OS X versus Windows – My Current Take

by on Nov 15, 2007 | 10 comments

As of the time I write this article, I have been using the new Mac Pro for almost three weeks. I bought the Mac on October 26th, the day of OS X Leopard’s release. I bought it on a Friday, spent that weekend messing around with it, and have been using it in my day-to-day life ever since that following Monday. I am also happy to report that I have not had to boot up the Windows machine but a few times – mainly to get files. Of course, part of that must be credited to VMWare Fusion, which allows me to run Windows on the Mac in those cases where Windows is just better.

I have made a few waves here at PCMech with my commentary. I have held nothing back in venting about those things I don’t like about the Mac. I certainly held nothing back when it was acting very unstable for me, even going so far as to question whether this was Vista with a Mac skin. I had a lot of Mac users coming by and slamming me for making those comments. But, that is par for the course. This is a blog and, therefore, it is very real-time.

So, where do we stand now? Am I digging OS X and do I think it is better than Windows? Wouldn’t you like to know. Well, I’ll tell you.

The Answer is Yes

While I stand by my comments in the past on certain shortcomings of OS X, by and large, I most definitely think this is a better operating system than Microsoft Windows. Especally Vista.

If you sit back and look at what you are getting with Windows and compare it to OS X, OS X does come out ahead. Some features of Leopard kick Windows in all the right places, namely:

  • Finder. This is the equivalent of Windows Explorer, but it is SO much better than Explorer. For example, the Quick View feature in Leopard which allows you to preview almost any document without opening the associated program is very convenient. Windows just can’t do that. Not only does Leopard do it, but it is fast at it. The Cover Flow view in Finder is, in a word, spectaular. It allows you to flip through your files in full graphical view. There is hardly any waiting period while the system generates a preview. Windows file management looks pale compared to OS X Leopard.
  • Graphical Elements. Vista tries to be slick, but it was such a disappointment. The Aero look in Vista looks nice, but the system resources it takes up are inexcusable. I have written before about my thoughts on that nightmare. By comparison, OS X not only blows Windows Vista away in terms of eye candy, but it does it with no noticeable performance overhead at all. Expose, Spaces, the Dashboard, the animated window movements, drop shadows – it is ALL better than Windows. In fact, many of these great features can even be had in Linux using Beryl, so Windows is just lagging behind everybody in this department.
  • Time Machine. I have bashed Time Machine and that is because it seemed to be causing system crashes, however further research shows that it is likely not Time Machine. To those of you who thought I was a lunatic on that one, you can now rest assured that I have reversed my position. Time Machine is one of the simplest backup applications I’ve ever used. It certainly is the prettiest. And it works dependably. The only thing I suggest is that if you are using virtual machines, you might want to exclude them from Time Machine backups. Time Machine doesn’t play well with everything, and I can attest to that personally.
  • Compatibility. OS X, so far, has been great about being compatible with my peripherals. For example, I installed my HP networked laser printer to the Mac. It was literally as easy as plugging it in. The printer queue on the Mac even has a little icon which looks just like my printer. More suprisingly, it worked right away with my Sony Handycam. Now, in terms of camcorders, Sony makes about the most proprietary setups available. I routinely get annoyed with my Sony because they force me to do everything with Sony. However, on OS X, I plugged the Sony into the Mac using USB and iMovie 08 was able to import the footage and turn it into MOV files right away. No dealing with the stupid software that came bundled with the Sony (which only works on Windows anyway). Note that I had to upgrade to iMovie 08 to make this work. So, I’m happy with compatibility in OS X. I haven’t had to deal with a driver once.

I could go on, but you get the idea. OS X is slick and it is easy to use.

But…

OS X is not the perfect environment for every application. I am a long time Windows user. Even now that I am using OS X daily, I still hold that Windows has its strengths over OS X:

  • More applications for Windows. Not only are there more choices with Windows, but in many cases the applications are just better with Windows. One example I have talked about before is my FTP client. After trying many Mac FTP clients, I found nothing that works as well as the one I use under Windows. My take is that, sometimes, it seems the Mac equivalents of some software are just dumbed down when compared to the Windows counterparts.
  • Now that I am using Windows in a virtual environment, multiple screens don’t matter much. That said, I still hold that Windows handles multiple monitors in an immensely more practical way than OS X. The fact that the top menu bar is fixed in OS X is incredibly annoying and this is, perhaps, the single most annoying aspect of OS X for me.
  • Being able to resize a window from any point rather than only the lower right corner
  • Being able to easily move a file using Cut and Paste
  • Being able to double click a window’s title bar to maximize it. It is the exact opposite in OS X and it throws me for a loop every time.

These are features of Windows that are just nice. I’m being very careful here not to complain simply because I am used to Windows. I full realize that a different operating system is going to require some different ways of doing things. However, some things in Windows do make more sense from a practical perspective. And the issues of software choice and the fixed top menu on multiple screens are not even subject to debate, as far as I am concerned.

For Windows Users

If you are a Windows user interested in the Mac, don’t fret about being confused by it. Yes, some things are different – some good, some bad. On the whole, though, OS X has a lot more good to it than those few things that Windows does better. Keep in mind, too, that you can always run Windows on your Mac as well using either Boot Camp (for dual booting) or virtual machines.

I was able to spend a weekend working with the Mac, moving my data over, finding new software. After that weekend, I was working on the machine. That first week I hit a lot of speed bumps. A typically fast action would take me a lot longer because I had to figure out how to do it and, sometimes, what software to do it with. But, you get the hang of it. I am now making my way fairly well with the Mac.

For Mac Users

I now count myself in your ranks. And now that I’m there, I am in a position to give you guys a reality check.

Yes, Macs are great machines. I’m with you there. But, my recent diatribes are proof that Macs are computers. Namely, things crash and, every now and then, the entire computer crashes. Yes, it may be rare in most cases, but it was also rare for Windows XP to crash. The point is that the Mac is still just a computer. Some Mac users do get way too attached to their computers to the point of getting very defensive about it. They also proudly bash Microsoft at every opportunity. Those types of Mac users need a serious reality check. It is still a computer – crap breaks sometimes.

Most suprising is the seemingly reflex action of blaming the user when something doesn’t work. I’ve been using computers for years. Yet, when I complained about some things not working right on my Mac, I had people convicting me of some of the stupidest things. Or when I complain about the multiple screen limitations in OS X, the typical response would be – “Why would you need that many screens?”

My only point in all this is one thing: Mac users need to make the “Mac experience” more accessible to the 90+% of the world who don’t use Macs and get along just fine without a Mac. Instead of acting snobby, making fun of the PC or talking down to a user with a legitimate problem with their Mac, be helpful.

Here at PC Mechanic, I intend to do just that.

Wrap It Up – Finally

That’s another tech rant, this time to give you an update on my OS X experience. Yes, I’m digging it. Yes, I think OS X is better than Windows in terms of power of the operating system.

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  • Greg

    While I use macs everyday and school I am continuing to like them more and more. What crazy to me is the splash macbooks have made. Right now at my school at least there is an explosion of macbooks and the buzz that they make every where is crazy to me. That may be because of the flashiness or the fact that mac are less common than PCs but never the less I’m impressed by apple.

  • Bill

    For the record… :)

    Incidentally, maximize on a Mac has always been “fit to contents” not “fill the screen.” A good app should be smart about how you use your windows and remember the last size used. A lot of people have adjustments to make with that. I hate to use my favorite phrase again, but “document centric” is once again the reason.

  • Gabriel Unger

    Lol @ “I hate to use my favorite phrase again”

  • John G.Tymchuck

    I still like windows 98 much easyer to work with ,this ME is that the desktop is not setup so you can see it after you bootup ,you have bring it up every time

  • Mike

    You seem to have a balanced view of computers in general, which I like. Most articles like this are slanted too much one way or the other. I run my own setup with a herd of MS systems, multi-imaged and in some cases multi-booted as well as Macs and now BSD as well as Linux systems.

    I find for the real geek experience Linux is the ticket. Until recently my opinion of running Linux was right up there with self-mutilation, but how things have changed! I have started (dual boot XP / Ubuntu) using Ubuntu and it is if not ready for prime time, on the edge of prime time for average users and a dream for the geek.

    I heard that Linux had changed and just started using it to stay up on the changes and found out that it has dramatically transformed. If you will humor me; if Linux gets more user centric it may hurt Apple as well as Microsoft. Ubuntu at least has the potential to be as friendly as the Mac OS and the “let’s mess around with the innards” of the Windows systems if not more so.

    I would like to see a series of articles doing a “geek-off” three way comparision of XP, OS X and Ubuntu.

  • A_Pickle

    I’m compelled to disagree with this post in many regards.

    Finder, beating Windows Explorer? That’s a laugh. Seriously. I find it amusing how people are quick to brand Flip3D as useless, yet give praise to what is by all rights, an equally “useless” feature of Apple’s — Cover Flow. At the very least, Flip3D adds a tiny bit of ifunctionality onto it’s predecessor, Alt+Tab, in that you can use your mouse scroll wheel or click passing windows to bring them into focus.

    Cover Flow, if anything, is a BACKPEDAL on file management. Pretty? Yes. Can I see what every file is at a glance? No. You have to be hovering or focused on that file, and then it will give you the filename beneath the eye-candy. Then, for extended file information, you can look at the list pane below. Oh, wait… that’s… a list — not Cover Flow. Cover Flow is eye-candy — quite literally NOTHING else.

    And Finder… has no address bar, compared to Windows Vista’s breadcrumbs-style address bar, which is probably one of the most badass new features of Windows Explorer. Not to mention the “Favorite Links” feature, which — while I’m aware Finder has had that for awhile now, Vista matches. Then there are the views, sorting methods, and grouping methods in Windows Vista, and a very dynamic and scalable interface. Thumbnails, previews, and whatnot — all of them load VERY fast in Vista, much moreso than in XP which — admittedly, Finder kicked rightly in the arse.

    Then… Aero? Taking up “inexcusable” amounts of system resources? Sorry sir, Aero is otherwise known as the “Desktop Window Manager,” seen in the task manager as “dwm.exe.” On my 1920×1200 display with a notepad window open, Firefox with five tabs open, my Outlook 2007 main window open, a Skype window open, Paint.NET 3.10 with two images open, a Windows Explorer window open, and my task manager open — dwm.exe is taking up a scant 20 MB. I am more than willing to sacrifice 20 MB for a MUCH better looking, more modern looking, and more useful interface. It’ll pave the way for some very nice-looking, graceful, UI-driven applications. Thanks to Aero, all windows are DirectDraw surfaces — which lets me use Switcher for Expose-like functionality (only, I have about ten times the level of customizeability) with full Aero window previews (even while playing a windowed game of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch or watching a 1080P HD video… or both!).

    That. Is not. “Inexcusable,” in fact, compared to Beryl for Linux which has trouble running on a Radeon 9250, it’s damn good. I’m not entirely sure if you can Expose while QuickTime is playing 720P or 1080P HD vdeo… but I can.

    I feel inclined to add, you have not “written about your thoughts on that nightmare.” The link you provided to us so we could read about your thoughts on the “nightmare” of the “inexcusable system resource consumption” of Aero contained, in fact, NO COMMENTS on Aero, or just how many resources it ate, or why it was such a bane to Windows. In fact, that article was more-or-less a fest of bashing Vista because some of your third-party, non-Microsoft programs didn’t work.

    I won’t say you didn’t have some legitimate complaints — IIS7 was designed “for the Windows Vista platform” and is a Microsoft product, and I can’t see any reason why your triple-display setup wouldn’t work short of, well… third-party drivers not having matured yet. Three-way displays aren’t terrible common, however, so I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. It’s still in it’s first year, Vista has some issues, without question. I have several friends who had some Vista teething issues — any OS will…

    In retrospect, Microsoft probably did release Vista “early,” if you’re looking at it relative to the state of XP vs. the state of Vista at their same ages… but if you consider actual development timeframes, Vista was quite late. The industry, expecting Vista sometime in 2003, according to Allchin, didn’t get it until FOUR YEARS LATER. That’s not “early,” and frankly — Microsoft should be commended for NOT giving the industry another ME, and keeping the product in development ’til now. Vista is no ME II — it’s suffering some teething issues as a new operating system that has entered it’s life in a RADICALLY new IT ecosystem, with, if possible, even more hardware combinations and an even greater clientbase this time around. This is 2007, not 2001.

    The rest of your reasoning to put OS X on a pedestal above Windows is almost biased. I had no trouble getting my HP printer installed on my Windows Vista setup. I also had no trouble getting my mother’s HP printer installed on my setup — via the wireless network. Actually, I just hit “Start,” then “Network,” and then there was my mother’s printer.

    Getting my Canon HV20 to play well with Windows Movie Maker was… a non-existent task. It just did. Period. Getting it to work with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 was a similarly non-existent task. Now I have nice, crisp, 24P or 60i 1080P HD video to enjoy. Without having to burn Blu-Ray discs. Go me.

    And the only virtual machine I’ve had to install is a Windows XP virtual machine, because even though Age of Empires II does run quite well on Vista, it has a harder than normal time playing LAN games with Windows XP clients. I surmise that, once everyone in my LAN group jumps to the WOW, I’ll no longer need my virtual machine and will be able to save myself 4 GB of disk space.

    I’m not trying to bash OS X. It really is a good operating system. But credit’s due where credit’s due — Vista is a pretty good match for OS X, and will only get better.

  • Ed

    I am hardly expert at Operating Systems, so the following comments do not reflect the level of knowledge and sophistication of most of the previous.

    Despite a lack of knowledge about Operating Systems, I do know something about computers. I have a notebook that will boot with either Ubuntu or XP. I program in C# and Python.

    I had a computer running XP and updated to Vista. To do this I got a new video card and upgraded the memory to 1.5 gigs.

    Changing to Vista was a big mistake. It takes it a good four minutes to boot the thing and I cannot tell when it is finished starting itself. So, if I click on Outlook too soon, the OS crashes. Every time. It will not respond to anything. It also crashes about once a week and it is terribly slow to do just about anything. My guess is that there is some sort of problem with the installation. I’ve spent several hours fiddling with it to no avail.

    My Panasonic PV GS35 camcorder does not work with Vista at all. This despite spending hours updating the software for Vista.

    I’m down hundreds of dollars with less performance than I had and don’t want to think about trying to get back to XP.

    So, I went to a Mac store. Timed the boots on a couple of machines. The biggest meanest one took almost two minutes. Gosh, that’s not good. One iMac did boot quickly, in well under a minute. However, the lousy boot performance of the most powerful Mac in the store discouraged me from purchasing one. In addition, everybody I know who owns one, (they are all older machines) say they are slower than PCs.

    Meanwhile, my old slow laptop boots Ubuntu in under a minute and it only crashes, quite reliably I might add, if I leave it for an extended time. Presumably it goes into some kind of power down mode that the operating system can’t figure out. It’s never gone down for any other reason that I can remember.

    Well I think these comments must sound naive to most who might read this. However, non sophisticated users still count. I want the operating system to work quickly and reliably with the software that I want to run. I do not want to make a hobby out of learning to make the computer operate. Unfortunately, I do not think anything is quite up to snuff. Generally, and quite surprisingly to me, Ubuntu seems to be closer than the others . . . but it’s short on the software availability end . . . and, it’s right on the edge if any kind of uncommon task is attempted. I’ve got no interest in “sudo apt” kind of stuff. It’s easy to spend hours and hours on it and get no where.

  • Swisfondue

    @A-Pickle: “And Finder… has no address bar, compared to Windows Vista’s breadcrumbs-style address bar, which is probably one of the most badass new features of Windows Explorer”

    Yes it does. It is not enabled in the basic-setup. But you can switch it on and see it at the bottom of the Finder window. The folders in the breadcrumb trail are clickable as well, enabling you to instantly access any part of the trail.

  • SRegan

    Further to A_Pickle and Swisfondue, Leopard CAN be prodded into providing a breadcrumbs-style address bar, although it’s not immediately obvious how to get to it. It’s still an actual address though, so you can’t copy-paste it (resulting in a huge loss in productivity as you have to browse back to your folder every time), nor is it comprehensible outside OS X (I work on XP and Tiger and frequently store Mac files on my laptop). That Vista seems to be trying to imitate OS X in this matter hardly endears Gates’ latest work to me.

    From the little I’ve seen, neither Vista nor Leopard wow me. Leopard, by the looks of it, is “flashier”, which I dislike because I want an instantly responsive system, not one that takes “time out” to show me pretty animations. Ubuntu Beryl is by far the worst of the lot: with full options enabled, the contents of windows wibble like gelatine when you move them (WHY?!), windows “pour” down into the dock/taskbar-equivalent, and ignite in a ridiculous, poorly rendered firestorm when you close them.

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