OS X vs. XP
I'm fairly new to using OS X. I know I like it better than XP... it's easier to use, more stable.. and well... in a less subjective way... just more "fun".
Prior to having my iBook... I was part of the PC crowd that would always bash anything Apple. Now I find myself doing just the opposite. It's easy to get praise for an Apple product in Apple forums... but go to a competing site and try to say something pro Apple... you just get ripped to bits.
I don't think I know enough yet to be able to argue the case for Apple against the PC zealots. I'm a regular at the Riovolution.com site... a site for the Rio MP3 players. I do prefer some of the Rio players over the iPod... but that's not really my point... I prefer the Apple OS way over Windows. Please take a look at my post (my name there is also Joey and my avitar is a crudely drawn stick figure)...
http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic=10041
I pretty much come out and stand up for Apple everytime someone says that they "hate Apple" or similar comments. I'm just not very good at identifying "how" the Mac OS is better than XP. I use it... I know it... I feel it... I just can't explain it. If anyone can give me some pointers, that'd be great... of let me know a good site for a fairly non-biased (although... I guess it's hard to be non-biased... people will obviously prefer one to the other) comparison of the two.
It's really hard to get people to change their minds... even when they don't know anything at all about OS X... it's even harder when they actually know what they're talking about. I know... I was one of those people... and I've lived with a Mac person for years and was never convinced. It was only because I had developed a strong dislike for MS... and really wanted to try other OSs that I started to look around. None of the Linux releases are really at a consumer level... and the only way to really get a good feel for OS X was to get a Mac... hence the fairly inexpensive iBook (which I love).
Thanks for any help!
Prior to having my iBook... I was part of the PC crowd that would always bash anything Apple. Now I find myself doing just the opposite. It's easy to get praise for an Apple product in Apple forums... but go to a competing site and try to say something pro Apple... you just get ripped to bits.
I don't think I know enough yet to be able to argue the case for Apple against the PC zealots. I'm a regular at the Riovolution.com site... a site for the Rio MP3 players. I do prefer some of the Rio players over the iPod... but that's not really my point... I prefer the Apple OS way over Windows. Please take a look at my post (my name there is also Joey and my avitar is a crudely drawn stick figure)...
http://forums-riovolution.com/index.php?showtopic=10041
I pretty much come out and stand up for Apple everytime someone says that they "hate Apple" or similar comments. I'm just not very good at identifying "how" the Mac OS is better than XP. I use it... I know it... I feel it... I just can't explain it. If anyone can give me some pointers, that'd be great... of let me know a good site for a fairly non-biased (although... I guess it's hard to be non-biased... people will obviously prefer one to the other) comparison of the two.
It's really hard to get people to change their minds... even when they don't know anything at all about OS X... it's even harder when they actually know what they're talking about. I know... I was one of those people... and I've lived with a Mac person for years and was never convinced. It was only because I had developed a strong dislike for MS... and really wanted to try other OSs that I started to look around. None of the Linux releases are really at a consumer level... and the only way to really get a good feel for OS X was to get a Mac... hence the fairly inexpensive iBook (which I love).
Thanks for any help!
Comments
Judging from your title, I thought this thread was going to be about that site!
It is exactly what you are looking for.
Originally posted by Joey
None of the Linux releases are really at a consumer level...
Try Fedora Core 2, it is awesome.
Same goes for Suse 9.2.
Use these and you will wonder why people use MS for surfing when these systems do it faster and totally virus/spyware free (currently).
The only reason I have Win98SE and XP machines is I love Need for Speed/GTA 3 & VC and my mrs won't let me buy a PS2.
Dobby.
Originally posted by dobby
Try Fedora Core 2, it is awesome.
Same goes for Suse 9.2.
Use these and you will wonder why people use MS for surfing when these systems do it faster and totally virus/spyware free (currently).
The only reason I have Win98SE and XP machines is I love Need for Speed/GTA 3 & VC and my mrs won't let me buy a PS2.
Dobby.
Suse must have come a long way. The last distro I tried was Mandrake or Suse over a year ago. I managed to get the sound working, but there was no equalizer - a necessity with logitech z560s.
There was no GUI to adjust mouse speed - following the consistent advice on the net of editing text files, I still couldn't get it to work.
When I tried to set numlock, I found several explanations about how the keyboard driver wasn't designed with this in mind, but there was a hack - I also couldn't get this to work.
After a week, I gave up.
Anyway, maybe these problems have been resolved but I find OS X to be a much better solution than Linux. Why? Because Apple made it Apple simple to install, run and maintain OS X but you can dive under the hood any time you want to.
Originally posted by Joey
Well... I guess that's one thing that Linux has in common with Windows... it has to support a very broad platform of hardware. With OS X... you have the same company making the hardware and the OS... so with the exception of add on stuff... you never really have to worry about this sound card working... this sound card not working... this NIC working... this one not working, etc.
Exactly. The fact that OS X runs on a smaller selection of hardware allows Apple to optimize the hell out of OS X. Many people compare CPU / buss speeds and say that Apples are slower. In technical terms, maybe. But, do the same tasks on XP and OS X and for many things, OS X is truly faster because of its optimization.
For example, I loaded a 40 minute DV file in QuickTime on my Win2K dual 500MHz box and the same 40 minute DV file on my TiBook 500MHz laptop and did some simple scrubbing through the file. The TiBook handled this without any problems at all. My PC however was stuttering and couldn't keep up with me scrubbing through the file. This even though the PC had 7200RPM disks compared to the 4200RPM disk in my TiBook. Both had roughly the same amount of RAM at the time, and the PC even had a 2nd processor to work with!
This test alone showed me that Apple's OS is much more in tune with the hardware it runs on compared to Win2K.
Originally posted by Joey
I'm fairly new to using OS X. ....Thanks for any help!
I don't get tired to constantly repeat the two most beneficial facts of MacOs X:
BEAUTY AND SIMPLICITY
Nothing comes even close to that. Look at XP and you will understand
immediately what i mean
The Macintosh is NOT designed for People who don't care (OR simply not aware of, bad, bad, bad) about Beauty and Simplicity. Period.
Originally posted by Vox Barbara
I don't get tired to constantly repeat the two most beneficial facts of MacOs X:
BEAUTY AND SIMPLICITY
Nothing comes even close to that. Look at XP and you will understand
immediately what i mean
The Macintosh is NOT designed for People who don't care (OR simply not aware of, bad, bad, bad) about Beauty and Simplicity. Period.
Well said. Unfortenately do most people not care about Beauty and Simplicity. They just want a computer to, er, do things.
A LOT of people just don't like computers for various reasons, but I'm sure a lot of them would like it a little more if they used a Mac.
Originally posted by BigBlue
Well said. Unfortenately do most people not care about Beauty and Simplicity. They just want a computer to, er, do things.
A LOT of people just don't like computers for various reasons, but I'm sure a lot of them would like it a little more if they used a Mac.
Yup, I always cringe whenever Windows (at work) pops up a dialog box. It normally displays a huge novel of text in a teeny font size, ending with a question like "Don't you deny that you don't want to prevent erasing the entire hard drive?", along with the buttons marked "Yes" and "No".
In contrast, the Apple Human Interface guidelines state that if at all possible, button labels should be verbs, so even by skimming the associated text, the user knows what's going to happen when s/he presses a certain button.
It's that level of thoughtfulness that makes me love Apple so much.
I cringe when on occasion I see "Ok" or "OK" in a Mac application.
A lot of people approach computers as things you have to memorize, not learn. In other words, they think you just have to know what to do, that you can't discover or deduce how to do it. Someone has to point to the thing you want to do because it's too complicated to understand how it or you got to that point. Macs can actually be frustrating for new users who expect things to be in a certain place, and they have a mental block about deducing how where or why things are set up as they are. Their attitude is like what people think about drawing skills or understanding algebra: either you got it or you don't. What's more, I don't think computers do a good enough job (not even Macs) rewarding users for their discoveries and successes. I don't mean in a smarmy Microsoft Bob sort of way either.
My sister got a Mac just recently and is sometimes befuddled on how to do things only to discover that the answer was, after the fact, pretty obvious or at least logical. That's not always the case (I'm thinking of the option for full keyboard navigation among other things), but it's true more often than not.