Snow Leopard and Windows 7: Two flavors of the same GUI?

ZDNet ^ | June 4th, 2009 | Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Has Microsoft, after more than 20 years of work, finally come up with an operating system that rivals the Mac OS? Are the two just different flavors of the same GUI?

Hadley Stern, writing for Apple Matters, thinks this might be the case.

It may have taken Microsoft 20 odd years to figure this one out but there is some pretty big news on the horizon. Of course the market-share battle is lost for Apple, although it continues to chip away here and there. But the innovation-share battle continues. And the big big big news:

Windows 7 Doesn’t Really Suck

…

Unless Apple is hiding something very very very big with Snow Leopard Apple is about to lose the high-ground (and bullying rights) when it comes to its operating system. The blunders of Vista were easy to pick at, picking on Windows 7 will be nitpicking at best, stupidity at worst. For all intents and purposes Snow Leopard and Windows 7 are two flavors of the same GUI.

I’m not so sure. Why?

[Spktyr]

Well, if they’re so worthless and piled up in a corner doing nothing, why wouldn’t you sell them?

$150, then.

[Swordmaker]

Typically we are very early adopters and that is probably the primary issue.

We actually started buying iPods from HP because of their return policy...they would actually swap them out for us.

HP sold iPods only from February 2004 to August 2005... a one-and-a-half year period, ending four years ago. Apple started selling iPods on October 31, 2001. Your HPs are hardly early models and you are not early adopters of a four year old product.

The main problem with Apple for us is they never would support it. The battery failures on the iPods were pretty crazy and they wouldn’t swap the batteries.

Your experiences certainly do not agree with Apple's reputation and numerous experiences of my friends who owned iPods. Apple provided battery exchange services on all in warranty iPods... and exchanged batteries for out-of-warranty iPods of no matter what age.

By-the-way, exactly what do you add to a $2000 to $3200 Power Book G4 to get the price to your $6000 failed laptop?

[raybbr]

Are you running XP or Vista? Firefox 2 or 3?

XP, FF 3 the latest version.

[Swordmaker]

Quality issues

People have experienced failure of the lower memory slot, with the typical repair being the replacement of the logic board. Apple had started a Repair Extension Program concerning the issue,[3] but it has been noted that some models displaying the issue have not been included.

Apple have previously had an Repair Extension Program to fix the “white spot” issue on its 15” PB displays.[4]

There has also been a rash of reports concerning sudden and pervasive sleeping of 1.5 and 1.67 GHz models.[5][6] Symptoms will include the PowerBook suddenly entering sleep mode, no matter the battery level or if plugged into the mains. One cause is the ambient light sensing, and associated instruction set coding, with possible keyboard backlight and sleep light issues accompanying the so-called “narcolepsy”. Another cause is the trackpad heat sensor monitoring the trackpad; system logs report “Power Management received emergency overtemp signal. Going to sleep.”.

gee that was hard to find. And there are many more problems reported. Must be nice to live in your dream world where Apple doesn’t do any wrong...

Why do you think HP got out of the iPod business?<

I see... and you personally experienced ALL of these problems? Somehow I think you just did a Google search and cut and paste. No one here has said that Apple products have NO problems. There are 38,000,000 Mac OS X users in the world today. Some of them have had problems. Some of them have posted complaints about them. Your strawman FUD slip is showing.

I know people who have walked into an Apple Store with an out-of-warranty dead MacBook and walked out with a brand-new, latest model replacement, absolutely free, with their data restored from the dead one at no cost.

By the way, HP iPods lagged six months behind Apple's releases of the same model... that hardly validates your claim of being an "early adopter."

Quite frankly, I don't believe you have owned all these failing Apple products you claim.

[Swordmaker]

It was the original G4...ordered it the day it was available and I remember it costing around $6k. It was maxed out, and that price included the software licenses as well (office products, etc).

OH? The original G4 Power Book (2001) retailed for $2599, the highest, fully stuffed version was $3,997. So, you claim you added $2000 of software? Why?

How long did your G4 Power Book last? When did if fail?

[Tunehead54]

Ahh crap! I thought it might just be me. New vista laptop - plug in the am and I get to set up both monitors before I can load my stock screens - my Toshiba XP Sat from 5 years ago on xp had no such problems ... Ahh progress is great! Luckily I paid an extra $80 for an XP downgrade which I'll evaluate over the weekend. :-(

My TVPC runs vista fine w/o too many problems but this is work!

[Uri’el-2012]

OH? The original G4 Power Book (2001) retailed for $2599, the highest, fully stuffed version was $3,997. So, you claim you added $2000

Surfer dude dun too many dubies

My MacTracker confirms your numbers

[Richard Kimball]

I guess I’m the second. Four Macs, four iPods and an iPhone. No problems.

[AJ504]

I switched to Mac last year. I don't miss the reboots, the blue screens, the viruses, the constant patches to download, the printer communication problems, etc.

As I walk through my garage each day, I chuckle at the pile of doorstops on the shelf. The MacBook Pro may have been expensive, but I'll spend $0 on crap programs to fix a crap OS.

My favorite feature? The magnetically attached power cord. Two of my doorstops resulted from the power plug connection breaking off from the motherboard.

It's more of a "Tired of Spending on Crap" cult.

[Big Giant Head]

OS geek bookmarking

[dalight]

That is why most Macs are owned by Liberals...they have arrogance and little substance at their core.

Anyone ever tell you that you need more mouth to stick that foot in? Get a life.

[Big Giant Head]

` but how do you even know which version of Linux to pick? And, once you get it installed how the hell do you find the drivers for every piece of hardware?

Typically, one of the best ways to pick a Linux flavor is to go to Distrowatch and go with one of the top five or ten most downloaded. Ubuntu is always on top, Mandriva, Mint, PCLinuxOS, etc.

Most of the top distros will install drivers for the hardware detected. Most have their own repositories that contain 'bout every piece of software one could ever need. I'm an OS geek too, and I've spent a couple of years with Linux along side my Windows machines.

My big beef with LInux is the stupid names everything gets. Kb3? Oh, that's disk burning software! GKrelm (sp)? Oh, that's hardware monitoring!

[raybbr]

My favorite feature? The magnetically attached power cord. Two of my doorstops resulted from the power plug connection breaking off from the motherboard.

Mine just broke loose on the Toshiba I have. I can still use it but I suspect it's only a matter of time. It's still under warranty.

Send those doorstops to me. I have a couple of doors that need to be held open. :)

[antiRepublicrat]

A better design would be to create a sort of “Applications” button in the taskbar which would then pop up a view similar to OS X’s Stacks grid view

Put a link to your applications folder on the Dock. That's it, you have your wish. That's how I have it right now.

[ketsu]

Poor Adrian must be smoking crack. System 7 is NT with this years shade of lipstick.

Mac OS X 10.6 is BSD Unix at its core not some cobbled together single user system with more patches than base code.

You don't know what you're talking about. NT is based on VMS which was a very nice multiuser system. In fact they stole quite of bit of it and had to pay for it.

And OSX is *not* BSD Unix. It's Mach with BSD compatibility built in. Before you start kicking and screaming realize that Windows contains quite a bit of BSD code as well.

I use OSX as my day to day system, but all the FUD and ignorance around here is pathetic.

[surfer]

We switched to HP because they honored the service for any failures. So it made much more sense to buy them from HP because when we had failures they would replace them.

Even with the HP models we experienced drive failures and battery failures. We would RMA they would send a replacement and if we didn’t ship back the damaged one within 30 days they would have charged us for the replacement.

About 4 years ago is the last time I purchased an iPod, but my kids still have a couple of nanos.

[ketsu]

Anyone who designs a system which connects the root of the system with the hostile internet is a fool.

I'll take a BSD Unix system which was designed to protect against hostile threats from the internet from the design phase.

You have *no* idea what you're talking about. Sockets only made it into BSD in 1983, 6 years after its inception. One of the central problems of Unix is that it doesn't understand networks directly and has the sockets interface(the same sockets interface that windows uses in WinSock) instead of a system that matches the unix "everything is a file" interface.

What you're whining about is Microsoft building the browser into the kernel. Love them or hate them, building the browser into the kernel let Microsoft kill Netscape and gave them an extra 10 years of life they wouldn't have had otherwise. Google is killing them now, but that's another matter entirely.

You should *really* shut up before you make even more of a fool of yourself.

[surfer]

It included software as well...so I don’t remember the exact breakdown but I do remember the total.

[surfer]

No actually I binged after someone said there were no such problems...took me two seconds to find some of the issues on wiki...somehow I think you need to get some help for your paranoia...lol

[surfer]

They are actually packed in storage containers and every time we get an urge to buy an Apple product we take out the container and remind ourselves not to be that stupid again.

However I am glad to hear Apple has finally solved of their quality problems and have started supporting their customers.

You must have been in hibernation when all the fiasco started with failing iPods...etc...Apple has a horrible reputation in the first few years of selling iPods.