Another problem with those things is that they’re quite noisy, not something you’d want close to your head while you’re trying to sleep.
This is my current Mac, which is turned on 8 to ten hours a day on weekdays, and which is currently playing afghan-american fusion jazz by Shawn Quaissanee.
It is a security nightmare.
In the same room are devices older than that mac, that I have no problem securing.
Apple’s incredibly short product lifecycle and premium-priced hipster design values are great if you are in the top 10% - 20% income bracket. But don’t pretend you aren’t hyperprivileged; your belief in the security of your devices fundamentally rests on the fact that you can spend more than the poors.
I took the picture above with a $50 nokia windows phone that my employers bought for me. During the time I’ve had it, my daughter’s spent a thousand dollars on her currently-supported iPhone (she earned the money waiting tables and running split-rail fence.)
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Macs are the exact opposite of ‘security nightmares’, given the very low numbers of viruses and worms that target them, so I’m not quite sure where you’re going with that.
Apple products are also not only affordable by the “top income bracket”, by any means – comparing ‘apples to apples’, i.e., very similar Windows and Mac machines or iPhones vs Android phones – the prices are very similar. It’s fair to say that top-tier electronics in general are more easily affordable by those with more disposable income, but these days it doesn’t make any sense to single Apple out for being singularly expensive. In no possible universe are all Apple-product owners ‘hyperprivileged’.
The number of viruses and worms that target Macs is quite significantly higher than the number that target my own favored systems*. So that’d be one way I could go with that.
The reason there is more windows and android malware, which I think is what you are referring to, is economic - the larger target draws more fire, because it offers more return on investment. I would not criticize anyone for using their money to take advantage of this situation, and it can be a wise choice for a person in the right income and skill brackets.
That is a factually false statement on several levels. First, I did not make any statement establishing any equivalency as you proposed, and I certainly reject it, so your claim wouldn’t have any meaning even if the prices were similar. Second, the prices are not similar. As noted, a $50 Nokia windows smart phone permits cell communication, web browsing, email, and all other necessary pocket computing functions. Androids go for as low as $3 US, I am told, but I have never seen one for less than $5.
* I had to add the “Favored” qualifier since I run about a dozen OSes and I don’t like several of them.
That’s what, an iMac G4, about 13-15 years old now I think (circa 2002-2004 or so I believe).
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a 13-15-year-old computer still receiving security updates at this point (though you could toss a variant of Linux on there and be secured today if you wanted to make the effort). Feel free to plug in a Windows XP computer from that same era if you wish, but the odds of a 2002-2004 XP box being compromised versus your iMac isn’t even a contest. 
I used to agree with you on pricing until I realized that my many-hundred-dollar iphones have been sold for something like 60-70% of their value each year I’ve had them, and my laptops have sold for unbelievable amounts as well. My current desktop is from 2012, and not only still receives updates but is still “current” as far as Apple is concerned. I’ve spent at most a few hundred dollars a year on my phones, and I’ve had a new one every year as a result.
My two cousins (long time apple users, long before I switched in 2006) are both students, and get their $0 phones from their carriers and pay a rate that works for their budgets. I think they’d laugh at the idea that they’re in a high-income bracket. They’re both using macs from 2010 or so. They’re still supported and were purchased by their parents when they began school.
I look at your success with your iMac as a great ROI - it’s nice to see a system still humming along for more than a decade, that could be refreshed with a new install and might last for years more. Congratulations on keeping hardware around from that era, you have my respect.
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Well, there’s my home server, which has been running continuously for 13-15 years except for the times I’ve rebooted it to load kernel updates. So, no, not hard-pressed at all! OpenBSD and Linux are both fine on commodity hardware, and I’m really kind of a CLI guy anyway.
I actually have a spare server sitting on top of the old one, that I built a while back, when the RAIDs on the old system reached the point where one more failure will kill them. Somehow I still haven’t retired the old one, though… laziness and inertia.
Check the link I provided. If they are US students, they are probably in the top 1% worldwide.
I got it from the trash seven or eight years ago & reloaded the OS at that time, so I haven’t been running it incredibly long.
It’s a fascinating design, isn’t it? The base unit is quite a bit overwrought, but it makes a decent media player. I would never have imagined you could get decent sound from those speakers in a million years, but even people with better hearing than me say it sounds good.
Absolutely. Linux is the unsung hero of keeping hardware relevant. I have a personal server that’s been running so long that I’m afraid to turn it off in case the drives don’t spin back up again. (In fact, it was the second server I ever used to run Boing Boing on!).
But lets not pretend that we are in any way the majority of users.
What’s amazing to me is that these systems (the server I mentioned) have been exclipsed in almost every way by what’s in my pocket now. certainly in IO, RAM and graphics handling, and more than likely in CPU capability as well. I’ve recently begun to realize that my old gear has less and less utility because of 1) superfast internet and cheap online storage for things like media where privacy isn’t an issue, 2) the fact that modern media needs fast subsystems for things like lossless audio, 4k video, and so on, and 3) how horribly unprepared anything before USB3/thunderbolt is to handle that sort of traffic.
On-topic:
I’m not personally concerned about old PCs on the network. Anything in the last decade can be configured to have a firewall, and since they’re general-purpose computers, they can be configured with a modern browser or, at the very least, in a setup where you carefully control what destinations you visit. It’s these devices that were designed to be directly-connected to the internet with open ports that are the problem, and I think we’re going to keep having issues as long as they’re designed that way. Have these things poll a control site for remote content and interact that way, don’t put services directly on the 'net unless you can control them!
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Well, that’s exactly the thing. I wrote my first kernel code in the very early 1980s, for TSX-11 and RSX-11 systems, and I can write ten-pipe commandlines out of my head on a POSIX system, so obviously us talking about computers is like a couple of Indy mechanics talking about piston diameters. I won’t pretend our ratio of needs .vs. capability is at all typical.
I probably snark on people for making breathless claims of Apple’s* awesomeness more than I should, it’s a character flaw, I can’t resist the low-hanging fruit I guess. If (like Cory) a person has the technical chops to run a FOSS operating system, I recommend they do so for moral and economic reasons. But for everyone else, well, An’ it hurt no other, do as thou wilt. Just try to take the used-car-salesman grade hype of technology enthusiasts with a heaping teaspoon of salt!
IF they make sure their Apple devices are recycled properly, I can’t criticize people for choosing Apple. I admire Apple’s commitment to their design aesthetic, in fact, (although it’s not entirely to my personal taste) and if you have the money to get what you want, well, that’s exactly what free markets are good for, isn’t it? But I sure do pull a lot of three-year-old Apple stuff out of the trash, I must say.
Preach, brother! Testify! The proliferation of “cloud-connected” control mechanisms is a very bad thing.
* I pick on google-hype, Microsoft-hype, and other corporate propaganda too, but Apple fans are more prone to present themselves as tempting targets.
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Yes, I know – I was. You’re comparing a discontinued, out of market, low-end phone to the highest-end iPhone on the market, and stating in the same post that Apple products are only affordable by the richest, most privileged people. I’m saying that’s quite untrue. For example, one of the most popular iPhones right now isn’t the $1000 (!) model you mentioned, but the under-$500 iPhone SE. Used-but-mint-condition models are available for about $250. Given their reputation for durability and security, if you’re looking for ROI on a cell phone, that will be much better than a $3 Android (which is Unsafe At Any Speed and useless, really).
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I’ve been hearing that for years but its one of those “just so” statements that is a bit hard to actually prove.
I also still have one of those “luxo” iMacs. Right now its up in the attic but though I used it well past its end of support date (something like 6 years after purchase? more? cant recall) as a general desktop and have still put it to use for other things after that, I cant say I experienced any “security nightmare”.
FWIW I also ran a G4 Cube as an internet server long past EOS and again, didnt experience a “security nightmare”.
Not to continue bashing Cory, but these days the chops required are pretty damn minimal. Talking the talk and walking the walk arent the same. I’ll admit that I can no longer do ten pipe commands in POSIX without some RTFM nor write kernel code but either way as @orenwolf pointed out above, that I could do so in the past puts me in that rare blip demographic. Even rarer possibly, I’m someone who picked OSX as it was the unix I’d been waiting for. Most Mac users arent going to be like me but then again, most FOSS users I encounter are about the same level of chops as those who merely know how to build their own Windows PC and install from CD.
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And you are wrong, and you proved it in your own post. It is true. Look it up. You are extremely privileged, and I know that simply because you’re defending Apple’s cost.
None but the richest, most privileged people can afford phones that cost hundreds of dollars. Again, look it up, it’s objective truth.
There are three objectively false claims in this sentence as well.
Buy and enjoy apple if you want to (and please recycle them responsibly) but don’t try to sell snake oil to me. People buy $3 phones because they aren’t useless, because they do provide return on investment, and because they aren’t “unsafe” by any meaningful measure. You and I are hyperprivileged - remember the phone market includes subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and people who are even worse off, and many of those people need their $3 phones far more than my daughter needs her $600 iphone that she’s had to have repaired twice now.
Fair enough, I can only provide circumstantial evidence. The term “security nightmare” was relative to the existing conversation - my mac certainly cannot be allowed out on the global internet, but my discontinued Android tablet (which, in the previous conversation, was reviled as unbelievably insecure) gets security updates in a timely fashion and has never been in danger.
According to the articles you’ve posted, I am far from “extremely privileged”. I fall below what they say is a “hyper-privileged” person, which is a laughable metric. But in any case, my point isn’t that Apple products are cheap or affordable, it’s that all high end electronics are very similar in price. If you compare an iPhone with a Samsung Galaxy or a Google Pixel, you’ll find there’s very little price difference. But, of course, a discontinued, barely-supported or unsupported Android will be cheaper, that’s true.
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I’d actually use a luxo iMac even today connected to the internet. IIRC it did have a firewall option. Of course any browser for PPC is going to be horribly out of date, but still its not going to get overwhelmed even directly plugging it in without a filtering router.
Also may I ask
- does that tablet get updates from the manufacturer/vendor
- is it as old as the last version of OSX that can run on that iMac?
The same. I’ve had a desktop running almost every OS you can imagine at one point or another. OSX let me no longer worry about my desktop (while still getting my command line and FLOSS tools), so I could focus on tweaking FLOSS software as my day job.
This is the same reason I have an iPhone. the “Just works” trope is a bit tired, but it’s nice to have all my devices talking to one another without having to optimize the setup regularly because app X updated their config or daemon Y needs to be hardened or whatever. I do that all day for work already.
This, BTW, is also why I’m happy Android has done so well - let the people who DO want to tinker with their devices as a pastime do so, because that helps FLOSS as a whole. Same with their IoT devices. But it’s a mistake to believe that the only people who want the “just works” aspect of Apple’s ecosystem are those who don’t know better. Some of us do know better, and we’ve made the choice with eyes wide open.
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I may have related this story to you before but back around the turn of the century when I was looking to replace an aging out Vaio C1 subnote, I went around the Tokyo Linux User Group to see the state of things.
Was pretty surprised when all of them had Apple laptops for the BSDish layer. I over spent my budget, got a 15" G4 Powerbook just before 10.2 came out and havent looked back since.
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I don’t find it laughable; it appalls me that humanity is so foolishly economically stratified. And if you buy Apple products and you aren’t in the top 10% of global wealth, I would encourage you to rethink your economic plans.
My discontinued, yet thoroughly supported, android tablet suits me fine; it does everything I want, and none of the things that I do not want. This is my second one of the same model; the first one died when a rope snapped and hundreds of gallons of water landed on it. But when I received the previous one as a gift in 2013, the roughly comparable Apple product cost roughly twice as much ($200 .vs. slightly over $400). When I bought this one from eBay, I paid almost the same amount, because they’ve held value well… what’s a 2013 ipad mini go for now? Can you get updates for that?
- yes, straight from Google; I’m not running anything customised, it’s just a cheap Nexus 7.
- no, I don’t think so! That mac has been unsupported for a long time.
I think it’s a totally legit viewpoint, myself. I respect that a lot more than unverifiable claims of security ultimacy. “Just Works” is personal, dependent on your use patterns and not a globally applicable metric, but it’s still real!
Another valid reason people choose Apple (or Microsoft) is to align the toolsets in their working and home lives. If you work at Goddard, for example, you’ll want an Apple laptop because fedguv regulatory insanity ensures that any Windows laptop you get will be relatively crippled. So most people would want the same system at home, I imagine, just for the ease of use that consistency would provide.
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So not the best comparison?
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Correct!
I thought that made it the perfect refutation of the “Apple is inherently more secure because they make people get updates” meme I was addressing. It doesn’t get updates, but my android does.
And honestly, it really is right here next to me in my office, currently playing Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn. It’s the only Apple gadget I use very much!
Unfortunately though, many Android phones dont get updates and lots on the market here cant be updated w/o considerable knowledge.
So perhaps still not a great refutation to an argument that isnt really an argument to begin with.
Yeah, there is that.
I am not claiming android is the One True, I am saying no commercial* OS is. You aren’t the first person to tell me about android phones that can’t be hacked or rooted by any means achievable to average customers, and which do not get updates in timely fashion. I certainly wouldn’t buy one of those, and would never say one of those was better than an iPhone.
And personally I’m not a staunch devotee of any computing hardware or software platform. Well, maybe the antikythera mechanism, that’s pretty great.
* correction provided by @Israel_B below!
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