Are Macs female?

Are Macs female is a question I've been pondering since Apple let us have one of their latest MacBook Airs.

Anybody that's had their ears be-bothered by Charles Aznavour's paean to female pulchritude 'She' (co-written with lyricist Herbert Kretzmer) may think there's some lines in there that could have been written specifically for Macs.

Specifically, "She may be the face I can't forget, a trace of pleasure or regret, maybe my treasure or the price I have to pay."

Well the price you'd have to pay for the model I looked at is £1,349 (inc. VAT). If you're thinking of getting one, get your skates on, because as from the 4th of January, Boy George (Osborne) will be lifting VAT to 20 per cent.

I suppose I'm primarily a Windows user, but it was interesting to live with the MacBook Air for a couple of weeks. The battery life seemed to be a cut above most Windows laptops, and being able to close the lid and open it up two days later and have MacBook's Snow Leopard OS ready to roll in under five seconds is very convenient.

Nothing broke while we were reviewing the MacBook Air, things just worked.

But unfortunately there weren't many ports on there, so owners would end up shelling out for a lot of USB adaptors for any specific connections they'd need. Like for example a wired LAN adaptor (£25), or screen connection to VGA, DVI or HDMI. There's no optical drive, so unless you don't use optical media, that's another  "price you'll have to pay!"

Is it a business system? I think so, but living with a MacBook for two weeks might not be enough time to detect all the vices it could be hiding, beneath its sleek exterior.

Well, imagine your IT department said "Right, at the next hardware upgrade cycle, we're giving everybody a cheque for £1,000 and telling them to get Windows, Mac or Linux systems."

There's a perception that if all IT departments did that, Microsoft's OS market share and profits would plummet like a stone, maybe even more than if they put a spell checker and a word counter in Notepad [that's a Microsoft Office joke].

If your IT department said "Right, we're replacing all Windows systems with Macs", you can guarantee a fair few people in your company would be wandering around for weeks looking lost.

"I don't know what to do with myself now that I don't need to open up a Windows control panel and fiddle around with the settings," would probably be a fair comment from many of them. Like those weekend car maintenance diehards, they can't resist messing around under the bonnet, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Of course, it's still possible to dig around inside the Macs innards if you're OK messing about with Unix command lines, but what's the point – it's not the same as digging around in Microsoft OSes – or as George Formby famously put it, "You should see what I can see, when ah'm cleanin' Windows".

One thing that did alarm me was that the firewall was turned off by default, and I suppose if Microsoft had done that with Windows, the headlines would have been quite predictable: "Windows firewall off by default shock. Ministry steps in."

It seems that Mac OS X has always had its firewall off by default. but as we're continually told network security should be layered, a bit like ogres according to DreamWorks' Shrek.

I'd turn the firewall on – better being too secure, than less secure.

Are Macs female? Maybe not – they'd have the firewall on by default.

Dave Bailey, Reviews Editor