Mac vs. Windows - a Real World Analogy

An employee of a client of mine asked me why he should get a Mac instead of a Windows computer. He wanted what, in my opinion, was the number one reason. After a moment of thought, I told him it was because Windows is much more susceptible to viruses and spyware. He said "How so?"

This is what I told him.

Imagine coming home after work and you open your closet to change clothes, and hanging there is an ad for J.C. Penny. You go into your bathroom and there are ads everywhere for toilet paper, toothpaste, deodorant, etc. You then walk into your bedroom and there, on your bed, are ads for Linens and Things. As you walk from your bedroom to your kitchen, you notice there are maybe 100 people in your house - all uninvited - placing these flyers everywhere.

So now you have to go around your house and clean up all the flyers, and doing so is made all the more difficult from all the people in your house who are making it hard for you to move from one room to another. After finally getting rid of all the flyers and ushering the people out of your house, you sit down to eat dinner.

The next morning, you wake up and you aren't feeling so good. In fact, you are feeling downright awful. So you go to the doctor. After running some tests he says you have not just one virus but hundreds of them, probably left by some of the people who were in your house the day before. At this point, your doctor tells you something quite astonishing:

"Oh, this is quite normal. In fact there are well over 10,000 viruses out there that they could have infected you with. Here are some prescriptions that should take care of them."

So you get the prescriptions filled, and then you call a security company to install equipment and post an armed guard outside your home to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Now, think for just a minute about what a much more crazy world this would be (yes, even crazier than the one created by the Bush administration). Yet, everyone in this crazy world thinks that is normal and acceptable - just the stuff you have to put up with in order to live your life.

Well, not everyone.

There are some people who build extra special houses. They are a little more expensive, but they are virtually impervious to home invasions that leave advertising all over the place and infect you.

Which home would you want to live in? That's the difference between Windows and Mac. I am admittedly a Mac bigot - but it just doesn't make sense to me to pay less for a Windows computer, just to have to install a bunch of extra software to keep it from getting "sick," or slowing down from all the spyware. If you are going to spend extra money anyway, why not just buy something that doesn't have those issues?

There are, of course, many other reasons why I think Macs are better than Windows (not the least of which is that I can now run all the Windows software on them as well, if I want - without endangering my Mac stuff, btw). But I won't go into them here. I really just wanted to write all this down while I was thinking of it.