Print Ads and Computers

Nowadays, it's fairly common to see ads which show computers, laptops mostly, and every so often some desktops. The ads themselves might be for something not even remotely connected with computers: like the white laptop attached to the refrigerator like a magnet; or the appliance and electronics store showing hi-tech wares, which show several white laptops on display, and a wide 17-inch laptop; or the guy sitting in front of the laptop, the computer clearly showing a full keyboard and speakers on the side of the keyboard.

Funny thing though is that the lid (the back of the LCD screen), shows a white logo of Apple.




Majority of the computers on print ads or TV show Apple Mac computers. Yet you hardly see any on the workplace and even rarer in households. So far, I know of only 3 (maybe 4) who have Macs at home, and only one of them have OS X. In addition, I know of only one other who has a Powerbook of his own (of those with Macs at home, two of them also have Mac notebooks.)

In the United States, the Mac comprises only 10% of all PC's. Here in the Philippines, that number is very much less. And yet, if you watch TV commercials and print ads and take note of the computers shown you'd think that there are no Intel PC's in the Philippines.

I envy the Mac users. Think about these:

• No Mac viruses, worms or trojans. Or to put it another way, worms, viruses and trojans do not have any effect on the Mac.

• Practically no downtime. The Mac (OS 9, or X) very rarely crashes. Mac OS X, is a UNIX variant. Rock solid.

• For all intents and purposes, the Mac is (at least) 7 years ahead of its time compared to Windows: the Mac was GUI since its inception; tt had always used the mouse; before, it had always used SCSI drives, now it uses fast IDE and Firewire hard disks; onboard Firewire ports; support for multiple monitors (clone or extended view); USB mouse and keyboard (meaning only one cable from computer to the user); plug and play firewire hard disks which can be daisy-chained; with the Mac OS X, multiple disk volume spanning; support for multiple file system types.

• No camera drivers needed. True Plug-and-Play. Just connect the digital camera via USB and use iPhoto to download the contents. Doesn't matter whether it is USB mode Normal/DSC or using USB Mode PTP. With video cameras, just connect via the Firewire and use iMovie.

• Easy network connection, to a LAN or to the internet.

• Security. On the OS X, because it's UNIX, creating individual accounts mean that the account owners cannot access the contents, files or folders of the other accounts. On the LAN, there has to be explicit access to these accounts before being able to read anything on the computer. Worms have no access.

• Burning to CD. Easy, just insert the disk. Drag the files to disk, and when ready to burn, click on the burn button.

The downside?

• Practically no games. It does not have as many game titles as a PC. Sometimes the Java games on the internet are not even playable.

• There are a lot of programs which are Windows only.

All in all, I'd say a fair exchange.

A pair of Macs: An iBook G4 running OS X and an iMac G3 on Mac OS 9.2


--andoy