Sean's Blog

…are getting a little old. OK Apple, we get it. Windows has been problematic, and it’s made life a living hell for millions upon millions of people. And Windows 7 will present new sorts of difficulties, I’m sure. Because of all that, I recommend Apple computers to all friends and family who might come to me for support issues. But let’s not forget the reasons why Apple computers are less problematic, because as with everything else, the rules are subject to change.

Certainly a big reason for Apple’s immunity to some of the security/virus/spyware issues that Windows users have seen is the size of their user base. The fact that Apple’s user base is smaller than Microsoft’s is irrefutable, and hackers and others with nefarious intentions will gladly target the platform with as many users as possible—or Windows, in other words. This doesn’t excuse Windows at all, as the platform has certainly had more than its fair share of security holes, and I can’t foresee the security holes going away completely anytime soon. But it does mean that if Apple’s market share on the desktop grows, so will its exposure, and OS X isn’t exactly super secure in the way a system like OpenBSD is. This is something that has been stated so many times in so many places, it seems ridiculous for me to be repeating it, but Apple’s premise that OS X is that much more “secure” than Windows warrants some criticism.

The bottom line is, if a user can run any software that they want, and methods exist to disguise evil software as something a typical user would be inclined to click on, bad things can and will happen. You can throw as many prompts in front of a user as possible, but they’ll just click through them without reading them after being inconvenienced with them once. No platform is immune to this, so to market a product as being superior in security to another product on this principle is nothing more than a marketing extension of security through obscurity. It works, only until or unless the status quo is changed.

And ironically, both Microsoft and Apple are working to change the status quo. Apple is attempting to convert Windows users based upon Microsoft’s difficulties in the past, present, and the perceived future. And, to an extent, it’s working. Likewise, Microsoft seems to have made progress in making Windows more secure. And again, to an extent, it’s working. Apple is working more on perception, while Microsoft seems to be working more on technology, and that focus on technology may just be fueled by these very ads Apple has been running.

Which brings us back to the ads, both past and present. On August 24th, 1981, Apple placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal welcoming IBM to the PC market. The ad was brash, cocky, and as the years following it would show, it didn’t have the effect that Apple had hoped it would. Who knows what effect the ad had at IBM, but IBM’s success in the PC market during that time period was clear. Apple is not the market share leader today that it was back in 1981, and Microsoft isn’t exactly the company playing catchup in market share that IBM was either. Nonetheless, the parallels between 1981 and now remain striking.

It will be any parallels existing between 1986 and 2014 that will be truly telling. If the status quo changes dramatically, and Apple has a considerable amount of market share, OS X will become a very inviting platform for hackers. And it’ll only take one security screwup that effects a substantial portion of users to make these 2009 ads look just as foolish as that 1981 ad looks today.