stephencarr's Profile

So the title of this article is completely misleading then. Vista is not really a reason to switch to Apple. The reason you are switching to Apple is because you like the idea of it and others have recommended it. Thanks for the sensational eye catching title, pity your article did not back it up and contained nothing different from a million other "hey look at me, I am switching to Apple give me a hug gang" articles. Fortunately a little interest was found in the comments so all is not lost.

You can't say Vista is a reason to jump ship until you have at least tried it. I find your whole article to be sensational and ill considered. Yes Vista will require better spec minimum hardware compared to XP, but usually more advanced software needs more advanced hardware, this does not surprise me, nor should it you. I am not going to get into the Mac vs. Windows thing because seriously the only people who give a damn about that argument are Apple fanboys. Everyone else just gets on with their computing be it on Linux, Windows or Apple. Use what suits you. It seems that as your daughter uses Macs at school might be a good reason to indeed go for a Mac. However, I don't think that Vista is the reason to, and to use the appropriate brand-love term, "switch" to Apple. I have been using Macs and PCs for years, I have had Macs with severe software problems and I have had PCs with the same. Macs crash, fact. PCs crash, fact. Which does it more often? A home built cheap-ass PC is the answer. Bad hardware configurations (usually bad/cheap memory) almost always give problems which are often seen as software problems. A Mac is built by the same people who make the OS, for this reason it usually works better on a whole, and usually costs more. You get what you pay for with hardware. I find that while PC hardware and software is ugly and a little careless in places it does do everything I need cheaply. I may have to poke about a lot to make it work properly but it does work. I don't think a PC "just works" as well as it could, then again I have friends who are new Mac owners and complain about the same thing. To a certain level you always need to RTFM. As for spyware and viruses I recommend SpyBot Search and Destroy (a free spyware tool), AVG Free (a free antivirus tool) and Firefox. These tools plus regular windows updates installed have kept me problem free. In fact, I have never had any serious virus problems and since I have stopped using IE I have no more spyware problems. Again, if you know what you are doing Windows can be good clean computing. The only real reason OS X does not suffer from malware like Windows does is because no one writes the viruses/worms/trojans/spyware for them. Corporate computing does not generally use Apple .Mail for their email system, so viruses are written for the masses, and that is Microsoft. It would be a different story if everyone used Macs, they would find a way. Having said that OS X does seem to be built from the ground up with better security than XP could hope for. In summary, Vista will be a long overdue update to the Windows platform, it will require newer hardware and it might not be everything you hoped for. Hopefully Vista will be a step closer to "just works" computing, it certainly is playing catch up with OS X. However, I can guarantee that a Vista PC will still be cheaper than a similar spec Mac. Apple hardware is stunning, but it is pricy, proper design does not come cheap (and it does not always work that well, just ask Ti Powerbook users and G1 iPod owners). /End lengthy comment.

Well, what you did there is say you can't quuantitively say what the differences are. Then you go on to raise actual things that make the experience better, calling them "brush strokes" to make Apple sound like a work of art (which you had previously discounted as being a quality people look for in computing). The things you have said in this article are well documented attractions of the Mac platform, I think this article is just masturbatory self assurance. I think that OSX is an excellent well thougth out OS, Apple hardware is the most beautiful computer hardware in the world. Apple fan boys are the only downside, it is like a cult and that is never attractive. About those brush strokes: ================================== XP automagically configures wireless connections too, this is nothing new, just the nature of a DHCP network connection. The fact that OSX is not compramised by viruses is nothing to do with its inherent security, it is because not as many people write viruses for OSX because it is not as popular as XP, which you already recognised in your article. Mouseover dock? Is that really all that fantasic? You could have said full OpenGL desktop rendering is a brush stroke, but you went with a dock. CTRL-ALT-DEL login? Don't think so. XP boots up with a login screen, much like OSX does, has done since the beginning. CTRL-ALT-DEL brings up the task manager.