Most of you know that famous email address: steve@apple.com. No doubt many thousands write letters to Steve Jobs, using that address, every single day. Most of it seems to go into a black hole, and you never know who actually reads those messages and how they are processed. For all you know, they are automatically routed into one huge Trash folder and that’s it.

Yet every so often, someone, somewhere, gets a pithy response from “The Man” himself, usually consisting of nothing more than a few quick offhand comments that, in the end, can make your day! If you’re lucky enough to receive such an answer, do you come away feeling your Inbox has been anointed, or do you even wonder whether it’s all real?

I mean, just because the message comes from an address supposedly used by Steve Jobs doesn’t for a moment mean that he ever sees a single message, or if he does, writes a real response. Unless he was seated before you working his iPhone or iPad while writing that message, how would you really know?

Perhaps the steve@apple.com address is akin to the address your kids use to send letters to Santa Claus every holiday season. People do read those messages, and sometimes the ones that come from the needy are diverted to the appropriate charitable organization. The rest? Well, why even ask?

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You’d think that, with Apple’s incredible sales growth and product explosion in recent years, most of the lingering doubts about the success of the company would be history. Yet a few of the old myths still persist and, despite all the great press Apple receives in the mainstream media, there are still some misconceptions. Some might even come as a surprise to you.

When recording an interview with John Martellaro, of The Mac Observer, for this week’s episode of the tech radio show, he mentioned that lots of people don’t realize, surprisingly enough, that Mac OS X is a Unix-based operating system. Their conception of Macs is rooted in the 1990s, when things got pretty bad, and they haven’t caught up with the changes.

But that takes us to all the other myths that arose then, which are still resurrected by people you’d think ought to know better.

This is not to say that some of those myths had no core justification to them. I mean, there are still loads of people who used a Mac at one time, got disgusted with the operating system, the lack of a specific application or some other negative situation, and vowed to go to Windows then and there. They may have seen all those Apple ads about how great Macs are these days, but they are just ads, after all. You can’t take those things seriously.

I remember, for example, when a local dentist, a long-time Mac user, ditched the platform in the mid-1990s when the vertical market software he needed for his practice failed to work properly on his network of PowerPC-based Macs. I know I tried to help him, but almost every day a new problem arose. Finally, the company that developed the product told him that they were abandoning Macs and he had to switch to Windows. Since he had years of accumulated financial and patient records that he needed to access, he sold his Macs, migrated to Windows and never looked back. Now if I recall correctly, the publisher of that product has, in fact, since returned to the Mac platform. No, my friends, I haven’t explored the situation in recent years and whether that dentist could or should become a Mac switcher and keep all his data and settings intact.

That’s the microcosm folks. There are loads of former Mac users that still harbor grudges against Apple for the loss of the software they needed for their business, bad service, or a host of other reasons that have nothing to do with the Mac of the 21st century. Maybe they know Mac OS X is Unix-based, maybe not. But that’s just a geek term that means nothing to them. They have become accustomed to the peculiarities of Windows and don’t want to have to deal with the devil they don’t know.

There is also the assumption, no doubt buttressed by Apple’s consumer orientation, that the Mac is just not a serious work computer. It’s great for managing your music library — although iTunes for Windows is near-identical — and certainly iLife helps with your photo album, personal site and other casual pursuits. But how can anyone believe that this “toy” is actually a serious work computer that you can use to run your business.

The other day, I talked to a friend, a freelance writer, who has been using Windows for years. He writes in Word, uses Internet Explorer and Firefox for Web surfing, and whatever miserable email app Microsoft provides for his messages. Most of the time, things work all right, but he can’t get Skype to run without quitting after a session or two. Yes, he uses the latest version, but there’s clearly something amiss with his two-year-old Windows box, but he’s not inclined to want to change setups that otherwise function for the sake of one broken app. That’s understandable.

I’ve mentioned Macs to him, and perhaps he used them at one time and wasn’t impressed. I remind him that there’s a Firefox and Word for the Mac, and who cares about Internet Explorer? Besides, Skype for the Mac is fairly reliable, most of the time already. But he still bears a bit of that prejudice about Macs not being serious work computers and I don’t expect him to change. Well, not unless his Windows PC develops a real serious problem that stops his daily workflow in its tracks, and I don’t wish anything negative upon him.

This, however, raises the critical issue for Apple in encouraging Windows users to move — or return — to the Mac. It’s all about first impressions. I complain frequently when Apple releases a new OS and there are serious bugs that need to be fixed after a few weeks. Releasing new hardware with defects is also a matter of serious concern. While my Late 2009 iMac has worked flawlessly, most of you know about the problems with screen flickering and that yellow discoloration that afflicted an unknown number of users. Yes, Apple has evidently fixed most of the problems, and even replaced computers one or more times to satisfy customers.

How many of those iMac owners were Windows users getting their first exposure to a Mac? And, of those, how many encountered a serious hardware or software defect and decided to return to Windows? That lost customer may not give Apple another chance, and, in addition to continuing to dispell myths about the Mac, I hope Apple will work harder to make sure new products are as reliable as possible. Certainly they’ll get another chance with the iPad. Let’s see how that works out for them.

Although March 24, 2001 signaled the release of the first version of Apple’s long-awaited industrial-strength operating system, with loads of warts and missing features, that wasn’t the first time I got to see it. You see, Apple released a Public Beta version the previous September, but I got a look even earlier.

In those days, I was a contributing editor for CNET, and I was flown to San Francisco for a fateful meeting with a representative from Apple’s PR team to get an early introduction to the Public Beta. I was even offered a Mac Cube to take home (on loan of course), but my home system was faster, so I opted to stick with the DVD after spending about an hour with my “tour guide,” going over the salient features, such as they were.

That beta release didn’t have much going for it. The Apple menu, in fact, was lodged in the center of the menu bar, and Apple got plenty of flack for that peculiar decision. But there was plenty to complain about in other respects, since it was much slower than the most recent version of Mac OS 9. Worse, there wasn’t much software that would run native on the new OS except, surprisingly enough, for the bundled copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Only later did Apple develop Safari, after development of IE languished.

However, a few of us discovered early on that the latest version of AppleWorks, the integrated app suite that predated iWork, would, after a fashion, also run native under Mac OS X.

Now if you wanted the Public Beta, it would cost you $29, but Apple at least agreed to give you a discount on the real version, released the following spring.

I remember attending a media briefing for the rollout of version 10.0, code-named Cheetah. During his presentation, Steve Jobs admitted that this initial release was meant for developers and power users. It wasn’t even feature compete. Such important features as the ability to play CDs and DVDs were missing. But as a technology demonstration, the future of the Mac OS was, at long last and after loads of postponements and frustrations, a reality.

Understand that Apple didn’t even include a Mac OS X installer on new Macs for a while. Even then, it was still an optional installation, because you weren’t actually expected to use it to get real work done. For that, there was the Classic Mac OS.

By September, Apple released 10.1, also known as Puma, to fix the worst ills of Cheetah. You could pick up a copy of the upgrade package from a dealer, or send Apple $19.95 to ship you a copy. I remember how Mac users complained loudly over being gouged by Apple to mail them a critical maintenance update for the new OS.

Beginning with 10.1, Mac OS X actuallhy began to perform decently on the fastest Mac hardware, and, as more and more native apps were released, it became almost usable. I have to admit that I didn’t really switch everything over to Mac OS X until the arrival of Jaguar in August 2002. That was when the version numbers were largely supplanted with the feline name of the moment.

Some of you will correctly state that you wanted until 10.3, Panther, or 10.4 Tiger, before embracing Mac OS X. Regardless, the real watershed was probably Apple’s decision to move to Intel processors, first revealed during the 2005 WWDC. Although rumored for several years, Jobs finally revealed that Apple had a simultaneous development project in place where Mac OS X had been ported to the X86 platform. You even saw the satellite photos of the building in which the work had been done.

In January, 2006, the first Intel-based Macs appeared, and the transition was completed that summer, with the first Mac Pros, all months ahead of schedule. That development, and the easy ability to run Windows on a Mac via Apple’s Boot Camp or a virtual machine, helped trigger the sharp rise in Mac sales. Nowadays, the number of Intel-based Macs has actually exceeded the number still using PowerPC processors. Indeed the latest version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, is Intel only, and more and more third-party apps will soon move in the same direction.

These days, I dare say most current Mac users never used the Classic Mac OS. They do not remember anything but Mac OS X. But some veterans from the “good old days” continue to complain about the features Apple discarded along the way, although some of them have been made available via third-party utilities.

One thing, though, and that is that it’s highly unlikely Apple will observe the ninth anniversary of their great OS transition. They didn’t bother with the 25th anniversary of the Mac either, and some of us aren’t happy about that. On the other hand, perhaps they figure that moving forward is the best way to live long and prosper.

In the early days of the Classic Mac OS, we had a few virus infections. I recall working at a design studio in the late 1980s, when we’d get loads of floppies that were infected by a so-called desktop virus. Without going into boring detail, the malware embedded itself into the desktop files used by the system to determine which application icons to display and which applications opened a specific document.

That outbreak wasn’t terribly severe, the potential harm relatively minor, and one of several anti-virus apps available at the time would eliminate it, but we felt the obligation to let our clients know that they sent contaminated media.

Over the years, the Mac virus repository reached several dozen, a tiny fraction of the outbreaks regularly recorded on the Windows platform before Microsoft ultimately decided they needed a “trustworthy computing” initiative to begin to set things right.

The arrival of Mac OS X, a Unix-based operating system, was reputed to provide far greater native resilience to malware. Although there are Unix viruses, you don’t hear of them turning thousands or millions of computers into “spam bots,” where they spread junk mail misery or outright malware throughout the planet. The action is still largely confined to the Windows platform, and Microsoft’s famous “Patch Tuesday” is designed to fix problems before potential outbreaks can infect your PC; that is, of course, if they are applied. The big problem is that, because a patch may also break a few things in the OS, system admins are apt to hold off applying the fixes until they can do a proper round of testing.

According to noted security expert Rich Mogull and others who have explored the state of Windows 7, it’s actually a pretty safe operating system, although you still want to install security software.

When it comes to the Mac, you know that Apple sells several times as many as they did just a few years ago. With market shares moving into the upper single digits and low double digits, you have to wonder when the malware scourge us going to arrive. The usual excuse is that Internet criminals let the Mac slide because there weren’t enough users to make much of an impact. That may have been true when Mac OS X arrived in the spring of 2001, but not in the spring of 2010, where Apple sells roughly three million Macs every single quarter.

This isn’t to say there are no Mac OS X viruses. Some are confined to the laboratory and there have been limited outbreaks. The most serious problem is the Trojan Horse, where a file masquerades as something you really want, such as an illegal version of a Mac app downloaded from a torrent site. You retrieve the file, install it, and you open yourself up to mischief. But that’s social engineering, and it’s possible to place something bogus and harmful in most any file that you execute or launch.

There are also a smattering of Mac security apps designed to protect you from known malware and potentially serious files. I’m sure they work precisely as advertised, but the larger question is whether you really need them. Now some of these apps also guard against Windows-borne malware, and that’s where they might have some value, since it’s always possible you might accidentally send an infected file to a Windows user. Surely you want to practice safe computing, and you want to make sure they are protected even if you don’t approve of their use of a PC. On the other hand, the malware software they should be running ought to do that anyway.

Of course, if you’re using a virtual machine app to be able to run Windows on your Mac, or even Apple’s Boot Camp, you’ll want to protect yourself. No, the Windows malware may not be able to wreck your hardware as it can with a regular PC, but they can still cause lots of grief if you run the system unprotected. Fortunately, both Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion come with a year’s subscription to an effective security suite, and installation is but a few clicks away. But don’t forget to renew after the expiration date. Having out-of-date security software is no better than having not at all.

But if you never touch Windows, the need for malware protection on the Mac is not yet proven. Apple regularly updates the OS and key apps, such as Safari, with security updates. Sure it’s true that they have been heavily criticized for not acting fast enough to deliver immunity to newly-discovered security holes, so there’s always the potential for trouble. I would hope they’ll react faster, because, when it comes to a major malware outbreak on the Mac platform, it’s never been a question of if but of when.

You may not need security software today, but you should be careful anyway, particularly when it comes to downloading software from unknown sources. And be ready to acquire a malware protection app should the need arise.