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a honest review from someone who went full-time mac and came back to windows

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f0dder:
alxwz: imho a lot of his points were pretty valid... especially at a user level (some of them I had to shrug a bit about being a programmer). It wasn't just the usual "wasn't able to deal with something that's just different." thing, he pointed out a bunch of flaws.

Riverrun: don't feel too safe, there's a lot of exploits for OS X, it's just not being targetted as massively as windows because of ONE thing: marketshare. Some bugs are exploitable even from non-privileged user accounts, yay - way to go, apple.

allen:
I can't help but chuckle at the constant attempts to claim one is objectively better than the other.  The bottom line is simply that they are both imperfect operating systems bosting overlapping but not identical featuresets and application availability.  At the end of the day, you use what you prefer and/or can afford.

Naturally the suits behind their respective operating systems want for everyone to believe their operating system is wholly and objectively better than their competitors (whether or not they are willing to invest what it would take to create something truly wholly and objectively greater) -- but that end users, too, jump on this is amusing.  I don't think it's even so much a matter of brand loyalty, but rather a fight to not be pegged as incorrect or foolish in your decisions.

This isn't directed at anyone in the thread, simply a blanket statement targeted toward the "My OS is better!" pissing/moaning contest that has been at the cornerstone of computing from the beginning. (and, of course, will persist well beyond our own life times!).

My favorite operating system was BeOS. It was novel, fun, short lived . . .  I won't say it was the best, but I liked it.  I love fiddling with/tweaking/customizing linux--but in the long run, -that- love leads to decreased producivity for me.  Mac never did much for me, its emphasis was in the wrong places to tickle my fancy.  Windows is my primary OS--if for no other reasons than familiarity and native support of all of my favorite applications.  But I don't have [whatever it takes] to claim I've chosen the best -- simply what I'm most comfortable with--for reasons of familiarity, convenience, and affordability.

Bottom line: pissing contests are silly. Should one wish to jump into one though, be mindful of wind direction and velocity!

armatostr:
I always thought macs are overrated :down:

steeladept:
Personnally, I have liked (though not loved) the Mac platform for a long time.  My biggest problems with it were 1) price, and 2) program availability.  Now that it runs on Intel chips, I can get a super-hyped laptop and run VM's of Windows, Linux, and Mac.  Base OS would most likely be Windows, so I guess that one is actually not a VM, but you get my drift.

Why windows?  Program availability - especially games that I want to play.  Okay, so I haven't even started a real game in 6 months and probably won't get much chance for the next year and a half; but hey, I don't have VMWare at home or the system to run it on either - yet.

nontroppo:
alxwz: imho a lot of his points were pretty valid... especially at a user level (some of them I had to shrug a bit about being a programmer). It wasn't just the usual "wasn't able to deal with something that's just different." thing, he pointed out a bunch of flaws.-f0dder (July 23, 2007, 08:24 AM)
--- End quote ---

His first set of "flaws" were the same ones I had when I recently switched. WTF doesn't this program close!? But that was just confirming the massive cognitive bias I have after using PCs since MSDOS 6. As soon as you replace application for document space it is suddenly intuitive. He simply refused to think in any other way than his biases predicted. The majority of his UI issues were in the same vein (not having a delete key on the Laptop keyboard aside - he wrongly confused the problem though correctly ientified the underlying frustration). His point on font corruption is a known issue, though it has never happened to me. But what he didn't mention is the OpenType support is native through the OS - this is simply  :-* -- I can use ligatures and proper typography everywhere -- for someone who purports to do lots of graphics work, this is the real deal.

Networking: I have as many problems with my Desktop PCs reliably sharing in workgroups as I have getting my Mac to -- networking sucks irrespective of vendor. No problem printing to two network shared printers running on an XP host.

Conclusion: it was much closer to a pissing content than an "objective" review (using allen's lovely categories)  ;)

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