Vista vs. OSX

From the water is wet and air is necessary files...

Mitch ratcliffe has been comparing Vista and Mac OSX in a series of articles on ZDNet. His conclusions?

• He is "convinced that Windows is much improved,"
  
• but he "continually gravitate[s] to the MacBook Pro because of its deep integration between the hardware and software."
• He adds: "The Vista desktop and Mac OS X desktops are very similar, because they've both evolved from the same background."
• But "Microsoft pours so many options into the UI that the simplicity of the system is lost"
• And " I prefer the Mac OS X focus on getting things done."

See my entry on why (and how) having both is the ideal way to go. I generally use Windows for work and productivity apps while using MacOS for digital lifestyle and graphics apps. Despite their similarities, I find them useful in different contexts.

Comments

[Glen]

I've been a Mac user for a few years and have come to appreciate its performance and simplicity. When Vista arrived, I was curious to see how it would stack up against OSX. I had heard all the stories about '5 years and 50 trillion lines of code (or whatever)' going into Vista. When my XPsp2 laptop died, I was one of the first ones to get a new laptop with Vista loaded on it. I knew going in that I was likely to hit issues because it was so new, but I had no idea how bad it would be. It was almost like magic how it was able to cause me pain in every single way imaginable. Some of the critical things that I need in a laptop are being able to get mail (Outlook), being able to project, and being able to run VMWare. One other obvious thing is simply to have an OS that is stable. Vista had significant problems in each of these areas. Outlook would either hang my machine, lose it's connection to exchange, or simply crash multiple times per day. I had to find a workaround in order to use a projector. VMWare would hang for up to 15 minutes while trying to boot a guest OS. Vista would quietly reboot at random times. When I tried to copy a large number of files from a USB drive, windows explorer ran up it's memory consumption to 1Gig and then the entire machine would freeze. When I tried to install software from a CDROM, the only option I was given was to 'format the DVD' or cancel. On and on. I eventually gave up and was able to go back to XP. While XP is not my favorite (OSX is by a long shot), at least its pretty stable. To summarize, Vista should not have been released, it's simply not ready. As it is now, it's no better than Windows ME - horrible.

A final note concerning OSX and VMWare: VMWare's Fusion product for OSX is awesome! It plays very nice with existing VM's that were created on windows machines, it's very easy to use/configure, and I've not had a single problem with it. Keep in mind that this is still beta code! I have not tried Fusions 'unity' mode (similar to parallels coherence mode, but it seems like it's every bit as good.