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    Just discovered this, hope it is helpful for someone.

    I just installed the free app VirtualBox which allows you to run Windows on a Mac. I was also surprised to see that Windows works even if you don't purchase a license, though some customization features appear to be unavailable.

    Both VirtualBox and Windows 10 installed correctly on the first try, and so after 25 years of being exclusively Mac, I now have Windows too. I did this specifically to get access to wider range of video and image editing apps.

    If, like me, you've never used Windows before, the following excellent tutorial video series is proving quite useful.

    http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/master-the-basics-of-microsoft-windows-10-on-desk...deo-tutorials/

    Another reason to learn Windows. While the Mac was once the sole focus of Apple, the iPhone now makes up 2/3 of Apple's profits. If I remember correctly, the Mac makes up something like 15% of profits. Point being, the future of the Mac is unlikely to be the same as it's glorious past. I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple secretly sees the Mac as a legacy product they're tired of having to mess with.
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  2. There are limits to running Windows on Mac effectively, one of them being its a waste if you need to do any serious video work. Prices on used Windows PCs are so ridiculously low, it makes much more sense to just buy one and have a dedicated workstation designed for Windows video software. Having two systems also frees up your Mac for the stuff it does best, like Photoshop or web surfing, while the Windows box is left free to process video files uninterrupted by other tasks.

    If I remember correctly, the Mac makes up something like 15% of profits. Point being, the future of the Mac is unlikely to be the same as it's glorious past. I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple secretly sees the Mac as a legacy product they're tired of having to mess with.
    Any interest Apple had in keeping Mac seriously relevant died with the FCX downgrade and abandonment of FireWire. At that point, it became primarily a halo product functioning as a dock for their other mobile devices. I'm sure many in the firm wish it would just go away, including Steve Jobs who said as much himself years ago. Nonetheless, it remains a very profitable category for them that no longer requires all that much in the way of investment: really, what the hell else can Jonny Ive do to improve the looks of their laptops or iMacs? Going back as far as 1997, when Macs were dead in the water, they STILL provided cashflow that cushioned Apple against a few staggering failures. Competing derivatives of iPad and iPhone significantly diluted the market for those products, but no one's ever quite managed to knock the MacBooks and iMacs out of the ring: if you want or need one of those, you aren't going to buy a Windows variant instead. As long as enough buyers feel the OS or design features are worth a price premium, Apple will keep selling Macs. They'd be fools not to.
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    There are limits to running Windows on Mac effectively, one of them being its a waste if you need to do any serious video work. Prices on used Windows PCs are so ridiculously low, it makes much more sense to just buy one and have a dedicated workstation designed for Windows video software.
    These are good points. I'm running Windows on my Mac to get comfortable with Windows, thus removing one barrier to doing just what you suggest.

    As long as enough buyers feel the OS or design features are worth a price premium, Apple will keep selling Macs.
    The key word in your sentence is perhaps "feel". What may be sustaining the Mac at this point is not a real world quality advantage, but the impression of a quality advantage created by Apple's world class branding machine. Another way to put it might be, when you're at the top, there's only one direction to travel from there.
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  4. Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    What may be sustaining the Mac at this point is not a real world quality advantage, but the impression of a quality advantage created by Apple's world class branding machine.
    It often seems that way to those who don't have a long-term professional history of using and/or supporting Macs. No doubt, at least half the college freshmen proudly sporting a new MacBook Air today are simply buying it based on herd instinct or glamor-advertising. But Macs still do retain some practical advantages for some people: I still would rather use Photoshop on Mac than any other platform, and still do most of my websurfing and downloading on a Mac because its less worry and hassle. Having two systems also keeps most of my Windows boxes as offline dedicated workstations, esp nice in this era of Win10 telemetry nonsense.

    And if you're in the unlucky position of being "technical support" for your extended family and friends, moving them to Macs lowers the burden 90%. Never, not once, in the past 25 years have I had to deal with virus or malware meltdowns for any of my friends/family on Macs. The Windows users, OTOH, drive me up a friggin wall and out of my mind with that crap: no matter how I lock them down, they find some way to get infected. Until and unless the hackers of the world get seriously interested in effectively targeting Mac porn and torrent users, they're a lot easier to support in this one arena (in other ways, not so much: every OSX upgrade is worse than the last).

    Since you already own your Mac, adding a separate second-hand Windows PC after you get comfortable with the differences will be very affordable (and give you added flexibility).
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    Originally Posted by orsetto View Post
    Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    What may be sustaining the Mac at this point is not a real world quality advantage, but the impression of a quality advantage created by Apple's world class branding machine.
    It often seems that way to those who don't have a long-term professional history of using and/or supporting Macs. No doubt, at least half the college freshmen proudly sporting a new MacBook Air today are simply buying it based on herd instinct or glamor-advertising. But Macs still do retain some practical advantages for some people: I still would rather use Photoshop on Mac than any other platform, and still do most of my websurfing and downloading on a Mac because its less worry and hassle. Having two systems also keeps most of my Windows boxes as offline dedicated workstations, esp nice in this era of Win10 telemetry nonsense.

    And if you're in the unlucky position of being "technical support" for your extended family and friends, moving them to Macs lowers the burden 90%. Never, not once, in the past 25 years have I had to deal with virus or malware meltdowns for any of my friends/family on Macs. The Windows users, OTOH, drive me up a friggin wall and out of my mind with that crap: no matter how I lock them down, they find some way to get infected. Until and unless the hackers of the world get seriously interested in effectively targeting Mac porn and torrent users, they're a lot easier to support in this one arena (in other ways, not so much: every OSX upgrade is worse than the last).

    Since you already own your Mac, adding a separate second-hand Windows PC after you get comfortable with the differences will be very affordable (and give you added flexibility).
    there is no such thing as a safe OS. i've seen reports of ransomware for mac OS now - http://www.myce.com/news/security-researchers-discover-ransomware-apple-computers-tor-network-82111/ so yes it is recommended that you have antivirus software for mac computers. avast mac security is supposed to be good - https://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=5.0
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    It often seems that way to those who don't have a long-term professional history of using and/or supporting Macs.
    In my case, I'm on a Mac all day every day since 1995. At one point I had a couple dozen Mac servers running for a business I started.

    No doubt, at least half the college freshmen proudly sporting a new MacBook Air today are simply buying it based on herd instinct or glamor-advertising.
    Yes, the one thing that can't be disputed is that Apple is a world class marketer, with one of the most powerful brands ever created.

    Never, not once, in the past 25 years have I had to deal with virus or malware meltdowns for any of my friends/family on Macs.
    Yep, same here, twenty five years, not once. Pretty big deal, agreed.

    (in other ways, not so much: every OSX upgrade is worse than the last).
    Yes, this is much of what makes me wonder if Apple still cares about the Mac. I just recently moved from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, and probably won't upgrade again for years. When it comes to MacOS my mantra is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I've just read too many OS upgrade horror stories I guess...

    I'm really not in a position to compare the Mac to Windows, given that I've been using Windows only about a week. All I can see so far is that Windows isn't as pretty as the Mac interface, which is hardly breaking news. I find it puzzling why a company as rich as Microsoft can't hire more inspiring designers, but who cares really.

    Most of my commentary arises from the fact that the Mac is no longer the sole focus of Apple as it once was, but rather now a small fraction of their profits. That, and when any company becomes as successful as Apple there's a natural human tendency to start coasting and adopt a "who cares" kind of attitude towards the user base, ie. Apple as the new Microsoft etc.

    The branding machine is trying to keep us in the good old glory days when Steve and Woz were hungry young men determined to conquer the world etc. But the thing is, Apple's no longer young, no longer hungry, and they've already conquered the world. There's only one direction for the story to travel from here.

    Nothing lasts for too long in this new Net based world we're creating. You know, Yahoo used to be the king of the world and it felt like that would last forever, and look at them now. Apple, Google, Microsoft, they'll all meet the same fate sooner or later, probably sooner.
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    Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    I'm really not in a position to compare the Mac to Windows, given that I've been using Windows only about a week. All I can see so far is that Windows isn't as pretty as the Mac interface, which is hardly breaking news. I find it puzzling why a company as rich as Microsoft can't hire more inspiring designers, but who cares really.
    Windows 7 is prettier than Windows 10. Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft got rid of the eye candy (3D affordances, transparent window frames, and intricate button/icon designs) and used a very minimalistic design approach for controls instead. Some find the new UI look "modern" and aesthetically pleasing, but others think was a purely utilitarian choice to improve scalability because Windows 10 was designed to run on computers, tablets, Microsoft's newest gaming consoles and Microsoft's phones.

    Personally I wish Microsoft followed a similar approach to Apple's: kept the existing Windows 7 UI "look and feel" for computers and designed a different UI for mobile devices and gaming consoles.
    Last edited by usually_quiet; 13th Aug 2017 at 12:25.
    Ignore list: hello_hello, tried, TechLord, Snoopy329
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    Originally Posted by usually_quiet View Post
    Some find the new UI look "modern" and aesthetically pleasing, but others think was a purely utilitarian choice to improve scalability because Windows 10 was designed to run on computers, tablets, Microsoft's newest gaming consoles and Microsoft's phones.
    Right, I think that's it. Same thing on the Mac side. Desktops/laptops are no longer the center of the computing universe as other platforms rise in prominence. The developers no longer want to code a separate interface for desktops, given that desktops now represent a minority of their profits. At some point the desktops will probably vanish, say for instance, once you can project the tiny image on your phone on to a piece of large shiny plastic sitting on your desk.

    On the other hand, Apple can now sell you a desktop AND a phone, so perhaps they will resist the idea of combining the two platforms. Or, perhaps they will combine the devices and use that feature as a way to sell more phones at ever higher prices.

    Personally, I have no use for the fancy pants phones and am baffled as to why people want to work on postage stamp size screens, and carry a device that allows people to interrupt them any time of day no matter where they are or what they're doing. But it seems this is an extremely minority position, and the phones are here to stay, and the desktops may be on the way out.
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  9. Originally Posted by october262 View Post
    there is no such thing as a safe OS. i've seen reports of ransomware for mac OS now - http://www.myce.com/news/security-researchers-discover-ransomware-apple-computers-tor-network-82111/ so yes it is recommended that you have antivirus software for mac computers. avast mac security is supposed to be good - https://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=5.0
    No one can claim Mac is definitively "100% safe" - even the big iron at the NSA has been hacked. It is simply much easier to support clueless friends and family on Macs than it is to support the Windows users among them. The overwhelming majority of malware exploits target vulnerabilities in Windows that don't exist or function the same way in Mac or Linux. An unprotected Windows PC (or one with protection failures) can be slaughtered dead in an instant by by an attack that Mac OSX will either ignore or can neutralize simply by quitting the browser. Yes, the asshats that create malware never rest and have been getting more inventive with Mac ransomware attacks. But most still do require the Mac user to make a distinct effort to invite them (click a link, click a "yes" button, whatever). Drive by attacks can temporarily lock up the browser, but can't usually just rip the hinges off a back door and automatically load themselves in quite the same manner they do in Windows.

    Could this change tomorrow? Absolutely. But since it hasn't changed significantly since OSX debuted in 2002, and desktops/laptops are being rapidly obsoleted as a consumer products anyway, there may not be any Macs left to speak of by the time their malware vulnerability matches Windows in scale. I can train Mac users not to fall for phishing links or fake alert popups, but no amount of training can protect my Windows users from a new automated attack that bypasses even the latest anti-malware systems.

    Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    Desktops/laptops are no longer the center of the computing universe as other platforms rise in prominence. The developers no longer want to code a separate interface for desktops, given that desktops now represent a minority of their profits. At some point the desktops will probably vanish, say for instance, once you can project the tiny image on your phone on to a piece of large shiny plastic sitting on your desk.
    Its a damned shame that mobile devices decimated laptops and desktops before anyone had a chance to grapple with some of the ugly consequences. Any number of tasks, applications and sites require a wider swath of visible data that can't be effectively presented on a 5" screen. The dumbing down and simplification of site after site to the lowered bar of the phone interface has been depressing and infuriating. I would personally like to torture every last developer at eBay, PayPal and Yahoo for the damage they've done to once-intuitive, easily comprehended info displays. Invest the freaking money you take from us to maintain both full browser interface and phone interface, please: stop forcing my 17" laptop screen into a useless info-starved 90% whitespace phone emulation. The tech-era equivalent to thoughtful journalism getting reduced to worthless sound bites in the 1980s.
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    Originally Posted by orsetto View Post
    Originally Posted by october262 View Post
    there is no such thing as a safe OS. i've seen reports of ransomware for mac OS now - http://www.myce.com/news/security-researchers-discover-ransomware-apple-computers-tor-network-82111/ so yes it is recommended that you have antivirus software for mac computers. avast mac security is supposed to be good - https://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=5.0
    No one can claim Mac is definitively "100% safe" - even the big iron at the NSA has been hacked. It is simply much easier to support clueless friends and family on Macs than it is to support the Windows users among them. The overwhelming majority of malware exploits target vulnerabilities in Windows that don't exist or function the same way in Mac or Linux. An unprotected Windows PC (or one with protection failures) can be slaughtered dead in an instant by by an attack that Mac OSX will either ignore or can neutralize simply by quitting the browser. Yes, the asshats that create malware never rest and have been getting more inventive with Mac ransomware attacks. But most still do require the Mac user to make a distinct effort to invite them (click a link, click a "yes" button, whatever). Drive by attacks can temporarily lock up the browser, but can't usually just rip the hinges off a back door and automatically load themselves in quite the same manner they do in Windows.

    Could this change tomorrow? Absolutely. But since it hasn't changed significantly since OSX debuted in 2002, and desktops/laptops are being rapidly obsoleted as a consumer products anyway, there may not be any Macs left to speak of by the time their malware vulnerability matches Windows in scale. I can train Mac users not to fall for phishing links or fake alert popups, but no amount of training can protect my Windows users from a new automated attack that bypasses even the latest anti-malware systems.

    Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    Desktops/laptops are no longer the center of the computing universe as other platforms rise in prominence. The developers no longer want to code a separate interface for desktops, given that desktops now represent a minority of their profits. At some point the desktops will probably vanish, say for instance, once you can project the tiny image on your phone on to a piece of large shiny plastic sitting on your desk.
    Its a damned shame that mobile devices decimated laptops and desktops before anyone had a chance to grapple with some of the ugly consequences. Any number of tasks, applications and sites require a wider swath of visible data that can't be effectively presented on a 5" screen. The dumbing down and simplification of site after site to the lowered bar of the phone interface has been depressing and infuriating. I would personally like to torture every last developer at eBay, PayPal and Yahoo for the damage they've done to once-intuitive, easily comprehended info displays. Invest the freaking money you take from us to maintain both full browser interface and phone interface, please: stop forcing my 17" laptop screen into a useless info-starved 90% whitespace phone emulation. The tech-era equivalent to thoughtful journalism getting reduced to worthless sound bites in the 1980s.
    would you recommend mac users use antivirus software or not ??
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    To be fair to developers (I used to be one) the Facebook/phone/texting era does seem to be delivering what many or most Net users want.

    Facebook is hugely popular, because it's built around the publication of sentence fragments. Twitter is even worse. Same for texting. Meanwhile, forums are dying because they were designed to facilitate the sharing of entire paragraphs (gasp!).

    As example, I recently contacted a local Mac shop I just discovered to inquire about their used Macs. I contacted them via the contact form they installed on their website. The very first thing, the only thing really, they want to talk about is how to get the conversation out of email and on to their phones.

    I have this experience all the time, people just can't bear the thought of having to type entire sentences. In fact, even though I expressed very specific interest in a very specific range of used Macs, a product they clearly want to sell, nobody from the Mac shop has followed up on my interest. They'd rather lose what would be a repeat customer than have to type.

    In the not too distant future every word typed on the net will be "me". I mean, c'mon, we don't have time for all these pointless details, let's get to the bottom line. But then folks will complain that two characters is so incredibly burdensome, so "me" will be shortened to "I", thus brilliantly reducing the typing burden by 50 per cent!
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    would you recommend mac users use antivirus software or not ??
    Good question. I'd like to learn more about this too.

    Here's a start I learned about on another forum. It's free, and it worked for me one time in removing some browser crap.

    Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
    https://www.malwarebytes.com/
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  13. Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    would you recommend mac users use antivirus software or not ??
    Good question. I'd like to learn more about this too.

    Here's a start I learned about on another forum. It's free, and it worked for me one time in removing some browser crap.

    Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
    https://www.malwarebytes.com/
    The Malwarebytes utilities are good, I've used them forever with Windows. I don't have active AV software in my own Macs anymore, tho I did run PC Tools "iAntiVirus" in the background until 10.5 Leopard, at which point everyone agreed it was completely worthless (after being promoted as "the best OSX AV" for several years). The rapid rise of really putrid ransomware is reigniting interest in AV utilities: while Macs have (so far) been relatively immune to drive-by attacks, even the most careful user might eventually click the wrong spot on a static attack page (or open a mysterious download) and screw themselves royally. Running something that works akin to Norton AV active browser+download protection in Windows might help avoid such traps as they become more Mac-specific.

    Norton itself has always been a rollercoaster: some years its garbage bloatware, other years its surprisingly effective. I have the current Norton running on my most-abused Win7 box, and its been remarkably good at fending off some ugly attacks (even when I intentionally go to a known-awful drive-by site). My less-abused Win laptops run Avira, plus Malwarebytes etc.


    Originally Posted by Tanny View Post
    I have this experience all the time, people just can't bear the thought of having to type entire sentences. In fact, even though I expressed very specific interest in a very specific range of used Macs, a product they clearly want to sell, nobody from the Mac shop has followed up on my interest. They'd rather lose what would be a repeat customer than have to type.
    An irritating (but sadly not uncommon) experience. I don't mind personal texting and do it as much as the next guy, but anything else I want a damned email trail. Why the hell a BUSINESS would want to divert to a social media, twitterish interface with no ability to organize is beyond me. No matter what tech or communication wonders we invent, they inevitably get brought low by human nature's hard-wired desire to be a simple-minded Kardashian. Perhaps we're all just reverse-evolving back into murky inarticulate pond water: serves us right.
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