To lots of people (myself included), "PC" means "personal computer" and include desktop and laptops from Apple.
However in the 1980s/1990s, there were "PCs" and "Macs". PC was anything running Windows (etc.) and a "Mac" was from Apple (i.e. a Macintosh). Apple (and many Apple fans) continue to use "Mac" instead of "PC". I've had Apple fans ask me if I use "a Mac or a PC?" (Since I use Linux, I don't know what to say :P)
The difference being that back in the olden days Macs used completely different processors etc while now Macs uses the same IBM PC compatible hardware.
Originally yes. With the release of the IBM PC the term was used to refere to the IBM PC or compatibles. Since IBM is no longer making PCs the descendants of the PC are referred to as Wintel or Windows machines. The term PC is slowly reverting to it's original meaning.
In the 90s I remember Apple calling HD space 'memory'. Does anybody remember when the stopped doing this?
"PC" is more or less synonym of a generic machine that runs Windows (much like it once stood for a generic machine that ran MS-DOS). It comes from "personal computer" but I think the IBM brand overshadowed the original meaning.
BTW, the PC I'm writing this on, while perfectly capable of booting Windows, never did it. It is, nevertheless, a PC and not a Unix workstation (despite its dual 64-bit processors, gigabytes of RAM, specialized graphics hardware and fast network).
Really? That must be why when they switched to Intel they touted the compatibility, and why the even offer a utility called "BootCamp" to easily run Windows on your Mac, with automatic re-partitioning, hw drivers, et al.
Well, they must be doing something right at Cupertino, because they really don't get viruses. Not theoretically of future-wise: practically.
99.9% of things reported (and even those are not that many to begin with) are trojans. So, Mac viruses are like the Yeti, they might well exist, but very few people have seen them in real life.
It's not just market share either. OS8/9 had several viruses with 1/5 the market share OS X has now.
If one considers that OS X is basically NeXTStep, and essentially a UNIX, do one really sees many viruses in UNIX systems? What I'm getting at is that the "administrator privileges by default", "can fuck with any file on the system" feature of Windows --up to Windows XP, which is where viruses really reigned, was not part of OS X from the beginning.
So, at worst, OS X since 10.0 was as secure as Windows Vista, which was not a swiss cheese OS like, say, Windows 98. Plus, OS X didn't have Active X, either, and used a custom PDF viewing (Acrobat is another common attack vector in Wintels).
Now, with the eviction of Flash and Java plugins as the default, and several other techniques (sandboxing, ASLR, signatures, etc), things will get even better.
>99.9% of things reported (and even those are not that many to begin with) are trojans
How is Flashback a trojan? Also what percentage of new Windows malware over the past few years do you think are "viruses" according to your definition?
Am I the only one sick of the pedantic quibbling and nitpicking over the word "virus" in every Apple malware story when everyone knows that viruses really mean modern malware in this context in general parlance and not really floppy bootsector or executable file viruses of the 90s? Anti"viruses" try to defend against all types of malware, so making a huge distinction here doesn't really help the discussion.
