@Michael Fischer, OK first let’s get the snide professor comment out of the way :-p. Hmm… anthropology professor eh? McDonald’s thanks you for your contribution to its work force (yeah, went with the stereotypical engineer response. It’s too early to be creative, sorry).

Power life can be a problem with tablets, it certainly is with my aging Toshiba M200. That being said, there are tablets that don’t have that problem, and can easily outlast a Mac, you just have to look for them (then pay a premium)

Mono is not a language at all, it is an open source implementation of the .NET framework… which also includes an implementation of C# (and VB.NET, I don’t think they’ve done the DLR though, so no IronRuby, IronPython, etc). C# is a general purpose language, but .NET is not cross platform which is, I think, what you meant. I have used Java and many interpreted languages that can be used across platforms extensively, I just think that C# is currently a better language for large projects if you don’t have to worry about being cross platform compatible. Frankly, with Apple at around 3% and Linux at likely less, developers normally don’t have to worry about them unless they are specially targeting them. I bet you’d find that almost all the programs you use day to day on the Mac have been written in cocoa and targeted specifically to that platform.
Yeah, I misspelled cocoa, it’s been over a year since I looked into it seriously so I guess that is no surprise.

I always multi task when it’s appropriate, which is, yes, most of the time. I normally have 8-15 windows open myself… around 20-40 if you include tabs; however, when I need to concentrate on one thing, I like being able to block the other windows out of the main display area by maximizing my window of concern. Perhaps this is because I’m a developer, I love my data-hiding . I never claimed my list was a general list for everyone. Your right, the folder thing is a personal choice. What I’d really like to see is an option for both on both operating systems.

I think we’ll agree to disagree on that power cord thing. I know from using other people’s Macs that it drives me nuts. I do like the idea of it being magnetically attached though. Again, even with all that being said, I still want one. And I don’t doubt that it will be one of my first major purchases post school.

- AcerNote Nuovo 970CX. 8lbs with battery, SVGA display, 8 hours of battery life.
- Toshiba Libretto 110CT. ~2lbs with battery, 4 hours battery life, WVGA display.
- 12″ Powerbook G4. <4lbs with battery, 4 hours battery life, XGA display.
- Sony UX280. ~1 lbs with battery, 2 hours battery life, WSVGA display.

That moved me from Linux to Win2K to OS X to WinXP, but not for the most obvious reasons. One, I replace hardware when the warranty expires. Two, I pick the hardware that best suits my projected needs. Three, I don’t give a rat’s ass about OS loyalty.

So, what have I learned? One, 800×480 is good enough for Windows 2000, but everything past that adds too much chrome. Also, 64MB is barely enough for a real Windows OS.

Two, OS X is the least intrusive OS ever. It doesn’t ask stupid questions, it doesn’t get in my way, it Just Works. I’ll admit that it can’t do everything, but that’s generally okay, because what it can do, it does quickly, easily, and intuitively. I can normally get a lot more work done on a Mac than I can on a PC, just because it’s so well thought out. I browse faster, I work faster, I manage multiple servers faster, and that’s something that I just can’t pull off with such aplomb on even an XP system with multiple monitors. It helps that the system defaults to Sleep Mode, and wakes up incredibly quickly. I can grab a Mac, pop it open, do something, and close it again in no time, so it’s rarely a distraction *to me.*

Nowadays, I need a small computer, something bordering on pocketable, so I have the Sony UX. It’s taught me that Vista sucks ass on less than 2GB of RAM, but on the XP side, it’s nice having a full-featured computer on deck, even if the UI is suboptimal.

Sadly, the UX keyboard issues are getting a little out of hand, and I’m considering something else, but there’s one last hidden advantage to the UX over other ultraportables: Due to the hardware choices, I’m a single mini-PCI card away from proper hardware support under an OS X install, which may very well be the most effective combo I can manage.

What is better? Mac or PC?

Well for tablets… there’s only one solution: Windows. For desktop and Lapies, one can choose Mac or Win.

I do run Vista in my tablet and OSX in my iMac. Experience is much smoother and easier on the mac. Why? Because I don’t need to open the control panel every 10 seconds to change whatever little detail! Microsoft made Vista for computers in 3-5 years… not for now. OSX, at least Tiger, still runs pretty well on my G3 400mhz with 512Mo RAM !!! Also the lack of virii and other badware is really welcome on the mac side. Windows defender, antivirus etc suck big time.

BUT there are things one cannot do on a mac. Skype will always be a few releases behind windows. Windows media player is way behind. One cannot stream Netflix online movies on a mac, some software are designed only for PCs, although these are not mainstream softwares! There’s also no speech to text recognition, a crappy handwriting recognition, etc. Well there are some hitches too with macs.

So what to choose? If you read JK, it means you’re a geek… and you may need both operating systems (through parallels or 2 computers, whatever). If you’re my aging parents or my wife that hates computers, get a mac. It’s much easier…

Owning a MAC must be so boring!

I decided today to setup a dual boot on my old laptop – Win2000 (the best OS in my opinion) and XP MCE to try out the MCE keyboard and remote I picked up for a song.

Did it just work? Of course it didn’t – it didn’t even get a few minutes into the MCE install before a message popped up saying ‘can’t install keyboard DLL file’ or some such and told me to switch off the PC.

MS OSs are so much more fun to play with don’t you think?

By the way, not being American, whenever someone mentions Soccer Mom I always think of sexy, bored housewives.

@bluespapa – Bascially you’re right – if you don’t feel the need, why bother. One of the reasons I recommend Macs to people is not because they are simple (though if I know them well I do want them to get off Windows … I just don’t have time), but to make them more ambitious – people seem to be able to do more without a lot of knowledge, and they don’t generally lose 75 hours a year to fiddling just to keep the machine running (estimate from various studies). I just don’t have an extra week a year to spare, and most of the people I know don’t either.

Your wife may have problems, but having to reinstall software is odd … I think we’ve done that four or five times over 7 years on 120 or so macs, but no more. Not at all in the past three. Jumping to reinstallation sounds like someone who hasn’t quite ‘transitioned’ yet.

Still I have seen problems like this with people trying to use Mac OS X like it was Windows and end up causing real problems – Apple needs to study this more if they are entertaining more switchers. And from the wifi example, she could just be accident prone. My experience is that macs are too willing to join networks and I have to warn people not to take up every invitation. BTW you can find all apple specs at http://support.apple.com/specs/ – took me 15 seconds of google to locate.

@mwalts – (disclosure: also a Professor) Your first reason is valid enough for the moment – I am still looking for same – started to buy a tablet, but in investigating discovered that between my old Psion Netbook and assorted Newtons that these were actually better than anything I could buy if one could live without nice colour graphics (the Netbook has colour, but on the old passive matrix display). Both will operate for more than a full day on a charge, are light, are based on flash, and work well for those kinds of tasks and they still work after a decade! The only good alternative I found on todays market was the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, now replaced by the Nokia 800 and soon the 810 (which looks very good!). These run linux. The windows based boxes are only useful if you are tethered to a power plug, or don’t need long sessions and can bear the tedium that is windows.

The cost – we buy all kinds of hardware and for equivalent configurations the price is pretty similar (+- $50) – there are lower cost notebooks but they are also lower configurations – and the macbook pro is much less (about $500) than equivalently configured notebooks running windows. However, lots of people don’t need everything you have to buy when you buy a mac.

Mono is not C# and C# is not a general purpose language – too tied to Microsoft – same for Cocoa (Apple) (which is why we don’t use Cocoa). Use something that works everywhere (many choices).

Folders – a matter of taste, not logic.

Single tasking – the biggest problem I find with new students used to windows is that they have a tendency to single-task – they close each window before moving to the next – Macs are a multi-taking OS – I typically have 200-400 windows open at a time each associated with some task I am doing – would be really time consuming to have to start up each thing I need to do (perhaps students can afford to single task – professors can’t).

Tiny power lead on macbook/pro will save your life (or at least your computer) – no more pets/students tripping over your cord).

Mind control – as an anthropologist I have noticed that people take to defending their computer far beyond what one would expect – what can I say. However, as someone who is responsible for paying for support of users I can say where most of that payment goes – Windows accounts for three quarters (and these are one quarter of the machines we have), Unix (Solaris) about 20% just because the guys are expensive, and Macs about 5%. These are just numbers that betray that Macs aren’t perfect, but seem to be about 15x more perfect than Windows, as measured in dollars (well pounds really), and I assume pain and suffering that goes with the problems.

However, as a student you’ll live, or buy used. When you have a job, invest in yourself. You’re worth it.

I’ve watched my wife transition to a Gmac and a Macbook Pro, and she’s had to reinstall Photoshop and Tiger as many times as I’ve had to reinstall half of my software. I haven’t gotten the blue screen of death much since Windows 98, and I rarely have problems with Office 2007 (though the beta lost so much of my work, I still haven’t tried what seems to be a beta of Vista). She went off to the local coffee house one day and couldn’t get back on our wifi at home, and we messed up so many things trying to re-pair the two, that I finally went out and bought another wireless router to hook into the regular one–she could get right on, and still couldn’t get on the regular one.

I can’t sit in meetings with a laptop and a screen between me and everybody else, and I CAN sit and take notes (and check my email, blog, play solitaire or do actual useful research during the meeting), and the tablet isn’t near the distraction a laptop would be. The online tour of Leopard is stunning, and it clearly does things that I’ve had to pay to have add-ons perform, but it looks like Vista has other add-ons, and it has handwriting recognition. I’ve been using my Q1 almost exclusively, and with two gigs of ram, it does almost almost everything I want.

I’ll admit that Apple “got” integration long before Microsoft, and Leopard looks as though integrating all the different media will be even more seamless; certainly switching from Outlook to OneNote to MindManager to Word, etc., isn’t as seamless as it should be, though they are integrated in ways previous Windows integration just wasn’t, but I don’t get the “it just works” when I’ve been watching my wife back up, reinstall, lose, and be denied permissions all too often. My mother can write with Word and email with Outlook Express, and doesn’t want to mess with much more, and recommending anything contemporary to her is overkill. “It just works” is complicated, and learning a new file structure, operating system peculiarities, etc., means a learning curve, even if it’s less of one for someone going the other way. I’d be willing, but why should someone who just wants to work and knows what they have at work?

I’ll also say that while my kids hate Vista for unnecessary UI changes that have had them searching for things XP had trained them to expect, they both hated the Apples at school, though those were probably not OS X.

I do appreciate James’s basic message, that an experienced user on both will find OS X preferable. My workplace bought a cite license and I have Office Enterprise on my computers, so I’m unlikely to switch for the whiz-bang effect, but I’ll be watching. Despite her frustrations, my wife has been productive with photography and video on her Macs, and I’ve just spent a week reinstalling and restarting and the house of cards is delicately balanced again, but it certainly is true that using a computer is still like pre-fuel injection and computer control on a car. Everybody knew how to start theirs, keep it going in the winter, and how it will run on a hill. It doesn’t take marketing necessarily: my workplace claims to prepare workers for the workplace, and needs up to date equipment; my wife’s workplace just moved up to XP in the last couple of months, and to Office 2003 this year. That’s not shrewed marketing on Microsoft’s part, it’s just a cheap, short-sighted business decision that kept them on Windows 95 when my kids were on XP and I was on XP Tablet.

But even with the latest, if I have to say to someone that I’m showing off my tablet to, ignore that, oh, you have to start this one before can start that one, etc., it’s just ridiculous. And friends with Vista have had the same experience, and I’ve watched my wife sit wondering why she can’t just drag and drop in one screen like she can in the others on her Mac.

If Mac users have less of that nonsense, it’s not surprising that Apple’s profits are up 67%.

Also, while my iPod is fantastic, iTunes has irritations that keep thinking OS X couldn’t be better, just different. Why put myself through all this trial and error (and reinstalling, restarting, and trial and error all over again) just for slightly fancier graphics? Why would Apple make trying to find the specs of their products online so irritating? If I spend two hours online trying to find out basic facts of their products, and still can’t, why spend two more when I can find the specs on a dozen other brands in a few seconds? Apple has work to do, too.

@Pam, well I was going to make a comment about how silly and chauvinistic that soccer mom comment was but… a professor? Sure you wouldn’t rather we think of you as a soccer mom? . Just kidding, but I think as a computer system technologist and current software engineering student, I’m legally required to make fun of professors when they can’t (easily) track me down

Seriously though, I have never owned a Mac, and without dual booting and parallels I would never have one as my primary machine. That being said I want one, and the only reason I won’t have one soon is:

-No proper mac tablet yet (why the heck not!). I have to sit through a lot of lectures, and without tablet functionality my notes would be an unholy mess, and I would no doubt lose half of them (like I did pre-tablet)
-The price. Even with a student discount it, will cost you a fair chunk more then the hardware equivalent PC (and not claims of there being no equivalent, you’re not fooling anyone)
-I think C# (especially 3.0) is a better language then objective-C and that .NET has better libraries then Cocco. If you’re a developer, you might want to look into some of the neat new things coming out int the .NET space like the DLR and the MVC for ASP.NET. Yes MONO runs everywhere, but no, it’s not the same.
-Copying a folder on top of a folder destroys the original folder, there is no option to merge the contents.
-The “maximize” button is actually a size window to contents button, so the other open windows will still be visible and bothering me when I’m trying to concentrate on one task unless I manually resize the window.
-That tiny power cord is ridiculous.
-Most people that I know who have switched stop thinking objectively and refuse to admit to even the tiniest flaws in the Mac paradigm. No computer system is perfect, and if a Mac would make me think that it was, it must have some powerful mind controlling hardware inside that I’d rather stay away from

Fix the first two and I’d probably buy one today and happily dual (well, more likely triple) boot with it.

Let’s see…

@Jake, I didn’t suggest that you had to blindly follow anyone’s opinion, but I did suggest that responding to James’ post about the utility he is getting from his Mac with the number of Windows users that exist worldwide was kind of nonresponsive to the issues he raised.

@MA, you make me laugh! Try my comments reek of so much of a university professor… not that one’s occupation should matter in a forum like this, but since you raised it…

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2007/10/take_me_home_le.html

As a pc-turned-mac user, I have a good look on both sides of the fence. Of course I’m also biased (duh, I *switched*), but aside from that, the whole ‘Macs just work’ statement is kinda true. When I had my PC’s, I regularly updated them, be it software/drivers or hardware. I’ve had 2 or 3 big hardware upgrades of my system before I switched, and I’ve had none with my Macs. This isn’t a bad thing either. PC’s are more modular, you add whatever you want, and that’s that. This could save you some serious cash (Don’t buy what you don’t want). When I buy a Mac, I do little to nothing with it, upgrade-wise. Software is done automatically, so is drivers (thanks to all the hardware coming through apple). Sure, I upgraded my RAM the minute I unboxed my macs (Come on, 512MB ram on the first gen macbooks, the hell?), but somehow, you just seem to use your mac, until you get a new(er) one. So for the ‘it just works’ part, if you look at it like this, it kind of makes sense.

Then, my little brother recently got a new computer. One of those ‘complete in a box’ ones that brands put out. It came with Vista Home something, and a whopping 512mb RAM, along with a video card that made you cry even by reading the specifications. The saddest part was, that was the best this particular store had to offer.

Now, us tech savvy guys know our way around it. We know what RAM to buy to plug it in, and know what video card to get to make it run decently. But for our average consumer, how do you expect them to hack up their brand new machine, just to get basic stuff to work normally?

Windows XP is a rock solid system, and most systems that got sold with XP were pretty good, they worked well enough to be… well… workable. But nowadays, You can’t simply go out and buy a simple system, not if you don’t have the knowledge to patch it all up to at least WORK.

And that is where I feel really different with Apple. Buy any of their computers, and they work right out of the box. Sure, more ram won’t hurt, but even with the standard amount, it works fine.

So maybe, in the end, it’s not Microsoft that’s causing the trouble (well… aside from Vista), maybe it’s all those big computer companies that screw us over, big time .

Now, for some fancy Mac fanboy ending (you seriously didn’t believe I would let you go away without one, did you?), I can’t wait for my pre-ordered Leopard to get here. My Macbook Pro is fully set for the upgrade, and I can’t wait to see how the speed is improved.

Get a Mac. Save the world .

Maybe you’re right, Jake. In the world that you inhabit that may just be the case. And you’re certainly entitled to your opinion.

But from where I sit (and I guess where James and Kevin sits), there are quite a few people who are seriously considering switching over to the Mac, and not because they want to run Windows, though they’d like having that option if it later became necessary. So no, they’re not spending the $70 on Parallels right now. These people see value (not toy, but a better user experience) in the Mac.

I do disagree with jk that MS needs to worry about Apple as a desktop OS, as they continue to dominate the large corporation space, and there is so much inertia, nothing will change for awhile. But Google and other application space companies are encroaching on or hemming in MS from further growth; that is their first concern. But MA, it is true that every quake starts with just a tiny tremor.

Apple in the handheld OS space is another story. MS clearly saw this threat back in Jan 06 when they started working on the Zune; becoming willing to kill off PlaysforSure and their partners. Not sure yet why they had to choose this course since it seems they could’ve built on Windows Mobile and licensed it to those partners.

Anyway, to those who value simplicity (in the midst of incredible complexity), OS X is the place to be.

>>>oh Pam, your comment reeks of so much soccer mom simplicity that i wont even bother.

Guess what, pal? She’s a far larger market than *your* type is!

Dismissed. Next!

Whenever someone on a website says, “I have no problems with Mac OS X”, someone else leaves a comment saying, “Well I don’t have problems with Windows either!!11″

It’s like cars. “I’ve had so many problems with my Chevy whatever!” “That’s funny, no problems with mine, but boy my Honda Civic was messed up.”

I manage 6 pc’s running Windows XP that are networked together for a local business. I finally managed to massage all the legacy software and malware software to play together without crashing now and then. PC users who moved up to Vista are lamenting the overly aggressive built-in virus and malware protection that keeps informing the user every few minutes that he/she is using the computer and asking whether or not they wish to continue using the computer… The Borg (Microsoft) keeps changing the operating system regardless of the fact that all options short of unplugging the computer are set to “do not update… do not change anything…” I know because I get called in to fix the consequences of the Borg’s secret modifications that cause the house of cards to collapse… Can’t complain though because I get paid to fix it…

The key things that I wanted to mention are the hidden security features embedded into Leopard that get little if any mention. Leopard has built in defenses that experts agree will make it practically malware proof. I use a Mac to get work done… I work with Windows machines to get paid…

@Pam. Sorry, I didn’t realise I just had to blindly agree with everything that James and Kevin have to say. My comments weren’t meant as a personal attack on James’s opinion and I’m sorry you took them that way. I thought that the point of these posts was to have a discussion – not just to praise JK for his thoughts (although he does deserve a pat on the back for putting together such a great site).

Having said that, I stand by my comments about Macs. The bottom line is that I don’t feel that spending a lot of money on a Mac will bring any benefits over sticking with Windows. Thus, it would end up as an expensive toy that I would use for surfing the web. I would imagine that there are quite a few other people who feel this way and this is what will keep Apple down.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only thing that will help Apple grow beyond it’s tiny market share would be to ditch OSX altogether and just run Windows. Then people will buy the hardware. I’m sure you disagree with me but most new sales of Macs will be because of bootcamp rather than OSX.