There’s this conventional wisdom, unfounded, that Macs were never susceptible to malware. That was certainly not true in the early days. I remember, in 1990 or thereabouts, buying a commercial app from a local computer reseller. This was an app from a major publisher, supplied on a floppy disk, in a shrink-wrapped box.

I installed the app — I forget what it did — and, when I opened QuarkXPress a few minutes later, I got a message that the app had been corrupted somehow. I located a shareware virus protection app on AOL, installed it, and found out that my Mac had become infected, and the source was the app I had purchased from the computer store. This was the sort of virus that the security app couldn’t fix, so I ended up backing up my files, formatting the hard drive, and reinstalling everything from scratch. Since this was a new Mac that had only been in operation for a few days, I didn’t lose anything. Except for time.

The dealer professed ignorance when I brought the offending product back. Since it was supplied by the manufacturer, it must be their fault, but the store manager was willing to exchange the box for another copy, or give me a refund. I accepted the refund.

That was my first and last exposure to a Mac virus at home, although I ran into a few at the office when I worked at a prepress service bureau. There we would take a client’s disk and run the desktop publishing files on a high-end output device, which produced printer-ready output. Some of the media we received was infected by something known as a desktop virus, which sounds really awful, although it didn’t really harm anything, other than spread itself.

I continued to run security software through the years — until OS X arrived in 2001. With OS X, Apple touted the presence of a more secure Unix platform, thus providing more protection from the sort of things that impacted the “classic” Mac OS. So I didn’t concern myself about installing security software, not that you had much choice in those days.

The years went by and, while there were ongoing security fixes for OS X, and possible proof-of-concept viruses, there were no reports of widespread infections. With the arrival of Intel-based Macs in 2006, improved sales meant, according to some tech pundits, the increased possibility of being infected by something, somewhere.

Aside from those security fixes for things that were rarely exploited, the biggest source of danger was clicking a wayward link in an email, or going to a fake site that pretended to be a company with whom you did business, such as a bank. If you logged in with your online credentials, you could be opening your account to access by criminals who’d be happy to steal your money.

So if you just watched out for phishing sites, or other online locales off the beaten path, and took care in where you spent your money, you’d sharply minimize your chances of being infected by anything. Yes, there are several security apps for the Mac, but not much reason to use them. Businesses might, as a precaution, and some of these utilities would guard against PC viruses, so you couldn’t accidentally infect the Windows user in the next cubicle.

As Mac sales increased, some claimed virus authors would find the growing target to be more inviting. But that doesn’t appear to have happened, although security “black hats” continue to find the occasional Mac security problem that they’re only too happy to tout at a hacker’s conference. In 2012, a malware outbreak did reportedly infect several hundred thousand Macs. Known as Flashback, it actually did its nasties to Java. Apple took its sweet time to provide a fix, and now mostly relies on Oracle, publisher of Java, to deliver updates. That, and disabling Java plugins for a browser, has mitigated such problems.

You still need Java to run some apps, including older versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite, but not that often. But since Java is regularly fixed, it’s probably not such a serious issue. It appears that Adobe Flash gets more attention when it comes to security lapses, but updates are also regularly issued. Still, if you can stay away from a Flash site, that’ll provide a extra ounces of protection.

For OS X El Capitan, Apple has added something called System Integrity Protection, a scheme also known as “rootless access,” which prevents you from accessing certain system files and processes. This, in theory, provides even greater protection against hackers doing mischief on your Mac from afar, or, if they get direct access.

Just the other day, I read a piece warning, once again, about the oncoming OS X malware infections, and how things will only get worse soon, someday soon, whatever. Having heard these “cry wolf” pronouncements for over a decade, it’s hard to take them seriously. Be careful, of course, but the sky isn’t falling, and Apple does appear to be taking security more and more seriously these days.

The other day I read an article from someone who was basically warning us off OS X El Capitan. While he hadn’t actually installed the new OS, he cited threads on Apple’s discussions forums describing a litany of problems that included incompatible apps and the inability to access external drives.

On the surface, I’d be scared off right away. Based on the blogger’s claims, Apple only posted public betas for marketing reasons, and didn’t do its job to make sure El Capitan was reliable. So he’s going to wait, which implies you should too.

Well, let’s set aside my personal experiences for a moment. For now, I did check the Apple discussions and found lots of problems, precisely as the blogger stated. But not all of them had large numbers of participants  reporting similar problems. Unless a problem is fairly consistent, it may be the result of a system oddity with a few installations. It takes more than that to take it seriously, but the article makes no attempt to weigh the importance of those complaints.

I did check the reviews at the App Store and found that El Capitan gets four stars. That’s not a bad start; Yosemite settled in around three stars. Yes, I did see reasons for lower ratings, but some were mostly about the fact that El Capitan doesn’t add a lot of compelling new features. I ran across a complaint about Mail, and that’s nothing new. Long and short of it, however, the buzz is quite positive at this early stage.

When it comes to incompatibilities with third-party software, I suppose you can blame Apple. But you can also blame the independent developer who needs to fix some problems. It’s possible system changes are responsible, but that doesn’t mean those changes are necessarily bad. El Capitan’s System Integrity Protection (SIP or rootless) is clearly causing problems for some developers. Jon Gotow of St. Clair Software has to do a lot of reengineering to make Default Folder X compatible. But that’s not Jon’s fault, nor is it necessarily Apple. SIP is designed to eliminate what is regarded as a potential risk factor in OS X’s security. In the interests of making OS X safer, Apple took steps that protects certain files, folders and processes from being modified or tampered with.

A change of that sort means that things developers depended on are no longer there. There are disruptions, but compatible apps are already showing up, and more are coming. That’s nothing unusual, but it’s not that Apple or developers should be faulted. You want security, there may be tradeoffs, although it is actually possible to disable SIP with a Terminal command. But I wouldn’t recommend it unless doing so is required to get your mission critical app to run.

My personal experience with El Capitan at this early stage is mostly solid. Mail has a tendency to briefly stall, but will resume normal operation in less than 30 seconds. Maybe it’s about background processing of large message folders, but I’m shooting from the hip. The other problem is Microsoft Word 2016. If a document is open and idle for an hour or two, I can no longer save it after making changes. Each attempt brings up a Save As dialog, but it won’t Save. My usual solution is to copy the text, quit Word (not saving the changes), reopen the document and paste the changed text. Then it works.

But when Word launches, I do see a curious prompt about a problem with a backup file the app creates. But maybe it’s fixed already. This week Microsoft released an update for Office 2016 for Mac. While El Capitan issues, such as crashing, were reportedly not addressed in the update, I didn’t see a recurrence of my particular problem — so far at least. In contrast, I’ve had no crashes at all in any of the Microsoft apps I use regularly. Regardless, there are published reports that a fix will come when El Capitan 10.11.1 is released, which is expected soon.

My other problem is far more arcane, and there’s a solution. I use The Levelator for post-processing of files created for my radio shows. It’s a free app, available for Mac, Windows and Linux, which provides a sophisticated form of normalization to an audio file. It does it a whole lot more efficiently than most audio apps I’ve used. But it’s not compatible with El Capitan because a system file on which it depends appears to be unavailable. There is information posted online on how to copy that file from the app bundle and put it in the appropriate system folder. A restart, and it works, though you’d have to follow this process for each Mac you own, or when restoring a Mac.

Since development of The Levelator halted in 2012, you will never see any change unless someone wants to acquire the app and do it. But they’d probably want to charge for it, for otherwise where’s the incentive other than giving back to the audio community?

In any case, as operating systems go, El Capitan strikes me as a pretty solid release. It’s possible the forthcoming 10.11.1 update will address a number of concerns. But with any new version of OS X, some people will have a positively miserable experience, and it may take more than one fixer-upper to address that.

In 1998, I was a member of Apple’s “Customer Quality Feedback” program where I not just beta tested new apps and operating systems, but hardware. I received several samples of Macs that you may know about, plus one that never made it to the production stage, although it was rumored. When the decision was made to kill that project, they asked me to send it back so it would be recycled. There’s no point in mentioning what it was, even though I’m quite sure Apple’s NDA for CQF no longer applies. It was nothing you’d miss.

Well, among the products that did make it into production was a peculiar plastic-clad gumdrop shaped all-in-one computer known as the iMac. Yes, the original Bondi Blue iMac that was released in August of that year. Indeed, I was offered the opportunity to keep the unit — if it would survive a firmware update. Well it didn’t, and I don’t know if that was part of the plan, so I sent it back.

As the owner of a Power Mac, I didn’t take the iMac all that seriously. It was distinctive enough, and I had the chance to interview Jonathan Ive briefly about the good points. Despite the striking looks, it did not appear that Apple invested much in the internal hardware. It was very much based on note-book innards, consisting of a 233MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 32MB of RAM, a 4GB hard drive, and a 13.8-inch display with a resolution of 1024×768 that was powered by an ATI Rage IIc with 2MB of RAM.

While it was possible to upgrade RAM and swap out a hard drive, it wasn’t terribly user friendly. You literally had to take it almost completely apart, opening the case to pull the chassis. The actual upgrades weren’t difficult to perform, but it was awkward to remove the wiring harnesses and pull out the assembly. I did it more than a few times, not enjoying the process at all. But the iMac was not the most difficult Mac to upgrade. I remember fiddling with putty knives on the first generation Mac minis. These days, you cannot even upgrade RAM on most Macs. The 27-inch iMac and Mac Pro are rare exceptions.

At $1,299, it was cheap enough as Macs went, and designed strictly for home and educational users. But Apple also made what some regarded as curious design choices at the time, though they did point the way for the entire industry. There was no floppy drive — and Apple took lots of criticism for that decision, although you could get an external USB-based device if you needed one, as I did. It had an Ethernet port and a 56K modem, but Apple ditched some of the other peripheral ports in favor of USB. While USB had already appeared on PCs, Apple’s decision to embrace the technology in a mass market computer was sufficient to encourage peripheral makers to deliver more products with USB ports. For a while there was a thriving business of adapters that would allow you to connect whatever you had to USB.

It didn’t take long for all Macs to lose floppy drives and gain USB. Apple sold loads of iMacs, and even took legal action against some PC makers whose designs got a little too close for comfort — and evidently won.

Now the iMac went through several design revisions over the years, finally settling on big, thin and light. As CPU horsepower expanded, it began to move beyond it’s entry-level pretensions. As an all-in-one, the iMac was, essentially, a direct descendant of the original 1984 compact Mac.

With the late 2009 iMac, Apple made the decision to elevate the product to mainstream status. This was the medium-priced Mac that was tailor made for both business and home use. Outfitted with the fastest optional processors, the largest hard drives and the maximum amount of RAM, you had a powerhouse computer that served the needs of many content creators. Indeed the costly Mac Pro was, technically, a professional workstation rather than just a personal computer and thus catered to a smaller audience. The rest of us used iMacs, Mac minis or a portable.

In my case, I sold off a 2008 Mac Pro and a 30-inch display to acquire a fairly loaded 27-inch late 2009 iMac. Indeed, I had several hundred dollars change from the transaction.

OS X El Capitan runs fine on that iMac. There’s no support for Handoff or Metal graphics because it lacks Bluetooth LE and the graphics hardware isn’t up to the task. But if you add an SSD, as I did with a 1TB drive from Other World Computing, you’ll end up to a perfectly useful work machine with plenty of life left in it.

Apple continues to show the love with the iMac. With little more publicity than a press release, a second generation 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display, and a 21.5-inch iMac with a 4K display, made their debut this week. The most significant improvement is a display that supports the DCI-P3 wide color gamut. With a fairly generous amount of customizations, you can equip either to serve as powerful content creation machines. They are even well-suited to editing 4K video. Finding an all-in-one PC with a display that displays 14 million pixels without an Apple label remains an unrealized dream.

Compared to the original $1,299 iMac, today’s entry-level model, starting at $1,099 with a conventional display and hard drive, is hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the original. The iMac has come a long way from its humble beginnings that emphasized form over substance. You see iMacs liberally spread on TV shows and movies — and that’s just this generation’s product. Clearly Apple is investing large sums of money and design resources to make it better, yet keeping the prices at current levels. I just wonder what the next revision will be like.

You wouldn’t think it should matter, but several published reports claim that the battery life of an iPhone 6s and an iPhone 6s Plus can vary drastically depending on who built the processor. So Apple uses parts from TSMC (for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and Samsung. The story goes that, if you get a handset with the former, you can get up to two hours additional battery life. These figures were based on a Geekbench 3 test that promises to measure expected battery life.

If true, and based on a possible breakdown of 50% for each manufacturer, you theoretically have a one in two chance of getting an iPhone with the right processor. But Apple has already stepped into the fray, asserting that the tests were wrong, that, in fact, the battery life difference is closer to two or three percent. That could still represent the difference between running out of power and having a few more minutes before the unit blacks out, but it’s otherwise not significant.

So just what is going on here?

Well, the folks at Ars Technica decided to run their own tests using four different measurement methods. The results were published on Monday morning, and, for the most part, it appears Apple is correct. Well, at least for the Wi-Fi browsing, WebGL and GFXBench tests. For the WebGL results, it appears the Samsung chip was marginally better.

But, as reported elsewhere, the Samsung chip falls way behind in the Geekbench 3 test.

Ars Technica is being realistic, and points out that such tests have limitations, and you can’t make a blanket assumption based on how the one iPhone fares against another in one set of canned tests. It may exacerbate the minor differences between the two chips, which actually benchmark about the same otherwise.

Obviously, there’s no guarantee which chip you’ll receive when you buy an iPhone. You can check the model numbers that appears when you run a benchmark, but otherwise, it’s not that you can demand that your Apple Store give you one with an A9 processor fabricated by TSMC. They’d laugh at you, or try to deal with such “unreasonable” requests with logic and reason.

So does Apple have a serious problem here? Will people with iPhones equipped with the “wrong” chip demand a replacement? It’s not something that a traditional manufacturer’s limited warranty would address, since Apple can no doubt assert that the product meets their specifications, and, besides, they reserve the right to buy parts from different sources.

Besides, has any other smartphone ever been checked for a similar phenomenon? Last year’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus contained processors made by either TSMC or Samsung. Did anybody bother to measure the battery life of each to see if it was any different? What about other handset makers who source processors and other parts from different vendors? Or is Apple’s new hardware the only gear that has been subjected to this sort of benchmark?

I wonder!

Besides, when you use a canned benchmark, you are bound by its test algorithms, and if there’s something wrong in the programming that exaggerates differences under certain test conditions, that’s not something for Apple to fix. I’m not saying that the test is wrong, but it’s curious that only one type of test reveals this problem. I also expect that other publications will join Ars Technica in running their own battery life tests to see what sort of results they get. If the results confirm a problem without Geekbench 3, that may be one thing. If not, maybe we should blame the test.

Regardless, I’m sure some lawyers around the world are just salivating over the prospects of filing class action lawsuits against Apple asserting a product defect. But would different levels of power efficiency in parts that are otherwise compatible constitute a defect, or just a normal variation? What’s more, is it just the processor, or how it functions with other parts that Apple uses that may cause such a symptom to reveal itself?

I’m just guessing. I have no idea whether this problem exists or not, but it’s not unusual for a scandal to erupt involving Apple. Last year we had “BendGate,” the false claim that the iPhone 6 Plus was unduly sensitive to bending when placed in such locations as one’s rear pocket. It doesn’t matter that independent tests, including those run by Consumer Reports, failed to reveal evidence of any unusual sensitivity to damage under normal use and service. The story never died.

It was even resurrected this year in connection with the news that Apple used 7000 series aluminum for the new models. They are said to be far more resistant to bending, but was Apple responding to a reliability issue, or just doing their due diligence in making products better?

So will “chipgate” have any traction? I’m not at all certain, although the possibility will be sharply diminished if further tests, with different benchmarking tools, fail to confirm what the Geekbench 3 tests reveal. But that won’t stop some people from complaining.