Mac OS X vs. Windows XP

[pm63]

I'm currently running (and am most proficient at) Windows XP on my home machine, but recently I've deided to get a laptop.

I was seriously considering a MacBook until very recently, when I started to ask myself if OS X really is just shiny visuals and is not as practical as Windows.

Now, I'm really confused over what to get. I've test drived both, and OS X did seem smoother, but obviously its all about the software, and there isnt that much available for it.

What really put me off so far arethe things I have seen in this thread: http://forum.netmag.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=27834

And as I will be doing schoolwork and webdesign mostly, followed by programming and web browsing and maybe some graphic design, this troubles me slightly.

Im therefore really confused and would like someone to please explain to me:

What can a Macintosh give me that a PC can't? Where does it excell when compared to a PC and will it be better suited to the things I'm doing (above) then a PC will? Are there really small niggles (such as no fullscreen apps) that make it frustrating?

 

[DasFox]

Well I didn't read that article but I know the deal, OSX is as real as an OS gets, and as far as speaking in those terms, "An OS" superior to Windows, aside from software support.

So really you just have to decide if it supports the software you need, and if it does then you'll be better off, without the spyware/viruses, plus it's a more stable system too.

So a summary.

#1) Does it have the software support you need?
#2) OSX is a Unix based system, this means better performance, and stability over Windows
#3) Spyware/malware, and viruses are practically non existent

OSX is a more stable system with less to non existent threats, when compared to Windows.

Oh and if you get one of the newer Macs running the Intel architecture, guess what? You can put Windows on it, and have the best of both worlds.

Do your web work in Windows if it supports it better, and go online with OSX for better security and less problems, headaches, now that is ONE real smart solution to your problems.

ALOHA

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: pm63
but obviously its all about the software, and there isnt that much available for it.

You're nuts.

What really put me off so far arethe things I have seen in this thread: http://forum.netmag.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=27834

Summarize it for us, I don't feel like reading a bunch of stuff on another forum.

What can a Macintosh give me that a PC can't?

Mac OS X.

Where does it excell when compared to a PC

When you want to use software for Mac OS X, need a machine with a decent selection of software included by default (nothing like having a useful machine out of the box instead of having to hunt down for a million pieces of software like you do with Windows), need a *nix but want major corporate support.

Are there really small niggles (such as no fullscreen apps) that make it frustrating?

The fact that it works well without full screen applications makes it better in my opinion.

 

[nweaver]

as far as software goes, I think you can install most any opensource app, which means there are tons of well written and free apps.

 

[Nothinman]

And as I will be doing schoolwork and webdesign mostly, followed by programming and web browsing and maybe some graphic design, this troubles me slightly.

Find out what you need for your schoolwork. If you're just talking about doing things in Word then you can probably get by with OpenOffice or buy a copy of MS Office for the Mac. Graphic design and web browsing won't be an issue although you may have to buy the design software again if you only have the Windows version currently. Programming might be an issue, running OS X doesn't make a lot of sense if you're going to be writing Windows apps although you could put Windows in Parallels if you want.

 

[drag]

If you get the MacBook you can always install XP on it if you don't end up liking OS X. If you get a regular laptop then you can't install OS X over XP, so it doesnt' work in reverse. Also you can run Parrellels to run XP alongside OS X in a VM environment. Switching back and forth is just like switching desktops.

So if Macbook looks to you like a decent enough notebook computer that you'd buy it anyways just to run Windows if you could, then it's quite pointless to buy anything else if your curious about OS X.

You don't realy have to give up anything anymore in terms of application and game support to use OS X. Dual booting and virtual machine technology has taken care of that.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: DasFox
#2) OSX is a Unix based system, this means better performance, and stability over Windows

Damn I get annoyed when people write silly things like this. unix is a set of standards, none of which say that you must be faster or more stable than windows. Anybody can screw up a unix implementation.

As for the programming question, it kinda depends on what programming you will be doing. If you are doing windows style programming you'll obviously be better off on windows. It'd probably be .net so you might get by with mono on the mac but it wouldn't be very idea. If you're doing more unixy programming, you obviously want a mac. If you're doing something like java or python, it really won't matter. os x has better out-of-the-box support for both but setting up your own is part of the journey

 

[Skitzer]

I have both a Windows machine with XP Pro and Vista on it and an eMac with Tiger on it. I game and surf the web with my windows machine and do everything else on my Mac. Anything you want to do can be done on a Mac, (and usually much better and more efficiently). The only exception would be games. If I wasn't a Gamer I probably wouldn't even own a windows machine, (I would probably turn it into a Linux machine).

 

[spikespiegal]

I hear the same tripe from Mac users:

'OSX is more stable than Windows'

'OSX is more secure than Windows'

'OSX is faster than Windows'

Feel free to google the top ten web-host/application developers in your area, who consequently are in a brutally competitive industry that demands 24/7 uptimes, high security, and rock solid performance.

Take note how many use OSX and Apple hardware vs Linux/Windows and generic x386 hardware. Then ask yourself if you really want to use a platform where you are forced to use only the hardware the OS maker says you can use, and is primarily promoted by people who couldn't figure Windows XP out.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal
I hear the same tripe from Mac users:

'OSX is more stable than Windows'

'OSX is more secure than Windows'

'OSX is faster than Windows'

Feel free to google the top ten web-host/application developers in your area, who consequently are in a brutally competitive industry that demands 24/7 uptimes, high security, and rock solid performance.

Take note how many use OSX and Apple hardware vs Linux/Windows and generic x386 hardware. Then ask yourself if you really want to use a platform where you are forced to use only the hardware the OS maker says you can use, and is primarily promoted by people who couldn't figure Windows XP out.

Still bitter huh?

Workstations shouldn't be expected to have 24/7 uptimes, that's basically ridiculous.

Security isn't a concern for web developers, if it was we wouldn't see so many XSS vulnerabilities.

You can use whatever hardware you want as far as peripherals. If you mean for the base system, I guess you don't like any of the system solution vendors...

 

[spikespiegal]

Summarize it for us, I don't feel like reading a bunch of stuff on another forum.

I will.

Ten years of corporate consulting, companies with revenues in excess of over a billion dollars in all different industries, over a dozen server farms bigger than your house, and not a single itty-bitty Apple computer or OS ever encountered performing a mission critical role other than designing videos or flyers in the media lab.

I figure if the engineers who's jobs and hence mortgages and families have no problem with Windows (and Linux) keeping stability and security and running corporate commerce, then Win2K might be fine on my desktop, which it does. However, if you find building a laptop into a desktop LCD as 'innovative', and like running apps like Photoshop inside Rosetta on a quad processor where the second processor spends most of it's life idle even though you paid $1,000 for it, then Mac is for you.

This movie was produced and rendered on a Mac:
http://www.skycaptain.com/

This movie was produced and rendered on Windows XP:
http://video.movies.go.com/sincity/

I'll take Brude Willis over Jude Law anyday.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal

Summarize it for us, I don't feel like reading a bunch of stuff on another forum.

I will.

Ten years of corporate consulting, companies with revenues in excess of over a billion dollars in all different industries, over a dozen server farms bigger than your house, and not a single itty-bitty Apple computer or OS ever encountered performing a mission critical role other than designing videos or flyers in the media lab.

I figure if the engineers who's jobs and hence mortgages and families have no problem with Windows (and Linux) keeping stability and security and running corporate commerce, then Win2K might be fine on my desktop, which it does. However, if you find building a laptop into a desktop LCD as 'innovative', and like running apps like Photoshop inside Rosetta on a quad processor where the second processor spends most of it's life idle even though you paid $1,000 for it, then Mac is for you.

This movie was produced and rendered on a Mac:
http://www.skycaptain.com/

This movie was produced and rendered on Windows XP:
http://video.movies.go.com/sincity/

I'll take Brude Willis over Jude Law anyday.

I thought sincity was rendered on a linux cluster...

What do large clusters and whatnot have to do with desktops? They're entirely different concepts.

 

[drag]

They used both Linux and Windows in their stuff. The workstations were XP-64, which isn't terribly usual. (Linux has inherented most high-end movie tasks from SGI) Most places use Linux. I would expect that any 3d rendering was done mostly on Linux clusters.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: spikespiegal

Summarize it for us, I don't feel like reading a bunch of stuff on another forum.

I will.

Ten years of corporate consulting, companies with revenues in excess of over a billion dollars in all different industries, over a dozen server farms bigger than your house, and not a single itty-bitty Apple computer or OS ever encountered performing a mission critical role other than designing videos or flyers in the media lab.

I figure if the engineers who's jobs and hence mortgages and families have no problem with Windows (and Linux) keeping stability and security and running corporate commerce, then Win2K might be fine on my desktop, which it does. However, if you find building a laptop into a desktop LCD as 'innovative', and like running apps like Photoshop inside Rosetta on a quad processor where the second processor spends most of it's life idle even though you paid $1,000 for it, then Mac is for you.

This movie was produced and rendered on a Mac:
http://www.skycaptain.com/

This movie was produced and rendered on Windows XP:
http://video.movies.go.com/sincity/

I'll take Brude Willis over Jude Law anyday.

I thought sincity was rendered on a linux cluster...

What do large clusters and whatnot have to do with desktops? They're entirely different concepts.

I suppose if you wanted a *really* reliable "workstation" a distributed cluster with UPSes might be the way to go. Having a distributed system is great when you can add or remove slave nodes with no effect on overall function... if the server node goes down you're out of luck though.

 

[nweaver]

MS has locked you into hardware too....we have 2 (3 I guess, if you count Cyrix) processors, 1.5 architectures (x86, x86-64)...there is choice for you.

in comparison, Sun offers Sparc, Alpha (iirc), x86/x86-64, Linux/BSD support everything and the kitchen sink

not that it matters...we can all go the rounds again...default instal of OSX, default install of XP SP2, wore venerable to issues?

blah blah blah "installed base" argumentes go here
blah blah blah "I've never had a virus in my 32 years of computing"
blah blah blah "other arguments that don't change the fact the windows, as default, is more venerable to malware then OS X"

 

[drag]

if the server node goes down you're out of luck though.

Not realy.

You use a distributed file system and do root node failover.

The simpliest and cheapest way to do that would be to use DRDB to mirror two disk partitions across the network. That would be low-end failover for two nodes. That sort of thing is pretty easy to setup.

Next level up would be to have redundant Linux PCs serving as dedicated storage (basicly use lots of drives with software raid to turn the machines into dedicated IP-based storage controllers) with redundant bonded ethernet ports with redundant switches that then feed data to your clients using ISCSI or GNDB and other GFS-based software technologies over IP. That's pretty simple to do also, but obviously having redundant hardware raises the price.

Of course next level above that would be to have some sort of dedicated storage array. Probably SAN with fiberchannel to GFS servers that extend the storage fabric using TCP/IP and ethernet (again with iscsi or gndb) to the various nodes. But that's getting very expensive and complicated.

For ultimate you'd go with SANs in combination with Nodes being partly responsable for storage and using Lustre with low-latency, high-bandwidth network interconnects for the utlimate level of storage performance.

(and no you can't do this with OS X. )

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal
I hear the same tripe from Mac users:

'OSX is more stable than Windows'

'OSX is more secure than Windows'

'OSX is faster than Windows'

Feel free to google the top ten web-host/application developers in your area, who consequently are in a brutally competitive industry that demands 24/7 uptimes, high security, and rock solid performance.

Take note how many use OSX and Apple hardware vs Linux/Windows and generic x386 hardware. Then ask yourself if you really want to use a platform where you are forced to use only the hardware the OS maker says you can use, and is primarily promoted by people who couldn't figure Windows XP out.

sigh...I develop on a Mac as do several other developers in my company (we're a Linux/Java shop). There are also some in use by project managers and development managers in place of Thinkpads running XP. It works just fine. It IS more stable than XP, we DON'T have to worry about virii, and it's plenty fast.

However, we deploy to Sun Fires running Solaris. Sure we don't use OSX for our server environment. Doesn't mean it's not suitable for software development or anything else you'd use an XP laptop/desktop for in a business environment. Only thing is it can't play the latest games. Last I checked, I wasn't allowed to do that at work. But guess what, I can dual boot and play my games in WIndows if I choose. The Mac and OSX gives your MORE options than Windows does.

And puhlease...we can't figure XP out?!?!? wtf is that supposed to mean? Just because you limit your own choices to an inferior and aging OS doesn't mean the rest of us have to.

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: spikespiegal
I hear the same tripe from Mac users:

'OSX is more stable than Windows'

'OSX is more secure than Windows'

'OSX is faster than Windows'

Feel free to google the top ten web-host/application developers in your area, who consequently are in a brutally competitive industry that demands 24/7 uptimes, high security, and rock solid performance.

Take note how many use OSX and Apple hardware vs Linux/Windows and generic x386 hardware. Then ask yourself if you really want to use a platform where you are forced to use only the hardware the OS maker says you can use, and is primarily promoted by people who couldn't figure Windows XP out.

Your anti-Apple trolling is almost as annoying as Link19's Windows 9x rants. :roll:

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: nweaver
blah blah blah "other arguments that don't change the fact the windows, as default, is more venerable to malware then OS X"]

I'm gonna suggest that you consult a dictionary. I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure this is not what you meant

 

[tatteredpotato]

Don't buy a mac, rather spend the extra and get a better Windows machine and if you desire the "Mac experience" then dual boot it with linux and configure it to your liking. If your in web/software development, the Linux will be cake for you.

OS X is linux for those who dont know how to use linux...... i see no other purpose.

 

[INM8]

For your purposes It doesn't make sense to go Mac. Graphic design seems to be the lowest in your list of priorities and that is what OS X is supposedly good at (I say supposedly because I haven't seen any evidence of what makes it better then any other OS for graphic design). Web design? Programming? Web browsing? Windows and Linux handle those tasks much better then OS X does.

For programming Linux is the best learning environment you can get, and for general purpose schoolwork and web browsing it is safe and secure. It is secure because less people use it therefore it is not the target of many malicious attacks, unlike windows for instance. I'm not going to feed you any bull**** about unix and how safe and secure it is, just the honest truth. The number one reason Linux is more secure is because less people are interested in exploiting it. The same goes for OS X. Since Apple keep their OS so locked down (aka: you can only get the OS if you run their hardware) learning to program on a Mac does not make any sense at all. You are better of learning on a system that is either: 1. open to the public (aka: Linux) or 2. Commonly used in the industry (aka: Windows). Since you are already familiar with Windows, I would suggest saving yourself some $$$, going with standard (ie: non mac) laptop. If you decide you want a change, dual boot and install Linux.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: BlameCanada
OS X is linux for those who dont know how to use linux...... i see no other purpose.

This statement made me throw up in my mouth.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: INM8
For your purposes It doesn't make sense to go Mac. Graphic design seems to be the lowest in your list of priorities and that is what OS X is supposedly good at (I say supposedly because I haven't seen any evidence of what makes it better then any other OS for graphic design). Web design? Programming? Web browsing? Windows and Linux handle those tasks much better then OS X does.

For programming Linux is the best learning environment you can get, and for general purpose schoolwork and web browsing it is safe and secure. It is secure because less people use it therefore it is not the target of many malicious attacks, unlike windows for instance. I'm not going to feed you any bull**** about unix and how safe and secure it is, just the honest truth. The number one reason Linux is more secure is because less people are interested in exploiting it. The same goes for OS X. Since Apple keep their OS so locked down (aka: you can only get the OS if you run their hardware) learning to program on a Mac does not make any sense at all. You are better of learning on a system that is either: 1. open to the public (aka: Linux) or 2. Commonly used in the industry (aka: Windows). Since you are already familiar with Windows, I would suggest saving yourself some $$$, going with standard (ie: non mac) laptop. If you decide you want a change, dual boot and install Linux.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Did he just say that?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Tha'ts a good one.

 

[pm63]

OK, It started off fine, but then turned into some stupid argument about servers and a flamewar.

Don't take my thread off topic.

I wanted to know if for my needs, OS X would do the job better. I have indeed tested Linux, however, I find that it is a lot to learn for someone who needs to have a full GUI OS right now. I do go to a Linux club, but am still not very experienced at it, and need a functional machine which I can use right now. I will partition my HDD and install Linux in addition, no matter what OS I get, as a learning tool. I just don't think it is suitable for me as a primary OS, rather a learning tool. I know it wil be suitable for progrmming but that is pretty much bottom of my list right now.

So, now with Linux/UNIX/Solaris/whatever out of the way, please tell me if it would be more suited to my needs. Leave the flaming to somewhere else.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: pm63
OK, It started off fine, but then turned into some stupid argument about servers and a flamewar.

Don't take my thread off topic.

I wanted to know if for my needs, OS X would do the job better. I have indeed tested Linux, however, I find that it is a lot to learn for someone who needs to have a full GUI OS right now. I do go to a Linux club, but am still not very experienced at it, and need a functional machine which I can use right now. I will partition my HDD and install Linux in addition, no matter what OS I get, as a learning tool. I just don't think it is suitable for me as a primary OS, rather a learning tool. I know it wil be suitable for progrmming but that is pretty much bottom of my list right now.

So, now with Linux/UNIX/Solaris/whatever out of the way, please tell me if it would be more suited to my needs. Leave the flaming to somewhere else.

Does the software you use work in OS X? If so, grab a mini and try it out.