The Apple revelation !

If you have read some of my previous posts you might have noted that I was constantly amazed at the totally illogical activism of the Mac enthusiast - I could not understand how so many things that should have been so obvious to any remotely competent user were actually ignored, denied, misrepresented and so on…

But recently just after responding to such a comment on an older post ”I finally got it” … and it was quite an eye-opener :)

You see, in the PC world there are almost 100 times more people than in the Apple world and many, many levels of knowledge - generally if your grandmother calls you when she has problems with her email she certainly looks at you as her on-hand-expert for that problem, but the called grandson like the vast majority of people always know quite a number of other people that have a much higher knowledge in a certain computer matter or another, so while a LOT of people are proud of their experience I would dare saying that probably 90% of the PC users think of themselves as just that - a normal user - and they generally have the tendency of listening to what other users and especially the people they regard as experts say about a thing or another, and the tendency of learning more and more to constantly rise on the knowledge ladder ...

However, from what I can see in the Apple world at least half of the users think of themselves as experts - but since they also want to be modest they might use the term 'power user' - so you actually have a world where almost everybody ALREADY IS an expert !!!

That is generally a very nice thing - it shows that people are reasonably happy with that computer technology - and honestly speaking for many people that is a huge achievement in itself !

However overconfidence always can generate problems - think of the (drunk?) drivers that believe that they can make a steep turn at 200 mph without any form of safety belt :)

In the computer world things will be a lot less dramatic - by far the most annoying result is the constant hype around everything that Apple does :) Another unpleasant result is that in a world with so many 'happy power users' any form of 'outside improvement' has only little chances - and generally not even the the best ideas will survive on the long term since Apple might 'borrow' them for their next update cycle... (and also any form of major improvement of the users knowledge - if they already are experts why should they learn anything new :) ) That Apple world might also be a 'monopolistic dictatorship' - the only 'higher expert' in a world full of 'power users' is Apple itself - which becomes a supreme authority that dictates pretty much everything and in the process is taking a consistent cut from all the other members of the world :)

A very interesting danger when having so many overconfident users is on the security side - and that is even more dangerous in a 'monoculture' (in which most people use pretty much the same hardware and software both from the same unique provider)! So far the main reason why no major security problems have been seen was that the current generation of hackers were more interested in making easy money from the vastly larger world of Windows ... but that might soon change ...

I can not take credit for being the first with such warnings - just yesterday The Register was running an article from Security Focus on that - but I will make another prediction that I consider funnier - just months (if not days) after the first widespread OSX exploits will start (or even after only modest trojans or spyware vectors will become widely known), the same company that was always claiming that OSX is perfectly and totally safe 'as it is' and that no extra helper program is needed will launch an antivirus service - either something separate and rather expensive (but with a 'totally unique experience and service' :) ), or something a little less pushy linked to the existing .mac tax - but even that will be no innovation :))