Security is the loser in the holy war between Android and Apple
The novelist Umberto Eco wrote a deliciously insightful essay in 1994, in which he argued that the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine, in contrast to the PC, which, he argued, was clearly a Protestant device. How so? Simply this: the Mac freed its users/believers from the need to make decisions. All they had to do to find salvation was to follow the Apple Way. When the Mac was launched, for example, a vigorous debate broke out among user-interface geeks about whether a computer mouse should have one or two buttons. Some were critical of the fact that the Macintosh mouse had only one button. But when queried about this, Steve Jobs - then, as later, the supreme pontiff of the Church of Apple - was adamant and unrepentant. Two buttons would undermine the rationale of the Mac user interface. He spoke - as his Vatican counterpart still does - ex cathedra, and that was that.
In contrast, Eco pointed out, the poor wretches who used a PC had, like the Calvinists of yore - to make their own salvation. For them, there was no One True Way. Instead they had to choose and install their own expansion cards and anti-virus software, wrestle with incompatible peripherals and so on. They were condemned to an endless round of decisions about matters that were incomprehensible to them but on which their computational happiness depended.
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