Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates

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John Gruber, over on Daring Fireball has a fascinating take on the Bill Gates quote in Newsweek:

Gates:
I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise.

He discusses both the implication that OS X is insecure, and also addresses the theory that Gates expounds regarding Microsoft having features that Apple copied, but implemented first because Microsoft was focusing on security.

Daring Fireball: Lies, Damned Lies, and Bill Gates

There’s another quote that isn’t addressed though, and it is this:

MSNBC/Newsweek:
How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade? (Referring to the Apple ‘upgrade surgery’ commercial.)

Gates:
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

That strikes me as disingenuous. A laptop that can run XP fine now will likely NOT be able to take Vista easily. As opposed to the fact that a 5 year old G3 ibook or iMac can take a Tiger or Leopard install and run pretty damned smooth.
In fact, OS X upgrades usually make older hardware feel like they run faster, if anything!
But try installing XP or Vista on a 5 year old P3/600 and see if it can perform your daily tasks. Unlikely, my friends…very unlikely.