OS X vs Vista
Our heroes are wielding their swords to see how their respective operating systems fare as tools. Count OS X reckons his OS is the epitome of logical design. Baron Vista disagrees, but they both have their foibles. Why on earth in OS X is the menu bar for any given application not attached to the application itself? Why is it fixed to the top of the screen, detached from the very thing it controls? Why in Vista do you have to click the "Start" button when you want to stop using the PC? Call us a little twisted, but we want them both to bleed in this round. Let's see who hemorrhages most. Swords clash, sparks fly and men grunt, but the showdown ends in stalemate. Take Vista. It has a far better user interface than XP--the file and application search facility is vastly improved and the cascading Start menu has been banished, but it only takes a few moments of use to discover pointless idiosyncrasies. Microsoft constantly reminds us of how great Flip 3D is, but this feature doesn't help us find the right application window much faster than Alt-Tab did. It's very time consuming when you have many application windows to flip through, and it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature. Vista annoys us with its questionable stability, too. Yes, it's more robust than XP, and yes, the OS itself doesn't crash very often. But the applications that run on the OS are as prone to hang as ever. If this was a real sword fight and Baron Vista's sword temporarily stopped responding, it's doubtful Count OS X would stop to let him press ctrl-alt-del. OS X doesn't do itself many favors, though. Why, after all these years can you not resize documents or applications by clicking any corner of the window? Why does Apple subscribe to the "mystery meat" school of navigation, where the "minimize", "maximize" and "close window" buttons at the top-left of a pane all look identical until you hover over them? Why doesn't the delete key let you delete files? Why instead do we have to press the Apple plus backspace keys? Using OS X is, at times, a bit like eating in the dark. Oh, and where are the OS X games? And why does Front Row feel like the poor, backwards relation of Windows Media Center? We're calling this one a draw. They're just as good as each other, and in some cases just as bad--a pox upon both your houses! Score: Mac OS X-2, Windows Vista-2 | ||||
- Talkback
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dstoti says...
I am a comfortable user of both platforms, having been entirely "Mac" or entirely "windows" at various times of my life. But, I must say, I can't entirely agree with this, humorous, albeit misdirected scenario. Misdirected you say? Yes, while one can't ignore the impact of the "market share" that Windows has, saying that it wins largely because there are more copies of it out there and therefore more software available is an artifact of a (possibly) bad decision made by Apple more than a decade ago. My controlling the makers of their hardware, the hardware was much better than the majority of boxes that people used to load Windows on, but they lost the market share war. Would you say that a Honda Accord is a better car than a BMW 750, because there are more of them on the road? I dare say that if the die had not been cast in the mid-nineties, and people were able to have equal access to software between the 2 systems, Mac would rule the roost, because all other things being equal, it is a better machine.
Feb 12, 2008 03:48
I am a comfortable user of both platforms, having been entirely "Mac" or entirely "windows" at various times of my life. But, I must say, I can't entirely agree with this, humorous, albeit misdirected scenario. Misdirected you say? Yes, while one can't ignore the impact of the "market share" that Windows has, saying that it wins largely because there are more copies of it out there and therefore more software available is an artifact of a (possibly) bad decision made by Apple more than a decade ago. My controlling the makers of their hardware, the hardware was much better than the majority of boxes that people used to load Windows on, but they lost the market share war. Would you say that a Honda Accord is a better car than a BMW 750, because there are more of them on the road? I dare say that if the die had not been cast in the mid-nineties, and people were able to have equal access to software between the 2 systems, Mac would rule the roost, because all other things being equal, it is a better machine.
Feb 12, 2008 03:48
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