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Posted on 01/07/2007 2:34:29 AM PST by Swordmaker
Amid the hype surrounding the release of Windows Vista, Mac users are taking solace from the fact that OS X is still a champ on many fronts. Here are some reasons our reviewer John C. Welch opts for Apple.
If you believe all the hype, installing the new Windows Vista operating system will solve world famine, end the AIDS crisis and bring about world peace. Well, maybe no one is saying it's that great, but the clamor and fuss have been pretty boisterous.
Hidden behind all of this hoopla, however, is the fact that as much of an improvement Vista is over XP, its main competitor, Mac OS X, still stacks up really well -- and even tops Vista in several important areas.
There are nearly an infinite number of ways to compare complex beasts like operating systems. I'm going to skip low-level issues, like comparing driver architectures. Most people just don't care about things like who has the superior kernel. People care far more about the parts they see and work with, so that is what I'm going to deal with here.
Steady Evolution
While Vista is indeed a major update to Windows, there's a lot of it that is, quite frankly, just Microsoft making up for lost time. The last non-server release of Windows was in 2001 with Windows XP, with only a single major interim update in service pack 2. In the same time, Apple has been steadily releasing updates to Mac OS X on what was a yearly schedule, now around every 18 months.
This means that while Mac OS X has been steadily evolving through 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4, and is now working towards 10.5, Microsoft was waiting on what would become Vista. When it was obvious the original Longhorn OS wasn't going to happen, they took the Windows Server 2003 code base and used that for the basis of Vista. They also chopped quite a few features out of Vista, most notably the WinFS object-based data storage and management system, which had been promised in various forms since the first blurbs about Cairo in the early 1990s.
Microsoft had two serious issues. First, they had to make this update of Windows revolutionary enough that it came close to justifying the delay. Second, they had to come up with something that would stand up well with its main competitor in the desktop OS market, Mac OS X. Have they succeeded at both? I'd argue that the former's almost a non-issue: Vista will sell well, because the world won't have a choice. As far as the latter, well, probably, but you'd be hard-pressed to say Vista's better than Mac OS X.
In a nutshell, Vista vs. Mac OS X is Revolution vs. Evolution. It's about a massive, long-delayed upgrade that has to account for almost 6 years of progress by its competitors, versus a well-executed strategy of regular updates. While updating an operating system is never something that can be called easy, Apple's strategy has been the better one for keeping their OS on top of things, something Microsoft has admitted to in a roundabout way.
English Rules
"Operational philosophy" isn't something that's written anywhere on a whiteboard or an inspirational poster. It's more of a "what does this remind me of" kind of thing. In other words, when I'm using an OS and I want to describe how I interact with it, what's the description that best suits it?
For Mac OS X, it's the classic English butler. This OS is designed to make the times you have to interact with it as quick and efficient as possible. It expects that things will work correctly, and therefore sees no reason to bother you with correct operation confirmations. If you plug in a mouse, there's not going to be any messages to tell you "that mouse you plugged in is now working." It's assumed you'll know that because you'll be able to instantly use the mouse. Plug in a USB or FireWire hard drive and the disk showing up on your desktop is all the information you need to see that the drive has correctly mounted. It is normally only when things are not working right that you see messages from Mac OS X.
Windows is...well, Windows is very eager to tell you what's going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you're on a network that's having problems staying up, you'll get tons of messages telling you this. It's rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout...who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans. This gets particularly bad when you factor in things like the user-level implementation of Microsoft's new security features.
To put it simply, you can work on a Mac for hours, days even, and only minimally need to directly use the OS. With Vista? The OS demands your attention, constantly.
This is an excerpt: Read more and see the graphics.
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The company I work for, a household name known for its outstanding technologies, has banned Vista and IE7 from the campus thus far. OS X has been banned since its inception except for DTP and PR applications. Mortal IT people may not connect their Macs to the network.
There is a certain distrust of powerful machines in corporate security circles. There are paranoid people everywhere.
I've only been permitted to use XP since 2004.
It'll be a while before MS recoups its investment in Vista.
It is the rule, not the exception, that companies do not immediately buy new Windows updates whole hog and migrate to these new systems as soon as they are released. There is usually not a compelling business reason to do so and the benefit would not outweigh the cost. It is also the rule that they use the same system company wide. "Banned" sounds like a dubious word for what your company has done. More likely, they made a business decision not to use Vista at this time, and have a policy that people cannot simply install any software they like on their computers.
If I were running a company, I would do the same thing.
Having said that, I would allow Mac OS upgrades to be installed within months of new release, and definitely prefer it to Windows.
John C. Welch
Unix/ Open Systems Administrator, Kansas City Life Insurance.
John C. Welch is a Unix/Open Systems Administrator for Kansas City Life Insurance, a columnist for Datamation.com, and a contributor to InformationWeek, Your Mac Life, and MacJournals.com. John has been a regular speaker at MacWorld Expo since 1999. He has been dealing with all things Macintosh since the Lisa, and even has non - computer parts of his life, such as his son, his soon-to-be wife, his guitar, and a long involvement with Korean Martial Arts.
This is the best description I've heard yet about the way windows works.
I kind of like the way my OS (Fedora Core 4/5/6) works. If you insert a disk, it brings up a window that asks you what you want to do with it. If you insert an audio CD, you have an option to open it in one of several players, open it as a disk of files, or rip it. Regardless of what you want to do, you'll also have an icon you can click on to do the same thing later if you don't want to do anything with it now. You get essentially the same thing when you pop a card in a card reader, or a DVD. In the case of external drives and cards, it just treats them as any other disk on the system that you can read/write to. It has definitely gotten a lot more user friendly from what it was like several years ago.
Like OSX, changes from one version to another are incremental, so you don't have to re-learn everything you knew before. I've heard the interface for MS-Office was completely changed in the new version, in such a way that a lot of people are going to have some serious issues. Perhaps this is a necessary change, but there also is no option for using the older way of doing things. I haven't heard whether or not they've changed the shortcuts significantly with Vista.
These articles are funny. We can all relate to liking something niche, and running up against a brick wall trying to convince others it's "better".
The market has clearly spoken "Microsoft is better" when it comes to what OS the vast majority of businesses will even consider using. They don't care one whit about Apple and OSX. Not one.
Those of you who live and breathe Apple apparently believe your kind are everywhere. I don't think you realize how comparatively rare your kind is. I deal with about 250 businesses on my courier route and only the ad firms and color houses use Apple (which confirms that legend as true). Everywhere else it's a Windows World.
And due to these threads I will often ask people if they use Apple or know anyone who does. Rarely do they answer in the affirmative. I even suggest to people shopping for a new computer to check out the iMacs. They always kindly decline as if that isn't possibly an option.
Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but I must not be alone in observing it because market share backs it up, "OSX is better" be damned.
"Microsoft is better" until there is a vicious computer virus that attacks a number of computer OS's or server networks and then there is one huge panic attack to go and get the latest sercurity patch.
As a member of the Mac club, I am happy to say that my OS X Tiger has been doing me good for nearly a year.
Didn't say it was, did I? You want a rosy, everything is all right review of Vista in comparison to it primary competition, find one and post it. I'll ping the Mac list to it if it does compare Vista to OS X.
There's a lot more than "better" involved in this. It all starts when IBM, with a virtual monopoly in business computers, licensed MS-DOS for its new personal computer line. Ten years later, almost all businesses were using it and its compatible successors, and that filtered to the consumers. Then add some anti-competitive, monopolistic practices of Microsoft itself, and in the end you have a massive amount of market inertia that is extremely hard to overcome. Even not releasing an upgrade to their consumer OS for six years barely slowed it down, and that OS now is inferior in every single way to OS X.
Actually what the market said was "Microsoft is cheaper to buy". Which usd to be absolutely true. Now it is a toss-up.
But, along with that "cheaper to buy" computer came the need for a pretty sizable IT department to keep it running. A wise old man once told me that in any company the big costs "walk on two legs". Save a grand on each computer and spend a grand on IT salary every year.
Now that IT departments are pretty firmly entrenched, companies are not going to switch to Macs -- ever. The IT people are the ones who now make that decision and no one is going to make 2/3 of his staff unnecessary overnight.
I use Windows at work, and can make it work, but I use Mac at home. When I retire in a few months, it will be about a 90-10 Mac household. DW maintains a few websites and we have to run Windows to check how they look.
I work for a government contractor and actually consider using Windows to be an ethics violation. People charge the hours they spend dealing with Windows to the contract, If they ran Macs, they would spend many fewer hours dealing with the computer and more hours doing something with it.
Almost everyone I know who actually uses a computer to make money at home uses both systems, and prefers the Mac because it is faster to use and easier.
So everyone who writes an occasional article for Macworld or any other Mac oriented magazine, despite the fact that his primary field of expertise is UNIX, is automatically a propagandist? Does his writing about and knowing how to use a Mac taint him from making accurate observations about Vista and writing his opinion.... which is what a review is all about?
I guess in your world only people totally ignorant of Macs are capable of writing fairly about your chosen platform. That says something. They can write about Windows and praise it... if they know nothing about the better alternative. ;^)>
Surely you don't think that bigger market share always equals higher quality, do you?
Does McDonald's make the best hamburgers in the country?
Does Ernest & Julio Gallo make the best wine? Is Budweiser the best beer?
This is the second thread you posted today (that I know of) in which you are pimping for Apple. If you are not getting paid for your work on their behalf, you are one strange individual. As I asked on the other thread, what's it to you which computer people choose? A computer is just a tool of modern life, no different than any other appliance, electronic device, TV, auto, etc. Some people buy Toyotas, some buy Chevys. Some people buy Maytags, others Kenmore. And so on. Why is your ego so wrapped up in what kind of computer people choose to buy?
"Surely you don't think that bigger market share always equals higher quality, do you?"
Not at all. But the bigger market share does mean Windows is more valuable to more consumers than OSX is. That was my point, contra to the delusions of some of an impending Mac takeover.
When Apple starts making software for all the computers in the world, maybe...
I think you're reading a lot into this conversation that isn't there.
We were discussing the relative quality of the two operating systems. Whatever prior baggage you have with Mac users is not terribly relevant.
"I think you're reading a lot into this conversation that isn't there."
Actually the "conversation" is an ongoing one, especially if you're on the ping list.
"Whatever prior baggage you have with Mac users is not terribly relevant."
Sure it is, as relevant as all the prior baggage Mac users bring into the present conversations about Vista. Please don't take it too seriously. I don't hate Mac users or Apple.
Yes, I know, but carrying old grudges onto new threads doesn't exactly help matters.
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