Security expert Winn Schwartau finally got completely sick of Windows. “Things used to work,” he said, referring to the pre-Windows days of the 1960s through the 1980s. “And this is exactly why I am coming to subscribe to the view that indeed, the WinTel hegemony is a threat to the national economic security of any organization or nation-state that relies [on] it.”

So he switched his entire company to Macintosh.

On April 29, Schwartau switched his entire business wholesale to the Macintosh platform, and in sixteen articles written over the last five months, documented his experiences along the way, along with his reasons for switching.

WinTel platforms don’t work anymore — at least not reliably. More than anything else, I need my box to work. I don’t need it to crash while giving a PowerPoint presentation to the Canadian Parliament or the ABA. I don’t need Word to crash after writing the last irretrievably 12 brilliant paragraphs. I don’t need IE to crash because the memory handling in Windows is so poor. And so it goes with a global litany of crashes that require reboot or memory cleansing every day.

A month after the switch, mostly pleased overall with the change, Schwartau asks, “In the WinTel world, could you do this? Or maybe you should ask, ‘Do I really want all of that paranoia to go away? Do I really want to spend more time enjoying whatever the hell I do on my ‘puter, or maybe I should continue wasting hours every week on security crap that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place?’”

I won’t give away the ending, though.

Schwartau is a world renowned security expert and the author of the famous books Information Warfare: Cyberterrorism: Protecting Your Personal Security in the Electronic Age and Cybershock: Surviving Hackers, Phreakers, Identity Thieves, Internet Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Disruption as well as his latest book, Time Based Security.

Schwartau has completed the Mad as Hell series, and you can read it all online. Don’t skip right to the end, though, or you’ll miss the whole story.

1. Mad as Hell 1 – Switching to Mac
2. Mad As Hell 2 – How I (And 98% of Ma&Pa) Work
3. Mad as Hell 3 – Month 1 Review
4. Mad as Hell 4 – Security Basics for Ma and Pa
5. Mad as Hell 5 – Is the CIA PC?
6. Mad as Hell 6 – Thinking MacTel
7. Mad as Hell 7 – MacTel vs. Wintel (2007)
8. Mad as Hell 8 – Appliance versus Theory of Everything
9. Mad as Hell 9 – Back to Simple
10. Mad as Hell 10 – Security History, Systems and the Failure of Wintel
11. Mad as Hell 11 – Time Based Security
12. Mad as Hell 12 – IPv6
13. Mad as Hell 13 – Reprise
14. Mad as Hell 14 – The Ugly about “The Switch”
15. Mad as Hell 15 – Penitence and Confession
16. Mad as Hell 16 – Final MAH