So yesterday, towards the end of the day, I got a call from Computer Reseller News, a trade publication that covers the ins and outs of our business - reselling and integrating technology into people's businesses.
He had a question about whether or not there was any truth in the idea put forth by Ollie Whitehouse, an architect with Symantec's security research team. Ollie said the following, in reference to the susceptibility for Mac users to fall for spammers and phishers that "trick" people to click on malware and viruses:
"I believe in part that historically the user base of Apple products are more technically knowledgeable - they're a bit wiser. So they're not necessarily as susceptible to the typical confidence tricks and so forth."
I gave my opinion, one which was quoted in this article:
"It's not necessarily that Mac users are smarter or dumber, but that they're more technically knowledgeable -- that has been our experience as well."
Apparently, I'm in the minority, as CRN also quoted a security analyst and another provider on the West Coast that disagreed.
Well, this is why I think that I'm right.
In the mid 90s, there weren't very many of us Mac users left. We were a very small percentage of the computing population (less than 2%, probably closer to 1%), and honestly, we were Mac users because we loved what Apple used to be - not what they were at the time. They had designed incredible products with interfaces that changed computing, but unfortunately, they weren't doing much other than sucking wind in the mid 90s.
We stuck with them because we had had Macs for years and hoped that Apple would pull through.
Anyone who was cost-conscious or needed to abide by industry standards moved to PC. It was just too easy. These were the early days of Dell and Gateway and when the Mac clones were a sorry excuse for a computer. Mac software was being marginalized left and right, and anyone who hadn't been with the platform for long was easily swayed by popular press. Just look at David Pogue's compliation of the mid-90s stories of doom. You would have had to be an idiot or insane to stick with the Mac.
Or savvy.
That's because back then, to get stuff to work, you had to know what the hell you were doing. It's not because the Mac broke all the time, but simply because there wasn't a lot of software around and new stuff being developed. So Mac users became resourceful. They used learned how to make software and inferior hardware to do more stuff, because honestly no one else out there was helping or writing software for the platform. They squeezed more life out of 5-year-old Macs than people did out of 2-year-old PCs, and that's partly because they paid so much more for their Mac and couldn't afford another computer.
Meanwhile, the PCs got dumber and cheaper. As the platform took over most businesses, PCs were being put everywhere - point of sale systems, kiosks, airport displays - hell, everything. The users just became, well, everyone.
Fast forward to the "00s" - most of the Mac users that I know came from this group of hardy souls who stuck with the platform. They rode out the storm, transitioned to OS X, and found that Apple had not, in fact, died. They came out with a secure, stable, and well made OS for their work.
They also started to tell everyone about the Mac - and a few people listened, and generally those were people like those original users: People that "got" the benefits of the Mac as a smoother computing platform and who didn't care about the industry standards.
Nowadays, Apple is on Intel, Windows runs on a Mac, gobs of new users coming to the platform, and a lot of kids prefer Macs instead of PCs. So, as the market share increases, will all of these less technically savvy folks bring down the platform with viruses and malware? Of course not.
Because regardless of the user base, the Mac is still a more secure platform. The vulnerabilities are fewer and farther between, the patches are more frequent and effective, and the market share is still lower. Combine that with the relative savviness of many Mac users and their fervor for showing others how to compute on the Mac, and the "tipping point" for when Macs start to have viruses like the PC world is farther out than most people think.
