Apple has been down this road before. The iMac, which Apple released in the 1990s, was also supposed to be something like an appliance. It was the Internet computer, the machine that made connecting to the booming and then mysterious Web a very painless thing. The iMac was in fact a hit for Apple -- but it didn't reverse the Mac's dwindling fortunes. So why should we expect Mac Mini to have any more success?

Well, for one thing, the Mini's cheaper than the iMac was. It is still possible to buy a Windows machine that costs less than the Mac Mini, but you'd really be scraping the bottom of the barrel, and even if you got something with comparable computing power -- as fast a processor, as big a hard drive, as much memory -- you still wouldn't be getting what you get with the Mini. A comparably priced Windows computer is a cheap Windows computer; a Mac Mini, with its built-in top-of-the-line software, is a digital media appliance that fits on a countertop, connects to your HDTV, stores all your photos, catalogs your music, edits your movies and (if you slap down $100 for the DVD-burning drive) creates your DVDs. Thanks to the Web, it is also now easier to start using the Mac without really going through the hassle of "switching." Key applications -- like e-mail in the form of GMail, or photos with Flickr -- are available on any platform, reducing your dependence on Windows.

But the main reason that the Mac Mini may find more success in the Windows world than the iMac did is that these days, the Windows world isn't doing too well. There are about 100,000 known pieces of "malware" -- viruses, worms and Trojan horses -- targeted at the Windows operating system, says Vincent Weafer, a computer security expert at Symantec. In addition, there are between 40,000 and 100,000 individual bits of spyware (defined broadly) aimed at the OS. Weafer says that by all accounts, the spyware problem reached a fever pitch during the past year. "Judging by submissions and support calls, it was getting a lot worse," he says. "We are also seeing a trend where a subset of the programs are becoming a lot more viruslike -- to hide themselves on your machine, they're using methods like viruses to try to become more persistent." Some people calling Symantec looking for answers to their spyware and virus problems are just beyond help, Weafer says. "They've tried many different things and it doesn't help. They'll end up reinstalling or cleaning it out or buying a new one -- a lot of this stuff is just so deeply embedded, it becomes more and more difficult to get rid of the gunk, the sludge at the bottom of your machine."

Spyware is big business; in the strange economy that is the spyware market, a parasitic piece of software can earn its owner $2.95 per year for every computer it's installed on. "If you want to earn some free money, you infect a million machines and you make almost $3 million a year," says Richard Stiennon, of Webroot. These incentives have caused spyware writers to build quite harmful applications, some of which are nearly impossible to get off your machine. "There are about a dozen pieces of spyware that are installing themselves in such a way that they're pretty much destroying the machine when they get on it," Stiennon says. People who are infected with such persistent bugs will notice the damage. Their machines will run slower, and key applications -- like the Internet Explorer Web browser -- basically cease to function. For Windows users, protecting against this software has got to be a full-time job, the experts say, involving multiple pieces of anti-malware software.

Compared to Windows, the Mac is a Fort Knox of security. There are only about 200 pieces of malware known to attack the Mac platform, and security analysts could not identify a single instance -- not one -- of spyware aimed at the Mac. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the Macintosh operating system is inherently more secure than the Windows platform. As a technical matter, the Mac operating system, which is based on Unix, has a much smaller "surface area" for attackers to target, Stiennon says. Windows, by contrast, "is a really dirty OS that requires thousands of system calls to do simple functions -- and every single system call is an opportunity" for an attacker to get at the system, Stiennon explains.

According to experts, though, it isn't the Mac's better structure that accounts for why so few pieces of malware and spyware are aimed at the operating system -- it's the size of its user base. If miscreants really put their heads to it, they could probably come up with many dangerous attacks against the Mac -- but who would want to? Faced with the choice of disrupting 95 percent of the computer users in the world or just 3 percent, which would you choose? The choice is especially obvious for the purveyors of spyware, who, remember, depend on high numbers of infected machines to make money. If you want to make a killing in the spyware business, you're not going to get far by attacking the Mac.

This is, though, a distinction without a real difference. To the individual Mac user, it matters little why the machine is less vulnerable to attacks. The only thing that matters is this: "If you switch over to the Mac," says Weafer, "you'll be relatively safer."

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