Switching Back and Forth
After a little over two years of using Macs now, I can say with great conviction that Apple has done an incredible job of maturing the platform. Things just work a whole lot better than they did before. I couldn’t really find much of a use for them previously, but now, I wouldn’t let go of my Mac for another tricked-out PC.
These days, I still use my main PC to do some work on. For example, there are certainly some things that are faster on my PC than on my Mac. However, keep in mind that my PC is faster than my Mac only because I’m using a 15-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of memory. My PC is running much faster. So, I use my PC for Photoshop work, and a few games.
The appeal of a Mac isn’t so much about Apple’s way of designing hardware, it’s Apple’s operating system that is the key selling point for me. Mac OS X is simply a very powerful and well optimized system. It’s based on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5 — a system that jives well with me because of my background in Linux. For those who say that Macs are not for very technical people, I’d have to disagree. I can use the majority of my Linux commands in OS X, do shell scripting, and remotely log into other *nix systems without a problem. The system is robust and highly tweakable.
Besides being robust and *nix based, OS X is just so well streamlined. It’s very fast at handling multiple applications and also efficient at managing system memory. The sweet spot for Leopard is likely 2 GB of memory, which is in the same ballpark as Windows XP or Vista really, but what Leopard does with its available memory is the key. Efficiency, fast, stable, configurable, customizable, powerful — most of all, it’s very mature!
The key thing for Apple is that it took a big giant leap and built OS X from the ground up. OS X although several years old now just keeps getting better because it’s on a platform that leaps away from the old legacy Mac OSes. I can’t really say the same for Windows.
Now I have to point out here that Microsoft does have a case for what it does: compatibility. Because Windows computers are so prevalent, Microsoft has to maintain a certain level of backwards compatibility. There’s just an ocean of hardware and software out there for the Windows platform. So it’s not surprising that Windows has a lot under its belt. It’s easier for Apple because it doesn’t have to manage millions of legacy hardware devices and software applications.