On 10/28/10 10:53 AM, Trevor Cunningham wrote:
I've always thought that the only reason someone would choose to
endure a Mac OS would be the benefits of its hardware, most notably
the graphic display. I simply cannot fathom why anyone with the skills
requisite to perform such an install would choose a Mac OS...that is
other than to show that it's possible and give Steve Jobs the finger.
Trevor. I've used many operating systems over the years. About the
only notable exception was Windows Vista. I purposely skipped that
piece of garbage. I run Win7 and XP at home. I use OS-X at work. And
I've used just about every Linux/Unix platform known to man.
There are 3 pieces to the Mac experience (well 4)
1. The hardware
2. The OS
3. The consistent user interface
On the hardware side, the guts of a Mac are the same as the guts of most
PC's. The only difference is Apple makes sure to pair up the hardware
so they are only supporting one configuration. All Macs of a given era
have the same video card, same chipset, etc. This is important to #2
below. The other piece of the Mac hardware is the construction. I just
bought a new Win7 laptop this past weekend. Its plastic. The hinges
seem weak. It was clearly made to be as cheap as possible. I paid $580
for it but I did get a mid-range i5 processor. Sure $580 is a heck of
a lot less than $1500 for a MacBook pro, but my MacBook pro at work is
made from aluminum has a solid hinge that has no play and has a
beautiful design. Is it worth $1000 more? Well my MBP is around 3
years old and its nearly indestructible. I doubt very much that my Win7
box will be in as good a shape in 3 years.
The OS is a major part of the equation. Because Apple has to tune its
OS for a small set of configurations the OS is much more solid than
Windows will ever be because there are dozens of computer makers using
hundreds of different hardware combination's. OS-X is based on Unix.
Unix has been around for decades and has proven itself to be stable,
secure and very hardware efficient. It also means there are tons of
existing software that can run on it with little difficulty. Want to do
web development? Sure you can get Apache, MySQL and PHP installed on
Windows, but its a royal pain. Its for the most part built in to or
easily installed with OS-X. The way the OS-X manages memory and disk
space are different than Windows. You never have to defrag a Unix/OS-X
hard drive. Virtual memory is more efficient with Unix than Windows as
well. This is clearly a strong plus for OS-X.
Apple highly encourages people developing apps for OS-X to follow their
interface guidelines and they have put a lot of effort into making the
interface one of the most human friendly on the planet. Things are
quite intuitive and once you get used to using the Apple key instead of
the CTRL key for copying and pasting, you don't want to go back. Then
there are the little things like printing to a PDF file that are native
to the OS.
If I could, I would install OS-X in a heart beat on all my machines, or
if I could afford it, all my machines would be Macs.
Rob
--
Rob Miracle
Email: rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.robmiracle.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MiracleMan
