; 07-28-2014 at 11:47 AM.

  12. #57
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Thien View Post

    Oh and David mentioned his relative commenting that he thinks people using PC's are either dumb, poor, or a combination thereof. I'd have to say that least when it comes to critical thinking, my experience has been the opposite. Easily overwhelmed people seem to gravitate towards Apple. Not all, but that has been my experience (on average).
    I think it has a lot to do with academia and how susceptible groups of people can be to trying to be trendy. You know, like many things, where it's considered unacceptable at all to spend money on some things (of the more traditional type), but mandatory to have others (glasses that look a certain way, t shirts a size too small (my bil isn't part of that movement, though), ...). Going out and making a decision based on your own parameters is not acceptable in such situations, and doing something like fixing your own faucets or changing your own oil is seen as brutish or garish. I guess my same philosophy on the PCs tends to anything that is easily maintained or repaired with just a little bit of desire to understand how things work. I like plain cars that are inexpensive and easy to work on, too - they tend to last a long time - same reason, I haven't seen anyone get anything back when they sell a 7 year old car that has heated leather seats and TVs in the headrests, etc. I've been down that road in the past, but the older I get, the more stingy I get, and the more I want to make all of my decisions rather than follow a trend.

  13. #58
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Thien View Post
    Macs die, we may as well install a revolving door for people that come here after being told at the Apple store that the miniscule amount of water that spilled onto the keyboard means the motherboard has to be replaced at a cost of $800+. MacBook keyboards are like liquid funnels, getting the water in just the wrong spot. We also see MacBook machines carried like a book that can get 1-2 drops of coffee or whatever in through the vent and it will ruin a machine. In fact, in that last 2-3 weeks I've auctioned/sold three MacBooks that were destroyed by miniscule amounts of water. I've never seen a Windows notebook that is as susceptible.

    Oh, and Apple appreciates you bought the AppleCare extended warranty, but it doesn't cover water damage like most other brands of extended warranties, sorry.

    Oh and iMacs that have bad hard drives, where the round trip to replace the drive takes a good tech 30+ minutes, when most PC's can be done in literally 1-2 minutes. Apple is all about the aesthetic, to heck with serviceability.

    Oh and David mentioned his relative commenting that he thinks people using PC's are either dumb, poor, or a combination thereof. I'd have to say that least when it comes to critical thinking, my experience has been the opposite. Easily overwhelmed people seem to gravitate towards Apple. Not all, but that has been my experience (on average).

    Finally, some keep insisting that malware on the Mac is nonexistent. I can only agree that it hasn't been as substantial as on the Windows side. But this article is a history of major malware strikes on the Mac:

    http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011...lware-history/

    Anyone believing the Mac is immune should READ THAT LINK.
    And all of that proves exactly what I said in a previous post. "Mac's don't like water spilled on them", "They are hard to replace internal components". None of that has a single thing to do with the user experience of operating it on a day to day basis.

    Keep actioning off those water damaged macbook pro's. I buy them whenever I can. There's a company that fixes them for a fraction of the price of apple and you can end up with a $2,000 Macbook pro for about $500 once it's all bought and repaired.
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  14. #59
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    I performed the ultimate boneheaded stunt — I dumped an entire cup of coffee on my MacBook Air. The laptop was powered on at the time, and although I immediately powered it off, you cannot remove the battery. I drained and sopped up the worst and flushed with distilled water. Waited two days for everything to dry out and powered it on. Still in use today. I've taken many Windows based laptops apart to repair and don't find them any better sealed (even Thinkpads). In full disclosure, I haven't performed the cup of coffee test on a Windows laptop yet.

    As to iMacs, we have to remember that we are buying a single processor/monitor unit and aesthetics aside, are designed to tightly control heat and noise. Although I haven't worked with the Lenovo, HP, Acer, and Dell single processor/monitor clones that were introduced after the iMac, I suspect changing components in these are somewhat difficult as well. If you really want to test your skill in replacing a hard drive, try upgrading one of those Acer desktops like the Revo, and Veriton. (but I love these guys for single application use)

    But when I choose a computer, I consider productivity first, and I have found Apple and OS X to be better over Windows (XP, 7, and 8.1) and Linux (Ubuntu). It's not that the others can't perform the tasks I need to accomplish, but Apple has a lot of little things that make me more productive.

    Dave
    Last edited by David Masters; 07-28-2014 at 2:51 PM.

  15. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by Rich Engelhardt View Post
    That's at least what, 5 updates you missed?
    It's what came up w/ a quick search. Kind of like this:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=site....org+microsoft --- About 4,710 results
    https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acert.org+apple --- About 1,810 results

    With Microsoft, one gets ``Patch Tuesday'' plus the odd out-of-band patch: http://blogs.vmware.com/go/2012/09/t...t-history.html

    With Apple one gets ``Apple will release security updates from time to time'': https://ssl.apple.com/support/security/

    and that essentially restates my original statement which you've been attempting to dispute. (That Microsoft has a patch schedule and occasionally has their hand forced to release one, while Apple releases patches on an as-needed basis, so has more flexibility.)

    I'd be interested in seeing a reasonable analysis which documents how many vulnerabilities there are for each platform at a given time if you can provide a link.

    I use both, and don't much like either these days, and really wish the Linux camp would catch up on the things which matter to me. Oh well, my mislike of where the computer industry has gone is one of the reasons I do hand tool woodworking.
    Last edited by William Adams; 07-28-2014 at 4:50 PM.

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