Why is a Mac any better than Vista?

[Maxintosh]

It is to me obvious that the clue train has missed your stop.

This coming from someone who repeats and believes in urban myths BTW-still waiting for you to explain how all of those operating systems with such a small market share got viruses, but I guess you're all bark and no bite and since you obviously can't answer, no one here will bother waiting for a response. Even PC magazine understands what you are afraid to admit.

 

"If you take a look at the history of OS design by each company, it's pretty clear why this is so. Microsoft has historically made an unreliable, ugly, and highly insecure operating system based on its own spaghetti/Swiss cheese code. This is no secret to anyone who has followed the industry or even used Windows on a daily basis. If you are a Windows users you MUST have spyware/virus/malware prevention software or, sooner or later, your machine is going to get nailed.

 

It isn't Microsoft bashing to say any of this, it's just the truth for Windows users each day of their computing lives.

 

Apple, on the other hand, decided long ago to ditch their old operating system and build one that was Unix based. Why did this matter? Well as people have begun to notice, thanks to its Unix roots, Mac OS X is a hell of a lot more stable and secure than any version of Windows ever released. Apple didn't make this choice by chance, they thought it through and knew exactly what they were doing and why.

 

Mac users simply don't live in the same inherently insecure and fearful universe that Microsoft, through its stupidity and bad programming, has inflicted on Windows users. The difference is night and day, and anyone who has ever switched from Windows over to Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter) knows how liberating it is once you realize that are free and safe from debilitating viruses, spyware, and malware that plague the Windows operating system.

 

And, thanks to Apple's skill at elegant design, Mac OS X is also much easier on the eyes and far more intuitive than Windows 2000, XP, or even the deeply flawed Windows Vista (which was supposed to be Microsoft's best shot at catching up to Mac OS X). All Microsoft had to do, in terms of design, was to copy Mac OS X, but they couldn't even do that right. So they ended up with an ugly imitation of Mac OS X Tiger and then promptly fell even further behind after Apple released Mac OS X Leopard.

 

Instead of the simple elegance of Mac OS X, Vista looks like a Frankenstein OS...bolted together and looking more and more like a stumbling, walking corpse of an operating system.

 

Is it so difficult for Microsoft to hire some talented UI designers? They have all the money in the world so why don't they just do it? Why must Windows remain a second-rate clone of Mac OS X?

 

Billions of dollars? Thousands and thousands of employees and Vista is the best Microsoft could do?

 

I wonder...is it stupidity or incompetence or both that got Microsoft to create the Vista monster?

 

I was on the phone with a woman from Comcast today...I'd called because I was considering switching to a competitor's DSL service. Well the Comcast lady tried to start selling me on Comcast's service by babbling incoherently (she was almost certainly reading from a script) about how Comcast helped "protect" my computer and was more secure than DSL or whatever. Well I cut her off at the knees by telling her I was running Macs (and Linux at times) and that I had no need for Comcast to protect me from anything.

 

So she started telling me that she was considering buying a Mac because her Windows PC was nothing but a headache, and that she might get her first Mac in February. So of course we started yakking and I told her once she switched, she'd never go back as the lack of viruses, spyware, malware, and so on would blow her mind. This woman was clearly frustrated and had had enough of Windows.

 

And who can blame her, really? I pointed out to her that I'd moved my mom off her virus-laden Windows box and onto an iMac years ago. Initially my mother was somewhat resistant as she was used to Windows. God help you if you tried to take her iMac away from her now. She loves it and could not care less about Windows. She never wants to deal with what she had to deal with before."

 

Oh that's gotta hurt to have one of your own windows magazines admit the brutal truth. You have yourself a nice day Gabotron

[munky]

so i cant be bothered reading this entire thread right now (its 6am), so i dunno if anyone's pointed this out, but....

 

Macs can *run* Vista. They can run it virtualised, thru Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, and most likely thru Q and VirtualBox as well. They can also boot it natively.

 

So when the time comes for Johnny Consumer to buy a new machine, he has two choices:

 

A PC from any number of manufacturers, which can run Vista.

 

A Mac, which runs its own, extremely powerful, highly advanced, and virus-free OS, AND can run Vista as an option.

 

Its like saying, which do you want... this sports car, plus a minivan? Or just the minivan?

 

This basically makes the whole 'PROVE TO ME that Mac OS X is (by some ineffable, somehow-measureable scale) 'better' than Vista' thing totally moot. We dont NEED to have every program under the sun running on Mac OS X, because there are ways and means to maintain compatability with legacy* operating systems like Vista. We dont NEED to choose one over the other. Most of all, though, we certainly dont NEED to have yet another mac vs pc / macos vs windows holy war, because with a Mac, its not an either/or decision - you can have BOTH.

 

 

* 'Legacy' is totally correct and apt - Vista has so much legacy code its difficult to see where the cruft ends and the actual OS begins. I would really like to see what Microsoft's engineers could come up with if the backwards compatability ball-and-chain were removed. Apple did it the smart way - start from scratch, move the old code to a VM (Classic), wait for the market to adapt, move on. But i'm totally serious - i'd love to see what Microsoft's guys could do if they were allowed to. People to often think of Microsoft as 'stupid', but just because the upper levels make stupid decisions. They still have a LOT of VERY smart people. And such an OS would be proper competition to Mac OS X, which could only be good for us, the end user. Nothing drives innovation like real competition, and nothing stifles it as much as the complacency of being the 'leader'.

 

Peace, out.

[macmaniac]

Great post, Munky.

 

I too, am sick of all of these OS vs OS threads. Can't we move on?

 

When a JW comes to my door, do you think he/she convinces me to join their religion? Everyone should STFU, and enjoy their favorite OS in their own narrowminded way.

 

I'll BRB to post a little cute kitty picture here.

[Alexkir]

Windows Vista has a very slow IE web browser

FireFox rules!!!

Mac OS X is made for people. Vista is made for fixing its errors

[wahwahman89]

On rig 1 (see my signature) - Vista takes 90 seconds to boot up. Now that's the STOCK installation. Stripped down, still takes 20 seconds plus. OS X takes 7 and it's not stripped down, and it's not barely functional. That's start of loadup (white Apple screen) to Desktop. I call that fast, as in f.a.s.t.

See my pic.

 

 

You can run Unix applications on Vista.

 

And after a certain threshold, what iLife provides is too limited for the advanced user to use. And all of the advanced applications are available to both windows and mac.

That's an opinion. Many people may find Vista is easier because they are used to the layout of XP for example.

[thasp]

Vista is a joke. A well funded joke, but it's still a joke. I would compare with XP.

 

XP is a lot more tweakable for when I {censored} around at home. For some of my interests there are worlds more options and programs for XP than for OSX or linux, or the linux/osx ones are crippled in some way due to lack of developers. I like to overclock my PC to get such tasks done quicker, I like to run it out of a case, etc. I like having a 3.92 GHz machine that I cool using a radiator in my window.

 

But for work, I like Logic. Logic stock can beat cubase or nuendo or pro tools LE even after buying a ton of plugins.. it's a great program. I also need to not be able to tweak as easy. If I see a BIOS upon bootup I will do something, it's in my blood, and I'll {censored} up my work machine. I like how simple disk utility makes it to make images and how simple it is to boot off a firewire drive to restore images if you mess up an install.. you can do it in windows for sure but here it's simpler.

 

I've made XP and OSX crash on me an equal amount of times though, and I have seen {censored}ed up OSX installs to the point where applejack and other programs didn't really help much, so I reinstalled. I do that with windows too if it's been messed up by a lot of people. no big deal.

 

I like the macbook pro as well. It's a durable {censored} machine, compared to many other laptops out there(at least the recent ones that don't burn a hole through your crotch), and is very well constructed.

 

I {censored} hate the dock though. taskbar > * and I am not a fan of imacs. either give me a laptop with full portability where upgrades are limited or a desktop I can swap stuff and gut stuff out of as I choose with no portability.. I see the iMac as half and half between not that portable and not that much a "real" desktop.