Intel: Mac v. PC

On Tuesday at the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, Paul Otellini, the new CEO of Intel, addressed security problems affecting the Wintel platform.

"Mr. Otellini ran down a series of hardware-based steps designed to improve security, articulating a vision of "virtualization" technology that keeps a virtual machine built into a PC isolated, and thus safer from attack, hardens that machine against hazards, and provides for remote repair after an attack," Jason Fry reported for the Journal. "But asked when such solutions would be available to mainstream users and usable by them, Mr. Otellini said 'I think we're still a few years away.' The problem can't be solved by hardware alone, he noted--hardware solutions take years to be adopted, and remote recovery of a PC, for example, will require service providers to offer that."

According to Fry, "Pressed about security by Mr. Mossberg, Mr. Otellini had a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter's computer. And when further pressed about whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh instead of a Wintel PC, he said, 'If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else.'"