5 Reasons Macs Can't Claim They're Better than Windows 7

I needed a new PC about 6 months ago as my laptop was showing its age. I looked at 17" 1920x1200 notebooks from Dell, HP, and Apple. At that time, the MacBook Pro 17" was about $1000 cheaper than comparably equipped laptops from either Dell or HP. Wanting to learning something else and NOT wanting to put up with Vista, I went the Mac route. Oh, and there was that matter of the really horrible support from both Dell and HP when you call in for a problem. Talk about incompetence personified!

It has been an interesting experience.

- After unpacking my Mac and starting it up, I got the beachball of death in less than 30 minutes of use. All I was doing was apply patches and it hung. I had to hard reboot to clear the condition. Nice first experience.

- I started running Win7 beta then RC and now RTM on Fusion v2.0.5. Yes, I know the VMware folks say they don't support Win7 yet but it runs reasonably well, even though it is being hosted.

- The Win7 UI is clean without all the &%$@ that was Vista. Things run well. It is an OS that I can get work done it. It has yet to crash on me thru the many months of testing and use.

- OTOH, OS X goes off in the weeds on me on a regular basis. I normally have to reboot a couple of times a day to maintain any kind of stability. The one I like the best is that I'll be working and it will just stop responding for no apparent reason. Then, 30 to 60 seconds later, it will carry on as if nothing had happened. If iTunes is playing, it will stop mid song, wait for a while, then continue. During this time, OS X is totally unresponsive.

- Finder is a joke. Throw that piece of $%&* away and come up with something that is actually usable. Even Windows Explorer, as bad as it is, is far more flexible than Finder. A simple example: I use list mode. You can't create new folders in list mode; you have to be in folder or some other mode to do so. How stupid. You right-click to delete something: sometimes you can move to Trash, sometimes you can't. You want to move a bunch of files from location a to location b: you can copy and paste but not cut and paste. And this is supposed to be user friendly?

- The Dock versus the Win7 taskbar. Far more functionality on the Win7 taskbar IMHO. Much cleaner too.

- Right-click functionality. Win7 and its predecessors have it all over anything OS X might have. Come on Apple: get with the program here.

- Mac apps versus Win apps. I have a bunch of both. I've used lots of them on both sides of the aisle. I don't see an advantage of one over the other. They are just different. As such, it becomes a matter of taste.

- The MacBook Pro 17" hardware itself. This seems to be reasonably well made. I like the weight and thinness. The matte screen is beautiful. The lack of a blu-ray player is not. Nor are the 3 USB ports. You'd think for a $3K laptop, the Apple engineers could at least provide some USB ports on each side and maybe even on the back.

- The Apple store. Okay, let's not even go there.

Overall, I'd rate the hardware a B+, OS X a C to maybe a C- and the apps a C to a B.

Bottom line: I'd have to think really hard about ever buying another Apple product.

First of all, stop being a damn troll. Those "this IS better than that !" is an unsuccessful endeavour at best.

Since there's no factual way of deciding, it's pure spin and subjective opinion. Nothing else.

Now, I'm using both.

As for my own PERSONAL opinion on the Windows 7 UI, I think Microsoft did better than Vista, but they've still misunderstood something: A great UI is not about surface this, surface that. Everything is plastic, or glass, or see-through, or lighting up, and what have we not.

My "thing" with the OS X UI, is that it's clean. It's nice - and clean.

And I fancy that way more than fancy plastic/glass surfaces. Which I think is making the user experience a not so cool thing.

Also, for me - OS X *never* crashes. Neither has Windows 7. That said, XP has done it very very few times, same for Vista.

Fact is - you can make any of the three crash at your command, if you just know how to.

Based on purely personal opinions, the ONLY place I'd rather run Windows over OS X, is in an enterprise environment. Microsoft has a fantastic management portfolio of applications and tools. When I say fantastic, it's not in the "cause Linux and OS X don't have any". Just that they're easier to use, and that MS purposely develops that part of their business.

But other than that ? I'm taking OS X over Windows 7 any day of the week.

For me, it runs fantastic, fast, stable, and it's a joy to use. In fact, I find myself pressing Command + Q at work sometimes, to close applications ;)

But, that's for me. Personally.

And as far as discussions goes, that's more or less the only way it can be. Personal.

How often it crashes, if the UI is better... I'm betting you don't have an actual count of your computers crash history. And to conclude that one UI is factually better than the other, is just plain dumb. Not just biased. Dumb. You can NOT factually decide that, unless one is so crappy it's obvious that the other one is better.

As far as economics - Nopes, can't beat the Windows price when you look at the whole package, including hardware.

You definitely can when you look at the price of the operating system. OS X wins then. Also, Apple has better pricing when it comes to family packs (does MS even have that ?)

Since performance largely depends on what hardware it's running on, I'm betting you can "factually" prove either side is "factually" better than the other.

Fact is, for me OS X runs bloody fantastic, on relatively limited hardware (iMac 2007 w/ 4gb RAM).

I'm hoping you'll be more nuanced in your next article.

Because that article right there, is one of the most biased pieces of journalistic crap I've seen in a long time.

There, I said it.