The Register just posted this piece on Apple OS X, and attempts to find a correlation between the recent proliferation of computer security issues, and Apple’s exploding OS X platform sales.

I have touted Apple as a solution for the malware that binds us, over and over and over, not because I am a “Mac-head,” but because I bought one out of curiousity, and found it just plain works (and without all the nasties I became accustomed to with Windows).

I have to agree with The Register - there is a correlation.

If you are fed up, and are ready to make the jump, just click here: Apple Store.

I’ve heard an awful lot of analyst (and Dell executives) talk about how Apple is a one hit wonder with the iPod. While I have gotten a little more biased after my month on a Powerbook, I still couldn’t take the mindset of the fanatics, and had to continually lean towards the pundits. That notion gained even more strength after I saw the Mac Mini, and thought it overpriced and useless. Now I am beginning to wonder.

The custom automobile industry is big business, and has huge following which started with some very spendthrift, Honda Civic-owning types. Now there is customization going on all over the place - it has become mainstream. And if you want to sell a product, I mean really SELL a product, you have to hit the mainstream. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac Mini does just that.

There was some chatter about how the Mini was interestingly so close in size to standard US car audio dashspace. While the implementation at this link (TunerTricks � Blog Archive � GTi - MacMini) utilizes a lot more than this space, it is a heck of an effort, and I suspect we will soon see more of this.

This is how trends start folks, with one innovator, then two, then a little publicity from someone big (with something to gain). If it is featured even once on MTV’s Pimp My Ride, I say game over.

For more comments on the project, you can check out the sometimes useful and funny commentary at Slashdot here: Slashdot | Mac mini in a Volkswagen.

I am not the only one who likes my Mac. Although I still run a Dell C840 with dual boot WinXP and Fedora Core 3, the Mac has appeal in terms of portability, ease of use, and a comfortability factor I have become acccustomed to in a very short time (like three weeks).

Now Linus Torvalds is using one too.

Slashdot had this piece posted: Slashdot | Torvalds Switches to a Mac.

Interesting read, especially the comments about a “Mac not being a Mac,” without OS X, etc. etc. The jist of the commentary is that the Mac hardware is extremely well built, feature packed, compact (when in laptop form), and dollar for dollar a darn good value compared to similarly configured PCs.

I have to attest, those comments are correct. My 12 inch Powerbook has impressed the heck out of me so far. The aluminum chassis is stiff and light, and the keyboard feels much nicer (comfortable) than my PC (or my full size add-on keyboard). And with just under $2K invested (with the gig memory upgrade I added), it is roughly $500 CHEAPER than the (stripped down) relative-sized portables from Sony, Dell, and others. Yes, cheaper, and with more features than I found in others.

And did I say easy to learn, cool-on-my-lap-for-hours, and that I don’t seem to mind the smaller screen and lower resolution as compared to my suped-up Dell. And it is, well…cheaper (I am a cheapskate, so I always do a lot of price/feature comparison). Well then I just did.

My better judgement was tossed on the front steps this last Wednesday, the moment the MacMall sales associate told me there was no sales tax on products purchased online, for delivery to me.

New release Apple Powerbook G4 12 inch with Superdrive. 80gb hard, 512mb RAM, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth 2.0, etc. etc. Oops.

Now for some initial thoughts after tinkering around with it for the last six hours…….

First, MacMall service is great. Shipped as promised, on time (Fedex next day for $9.99). Well packaged all the way down to the fine Apple box.

Turned it on to about a 50% charge, and ran through the setup. OS X networking could not get into my WPA’ed wireless LAN on the upfront try. After setup, I had to configure through System Preferences.

I found Safari slow and cumbersome right off the bat, compared to Firefox, so I made that a second point to take care of. Importing old bookmarks was cake, as I already use Firefox on Windows and Linux.

Then unwrapped Xcode, as no decent machine deserves to go without some development tools, even if the owner doesn’t know the difference between Fortran 77 and PHP.

For office suites, it is my understanding that OpenOffice is not too hot for the Mac, so a quick trip to the store I went, to pick up MS Office 2004 for Mac.

Again, easy as pie install there, then the battle to get calendar and contacts in began. It is rumored that this would be a chore, but I found it less than arduous, with a little help from the OS community. There is a program called Outport that gets these items out of Outlook. Despite a lack of recent development, and lot of disclaimers on its use with anything beyond Office 2000, it work fine on my Windows version of Office 2003 (in fact, I used the same program to get the same data over to Evolution 2.0).

Anyway, once I had this little tool running again, I exported all contact and calendar items to “V” formats, and then moved them over to the Mac. Then, I selected all vCard items, and double clicked on them. They shot over to Address Book lickety split. Then did the same with the vCal files, and iCal. Next I opened the Entourage address book window, as well as the Mac Address Book. I then highlighted all the address in Address Book, and dragged them, first to the left out of the window, then up and into Entourage. Worked great. Same went for calendar, but then I had to delete a lot of duplicates (don’t know how they got there).

I am not going to go through an explanation of how I got all me email over, because I haven’t done it yet. Simple process though - use Mozilla on both ends of the transfer, according to numerous sources.

Email notwithstanding, up and functional as a work machine in just a few hours time.

A couple of other notes:

OS X reads NTFS just fine, despite what the forums say. I have a Firewire drive for backup, using it with my 1394 mini port on the Dell C840. So I unplugged it, attached a generic firewire cable, and the Mac sees it no problem.

I am also very very glad I took the time to learn Linux. The Mac is quite similar, just without all the driver install hassles. I will likely install X11 on the Mac so I can run some of my favorite open source progs on it too.

All and all a nice experience. But I must also say the slab is a pretty tight package, and doesn’t get very hot either. I hope my future experience deems it a good addition to the computing quiver.

I forgot one thing when talking about value, product excellence, and warranties the other day - something which an anonymous reader pointed out to me via email.

It was purported in this correspondence that Apple Powerbooks have pretty darn good resale value compared to Dells, or any other PC platform, for that matter.

So I did some checking on my own…..

What did I find out?

It is true. In a not-so-circumspect examination of selling prices of Powerbooks on eBay, I found that used Powerbooks do indeed fetch fairly significant prices compared to original retail values. Based on some back of the envelope calculations, I found that those puppies generally sold for up to 70% of original retail, at an average of one year old. This rough estimate excluded most items with any add-ons such as software or extra memory.

PC notebooks, on the other hand, did not fare as well. On average, they fetched roughly 50% of retail price after one year. Huh. There were a few exceptions, but this seemed the norm.

Keep in mind, I did not regress pricing data against age, with a 95% confidence interval, for a statistically relevant r-squared, nor did I gather what would otherwise be deemed a significant number of data points. This was just a rough guess, based on perusal of approximately 50 items, and comparison to some published (albeit old) pricing data.

Now I do not know if this has something to do with the fact that Intel chips are on a shorter upgrade cycle than PowerPCs, or that Wintel slabs are generally cheaper to start with, but I thought it was worth noting, nonetheless.

There is something about those darn Apples, that set them apart from the oranges.