What's up with OS X?
by Christian Bayer
March 11, 2005 - Christian passed away in 2006
This is coming from someone whose first PC was an Apple II+ clone circa 1983 that ran CP/M, but has been using Windows (amongst other things) since version 3.0. I don't consider the platform contest to be Apple vs. Windows, rather OS X vs. Windows. Classic Mac OS was okay but technically no more interesting than Windows 9X. The NT-based versions of Windows are admittedly a little better but still fall far short of OS X.
The lineage of the OS X core code is interesting to me but basically if I want to get something productive done on a computer like using Photoshop or word processing I can be many times more efficient than using Windows because I don't have to spend so much time interacting with the OS. I only have to deal with the application - the OS stays out of my way. Even if I am all too familiar with some procedure on Windows, it is easier with OS X. I really don't think using a computer should be something that constantly makes me angry at the box and OS X does this very well.
Linux is the best of breed OS for many technical pursuits but OS X also comes with some standard network analysis tools that are very powerful and some would consider nearly subversive in the wrong hands. What doesn't come preinstalled is generally available, and can often be found by browsing links at apple.com.
I am frequently amazed how many things I can get a lowly G3 with 512MB RAM to do at the same time. A similar load would cause my 2.4GHz 1GB RAM Windows machine to collapse into a pile of steaming blue poo.
When something does go wrong in OS X I can open a terminal window and type top to get the PID then type kill xxx and start over with it. If things get really bad sudo shutdown -h now is much better than pulling the plug when Apple's Force Quit (equivalent to the Windows End Process) doesn't do the trick. Very rarely does an application take down the whole machine, which happens once or twice a week to me with Windows.
Many open source apps have been ported to OS X. I found this media player yesterday called VLC that even plays Windows Media. Even though my laptop runs SuSE 9.1 I have never run across this app before, I guess it also has been ported to Windows. My experience so far is that available freeware for OS X is much higher quality than the typical VB-kludged junk you frequently find for Windows. With OS X there is a nice selection of commercial software and high-quality open source too.
So far I have not found a single Windows application that does not have a functional equivalent in OS X (except maybe Visio, depending upon how you use it).
If hardware is what you are into, then a dual G5 is pretty much the most exotic production model you'll find. In x86, the only stuff I have seen that comes close is from Boxx.