If you are one of the 1.35m people who bought an iMac in the past three months, congratulations, you've just joined a select group. You are also using an industry pariah. iMacs - all Macs for that matter - are second-class citizens when it comes to financial services on the internet.
The latest example of this exclusion is the internet bank smile.co.uk - the first in the UK to offer a current account. Two months after its launch Smile is still inaccessible to Mac users because of a software problem. Surf to the bank's secure web site on your Mac and all you'll get is a blank page. Smile customer services say they "are aware of the problem and are working to fix it". But a little investigation reveals the glitch is just the tip of an iceberg.
Smile's owner, The Co-op Bank, puts the blame on flaws in the Mac version of Java - an internet operating system specifically designed to run on any computer. It says it trusts only Java to ensure online banking is kept hidden from prying eyes.
"We are unapologetically Java-based because only Java offers the level of security we need," says Co-op spokesman David Smith. He says the bank knew Mac users would have a problem using the service before the system's launch, though the fact was conveniently ignored during the Smile advertising campaign.
Smith claims Macs are at fault for the incompatibility. "[The service] is aimed at people with up-to-date equipment who are very comfortable with the internet," says Smith. "It's the Macs that need to be sorted out."
But Mac experts say it is not a Mac problem at all but a Smile problem. "Banks that claim [that Macs have] a security issue are talking nonsense," says Alex Sobosley, editor of MacFormat. Java was intended to create a single internet-wide standard for programming on the web. But Microsoft did not stick to the Java design standard when it wrote its version for Windows machines.
Consequently Smile programmers were left with two different systems to cater for and Mac users have drawn the short straw. Meanwhile Windows users are enjoying Smile's 4.33% interest rate and free £500 overdraft in their droves. Some Mac users regard it as a form of computer apartheid.
Smile is not the only example of Mac marginalisation. Two of the latest home-finance and accounting packages, Money 2000 from Microsoft and Intuit's Quicken, are not available to Mac users. The packages are designed to help you keep track of your daily credits and debits, connect to your bank account via the internet, gather mortgage information, manage investments, savings and bills, and even create a will.
Money 2000 is written exclusively for Windows machines, while the Mac version of Quicken is not for sale to European customers - though it retails for $49.95 in the US. And forget about buying Quicken online. Intuit will supply the Mac package only to customers in Canada and the US. If you're a European with a Mac, you're simply not getting it. The reason for this bizarre situation eludes Intuit's UK support staff, who don't even know the Mac version exists.
The main reason for this anti-Mac attitude is the financial cost of developing software for the proportionally small number of Mac owners - 1.6m in the UK, or one-in-10 of all personal computers. But some blame a deeper anti-Mac conspiracy.
Industry insiders accuse software publishers of trying to eliminate Mac versions of software to cut costs. John Cormack, the creator of the popular computer game Quake, recently urged Mac owners not to buy the Windows version of the game and run it on a Mac using a Windows emulator, but rather to wait until the Mac version was released. Both versions were ready at the same time, but the Windows version went on sale first. Cormack said that if the publishers saw that the Mac version was not selling (because Mac users had bought the Windows version) they would pull the plug on any further Mac development. The same applies to the financial software industry.
A case in point is Market Maker - an online share-trading package supplied by the CMC group in Hertfordshire. No Mac version is available because most of the company's existing customers use Windows PCs. Market Maker is the first system to give share prices in real-time and to perform transactions in seconds. Typical online share trading systems are email based, transactions can take anything from 30 seconds to 30 minutes, while new share prices are published every 10 to 20 minutes.
If you're not a budding Gordon Gekko, the email system might suit you just fine, but there is another advantage in Market Maker. CMC is pioneering a dealing service called Contracts for Difference, which effectively allows you to trade five times as many shares as you pay for. With as little as £5,000 you could become a day-trader from your home. The service, launched on January 10, has already gathered hundreds of customers - all Windows users. But Andrew Palmer, CMC marketing manager, believes the Mac market is simply too small to be worth the development costs.
Like the Quake players, one solution is to fork out for an emulator and fool the opposition into thinking you're using a Windows PC. But you'd be losing out on all fronts. There's the speed issue - programs run faster if they are written for the specific hardware. Worse still, not all software is compatible with the emulator and technical problems are a nightmare to sort out.
Despite all this, I believe my own iMac was worth the cash, if only to stick two fingers up at the Gates empire. The Mac has survived similar crises before, and there is other software out there, albeit non-standard. But there are greater forces than my iMac at play, and if industry attitudes don't change soon we privileged few may soon become quirky has-beens.
