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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

"It doesn't get PC viruses" will, by definition, always be true. It's just not as relevant as it used to be, as Windows is much better in this regard today. If anything, this change is a nod to how the computing industry has moved on - using a Mac is no longer PC virus avoidance, but more "use this because it's great".

That said, most of the "virus" writers have turned to spyware and adware, and other scummy malware that demands money, and there is nearly none of this on OS X.

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>> "It doesn't get PC viruses" will, by definition, always be true.

Macs are PCs.

"PC" has been appropriated numerous times by vendors to mean a specific platform. In the times were personal computers were less-standardised "IBM PC" and later "PC Clones" referred to the platform and not "personal computer" specifically. This naturally led to Macintosh computer being referred to as Macs, even though they too are "personal computers".

The problem is that many people today don't understand the history of personal computing and that "PC" has an established history of meaning a specific mainstream platform. I think some mistakenly poke fun at Apple, as if they had invented the label 'PC' for their ad campaign. When actually Apple merely took advantage of this convenient, existing differentiator for their PC vs Mac ads.

Apple have been working references to other platforms out of their marketing materials for years. Comparisons are no longer needed when a company has found their publicly-held niche.

just asking seriously.. aren't Macs x86 now? Doesn't that distinction comes from the time when Macs used a totally different architecture (risc) based on something called Ironically "PowerPC"? I still can't see the difference now. Why then don't call Linux-PC or BSD-PC to others if based on the platform? I may be wrong, but the way I see it its just something anachronistic with an historical basis, but now just used for marketing purposes.

And licensing purposes too. Back in the old days Apple used the Mac ROMs to prevent cloning.

The early intel macs were "x86". The current line up is x86_64. Depending on who you ask in the industry this is called AMD64, Intel64, EM64T, IA-32e. This is the 64 bit platform as developed by AMD, it's not to be confused with Intels IA-64 as sold in "Itanium" chips.

No, in the context we are discussing, a PC is not a "personal computer", but what was called an "IBM PC compatible" (and subsequently by some a Wintel machine).

Few people use "PC" to mean personal computers in general, especially since for 99% of the people personal computers are all they know and encounter anyway, so no need to distinguish both Mac and PCs from, say, Mainframes and embedded systems....

That's why nobody got confused by the 3 year running "-I'm a Mac, -And I am a PC" ad campaign.

I was under the impression that since Macs went over to x86, they were capable of running Windows. They are IBM PC compatible.

I have a floppy drive and my PC will run some old PC games that ran bare-metal (i.e. booted off the floppy). Macs by design, can't boot those.

Also it's a bit freaky that my disk from 1987 still works in a machine I built last-year. Some games assumed a 4.77MHz clock though, and I there's no turbo button, so they don't really work :(

If we're going to be technical, since they don't run a PC BIOS (they use the newer EFI), they're not compatible with the original IBM PC.

EFI is not exclusive to Macs. It was developed by Intel and has been deprecated in favor of UEFI. Most UEFI images will have legacy support for BIOS services.

There is basically no difference between a modern Mac and a PC - except for Mac OS X, which can be run on "Hackintoshes".

>EFI is not exclusive to Macs.

Which is beside the pedantic point, that to be an "IBM PC compatible" you have to NOT run EFI.

Not if your (U)EFI firmware is capable of booting BIOS-booted operating systems as well as (U)EFI operating systems (like IBM System x Server Firmware).

And yet the PC clone market as a whole appears to be moving over to EFI

So they appear to be moving over to "not being IBM PC compatible". Which is perfectly valid.

I never said that PCs are called PCs because they ARE IBM PC compatible, only said they are called PCs because in the past "IBM PC compatible" defined their category.

I think the only difference now is that Macs use EFI boot, and not BIOS boot and hence will only boot software with a EFI-boot compatible bootloader.

Once you get past that step a Mac works exactly like a "PC". Just like a "PC" works exactly like a Mac if you fake the EFI-boot via a custom BIOS-to-EFI bootloader on a USB-stick.

That was fixed with firmware updates soon after release of the first Intel Macs.

Technically, since they don't use a PC BIOS. Plus, the "IBM PC compatible" as a specification hasn't been important since 199x.

The PC moniker for Wintel machines, while heralding from the "IBM PC compatible" era, it's used as a designator of the category of, well, PC-derived machines now, not as a technical spec. We mostly use the word Wintel for the respective thing now.

>> "It doesn't get PC viruses" will, by definition, always be true.

Until someone writes a 2-in-1 virus that can infect cross-platform.

Then by definition it is not just "PC".

It's still a "PC virus."

Does someone actually need to say this is an asinine technicality that isn't relevant to the discussion?

Good.

In biology they call this a pandemic.

Only if you define PC to exclude macs.

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