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Today’s Guests:
- Sebastian Rupley, Co-Crank, PCMagCast.com
- Rafe Needleman, Editor, Webware.com
- Danny O’Brien, International Outreach Coordinator, Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Topics:
- Microsoft, NBC Take Criticism for Olympics Video Tricks
- The Disappointment of Wi-Fi
- Apple’s App Store Doing $30 Million a Month
- Macs are PCs, Dammit!
- Court Blocks MIT Students from Showing Subway Hack
I watched “Macs are PCs” and thought maybe some people have forgotten history, and I was feeling just cranky enough about it to comment…
“PC” is generally shorthand for “IBM PC Compatible” which no modern Mac is.
If you want to be compatible with the IBM PC, you still need to run the same applications that it ran, and outside of a virtualized environment, Apple products do not have what 16-bit DOS programs need to run. You can also make the argument that a “Legacy-free PC” is also not a “PC” since it also lacks hardware needed for IBM PC compatibility.
If you are just generically using the term “personal computer” then it probably shouldn’t be treated as a proper noun, but at least it would make the people who claim Macs are personal computers correct.
To boil all this down to one condition: if it can run MS-DOS 6.22 *natively*, it is a PC.