Opaque Lucidity

Let Me Count The Ways

This post has been a few days in coming. It began life as two posts: Microsoft's unveiling of a for-pay security suite and my review of our new 20" iMac. But as I see it now, it's all really one issue.

First, please allow me to remind you of a post I authored in December, 2004:

MS getting into the anti-spyware market is like a drug manufacturer getting into the casket business. One solution: bundle it with Windows and give it away. Otherwise, they're going to come off looking like they want to capitalize on their own security problems (shocking!).

I'm going to make a promise now, and it's something I'm very serious about. If MS does NOT give away this new software, I will NEVER use their products again.

Fast foward to last week, when my friend Hash sent me a link to a ZDNet article:

Microsoft plans to ship a new security product in June, charging $49.95 a year to shield up to three PCs against viruses, spyware and other cyberthreats, the company said on Tuesday.

When I wrote the above post, I assumed any move I made away from Windows would be to SUSE Linux. But two weeks ago, we bought a new iMac (talk about timing!). And so, as of February 2nd, I'm finished with Microsoft on my desktop. My job requires me to use and work on Windows machines and my wife has a Dell laptop she likes very much, so Billy Boy Gates and Company will never be far from me. But when I'm doing my own thing such as posting here or creating a podcast, it will be with a Mac...from now on.

I will not repeat my analogy from 2004 about Microsoft's attempt to profit from their own security woes. But it is my firm belief that if a scam such as this were happening in any other industry, there would be howls of protest, Congressional hearings and someone would be on trial for fraud. The only thing saving Microsoft right now is the general public's belief that spyware and viruses can exist independently of a flawed operating system; in other words, the MacOS, Linux, Unix, FreeBSD, etc. operating systems would suffer the same problems if they were on 85% of the desktops in the world. It doesn't wash.

So what of the iMac? It's wonderful. It is not a perfect machine but, then again, I've never owned a perfect computer (even the ones I built myself, which is most of them). But it is fast, beautiful, well-designed and well-implemented.

First, there is the design of the machine itself. The entire computer is about twice as thick and a little taller (and much heavier) than a regular 20" LCD display. But that's ALL there is to the thing. Most of the components (except for the hard drive, I think) are actually made for laptops, but it is still an engineering marvel.

The LCD display is a thing of wonder. Because of the screen's aspect ratio and default resolution, I can easily have two documents or webpages or applications open side-by-side without compromise. The screen is bright and the colors are brilliant.

OS 10.4.4, the operating system included on the machine, is great. If you've used a Windows machine, you would immediately be able to adapt to this new desktop even though Apple implements things very differently. The OS also has one cool feature that Microsoft has never been able to perfect: sleep mode. Many Windows machines will not recover from sleep mode correctly; the iMac does it perfectly every time and the recovery is almost instantaneous. Most of the forum posts I've read recommend only shutting down a Mac when you're going to be gone from it for several days. Thus, I have only shut this machine down twice in the past two weeks (to move it and to install RAM). You CAN do that with a Windows box, but performance will almost always suffer.

The most impressive aspect of this machine is the included software bundle. Instead of stuff I'd never use, the iMac includes iLife, a suite of applications which allow you to edit video, audio, pictures, create websites, etc. Garageband 3, the audio portion of iLife, was the big selling point for me as it allows me to do wonderful things with my podcast (or, rather, it will as soon as I learn a little more about it). Also included is Quicken 2006, Safari (a very cool web browser), Mail 2 (an e-mail client I have yet to use) and a 30-day demo of iWork, Apple's partial answer to MS Office (the 2004 version of Office comes along as a demo on this machine; that's the first thing I removed).

The machine is not perfect. It is RAM-hungry; even though 512MB is included, 1GB should be a minimum for any kind of serious work. The hard drive on my machine is louder than I thought, but that may be because my old Windows machine had loud fans which drowned out the hard drive clatter. The hard drive noise sounded to me, at first, like a loose fan. Very disquieting. Finally, this bad boy was NOT cheap. 'nuff said about that.

Should you buy one? Yes, if you're tired of viruses and spyware and you don't mind spending a little more. Let me sum it up this way: if Steve Ballmer isn't losing sleep, he should be.