One of the biggest difficulties faced by bloggers who decide to target Apple or Apple products such as the Mac and iPods must be defining themselves against the array of fantastic Mac oriented sites available. Every niche and topic appears to be covered and whatever style you can think of has already been used. Added to this there is the problem of finding the time to actually write about your chosen subject when the distraction of all the other good stuff on the net seems to pull you away from writing and into surfing. There are so many good sites chock full of interesting apps and widgets that it is easy to spend all your time downloading and trying out the latest new products.

Since moving to Mac about 4 years ago I have been consistently amazed at the diversity and quality of the applications available for OS X. Even the most basic application is typically slick, glossy and presented in a fashion that even the most high end Windows applications rarely match. Take Skitch as an example, this screen grabber utility for OS X is so slickly presented and is so easy to use it actually makes you want to find an excuse to capture your desktop apps and annotate them. This is a theme common amongst OS X applications, amazing ease of use and consistency that make using them a pleasure and not a chore or a complex re-learning exercise as is so often the case with Windows apps.

Added to all of this is the fact that even the act of installing applications on OS X is stunning in its simplicity. I am sure I am not alone amongst switchers in saying that the first time I installed an application on OS X I stopped to see what I had done wrong…. It can’t be THAT simple I thought, there has to be more to it than dragging the application into your Applications folder ? Surely ? But of course anyone who has used OS X knows that is all there is to it, and when you step back and look it really makes you realise what a completely antiquated architecture the Windows OS really is.

As an IT professional who has made a living for the last 20 years managing and supporting Windows PC’s and networks I see more clearly than most what a complex and ungainly beast the Microsoft infrastructure has become. Sure, Microsoft cover bases that Apple have not even considered and there is certainly a world more products out there that require Windows than Apple, however that coverage has come at a price. Standards have been lost and Windows application developers in their constant bids to out do each other have built non standard user interfaces and inconsistent approaches to the same problems at every turn of the corner.

On top of this is the problem of viruses, spyware and malware which has become a huge burden that Microsoft products have constantly pulling them down. Even the much vaunted security improvements in Windows Vista have already been shown to be completely ineffectual, in fact John Honeyball writes in this months PC Pro magazine about how amazed he was at having to clean up huge amounts of malware from a friends brand new Windows Vista PC after he had had it for only a few weeks. Compare this with OS X which despite the best efforts of hackers has still remained totally secure against unsolicited software and viruses.

This last point is a hugely influential factor in the growing rate of sales of Macs into the home market. Corporate users are typically well protected against viruses and other such nasties these days ( though at enormous cost ), but home users are still a ripe target for infection. The typical home user will buy a PC with a 30 day anti virus trial installed which when it expires will just sit there getting more and more out of date and ineffective. I personally know of people who have had to write off large amounts of data due to corrupted or damaged files or who have to spend regular sessions re-installing their whole machine to get back to a stable working condition again. This just isnt necessary on a Mac. Not only that but a Mac can very easily be backed up to a bootable firewire ( or USB with Intel Macs ) drive which can be used to recover a machine to full working condition in the event of a hard disc failure. As I write this article I am cloning my hard disc to a Firewire disc using the excellent SuperDuper disk cloner, a process that is as far as I am aware not possible on a Windows PC.

Personally I have seen about half a dozen friends and relatives migrate to Mac over the last 12 months and with the latest range of iMacs appearing better value than ever this rate is only going to increase, which is all good news for us Mac bloggers as it is a bigger potential audience for our ramblings…. Any how that’s probably enough mutterings for one night, my SuperDuper backup will be finished soon and I can go to bed safe and sound in the knowledge that I am secure and protected. Can you say the same thing ?