The sort of people that have issues with transferring files or installing programs are the sort of people that are going to rush out and buy a copy of win7 for their old machines?
"no matter how you look at it -- it's still Windows" - The continued arrogance is ridiculous. You've most likely got an average user looking at these things things, wondering what all these problems are, who has them and probably wondering what os they're actually running, or an enthusiast who couldn't care less about marketing drivel.
Deleting data, silly prices, a tiny market share mainly made up of people that buy computers based on their look/an mp3 player purchase - maybe MS should take a leaf out of apples marketing team and go on the offensive, the forum posts would be entertaining - not that they need to...
If you think owning a Mac is all about how it looks, you really don't understand Apples. The appearance of an Apple Mac is only a benefit of Apple trying to make a computer easy to use. The main part is the OS combined with the essentially hand-picked hardware inside that pretty case. The Windows zealots argue that it's all the same hardware as any other PC, but then, a slip-joint plier is just like any other slip-joint plier, right? That $1 pair of pliers you bought at the discount store will last just as long as that $24 pair of Channel-Lock pliers you bought at the hardware store -- as long as you don't use it.
Yes, I know -- "Windows is used in the enterprise world-wide; Apple is just a niche player." That seems to be changing. One of the reasons the enterprise is still with Windows is because a huge proportion of the software they use is Windows-only. The other reason is that they've discovered how easy it is to simply wipe and re-image a defective machine compared to trying to figure out what caused it to fail in the first place. Much cheaper to spend 30 minutes replacing a corrupted drive than to spend several hours searching for the root of the problem. They also don't want outside software installed on corporate machines, thus maintaining tighter control over how the machine is used. Oddly, Apple is accused of doing the same sort of thing to its customers, only using hardware control rather than software.
So, yes.
"No matter how you look at it, it's still Windows." You still have all the malware attempting to break into your machine. You still have all the Trojans attempting to steal your data. You still have all the botnets actively running on roughly 15% of all PCs out there (15% of 1.2B computers is over 170 million machines.) One study reports that nearly 50% of all PCs carry latent infections, simply waiting to be activated; even when they have AV clients installed.
Meanwhile, the only active malware on OS X occupies less than 0.2% of all Macs. These few Macs, about 15,000 in all, downloaded hacked versions of commercial software, opening themselves to the Trojan that infected them. In other words, in trying to get something for nothing, they got more than they asked for. As yet, no attack against OS X has been fully effective in infecting more than a tiny percentage of machines. I'm not saying it's impossible, but at least for now, reality supports the perception that Macs are more secure. "Windows is still Windows."
