Once upon a time, in a lab far, far, far away (in time, at least) I had a thesis supervisor who refused, despite five out of five of his graduate students using PCs, to buy a new PC for his lab. Nooooooooo - he spent, instead, $12,000.00 on a brand new Sun Sparc work station. Why? you ask? 'Cause some guy in astronomy told him they were the swellest. Which they may have been if you were doing astrophysics and had a year or two to spend learning to write your own code to actually get the thing to do anything. Want to print a document? Write the code. Want to write a document? Learn the code. About a year later, the thing had been well superceded and was worth less than a thousand bucks. So then he bought a Mac. Why? you ask? Because they never crash and they're immune to viruses. Well, this one, oddly enough, crashed with great regularity. More often, in fact, than the PCs his grad students owned.

As for viruses, well, his attitude was very weird for a parasitologist. Successful parasites go after the most common hosts. After all, they offer the greatest reproductive potential. Viruses, for the very few of you out there who don't know it, are parasites. Biological viruses and computer viruses. Were you a person inclined to come up with a virus program, which system would you aim it at? The one used by 1 in a million people, or the one used by the other 999,999? Those of you who answered for the former, well, reality's a bit much for you, right? And this bit of news from Apple must be wildly depressing. Whatever made you think that Macs were somehow immune? It's just that nobody could be bothered.