I am trying to very simply (oversimplify please) the basic difference between a PC and a Mac. (yeah I know a Mac is a PC)
Anyway, my Mac person tells me that Macs tend to be hardier and can take abuse (like cold booting them) that is why they are used in schools for learning etc.
I’m not really concerned about the software issue…“More software isn’t written for Macs and when it is it’s more expensive” You know that arguent.
How does the internal operating system differ. I am just trying to give a basic overview in a computer class I am teaching the Sales staff.
To most people the OS look very similar. Both have trash cans and icons, both have folders.
Any help or ideas will be appreciate.
I am not really interested in complex stuff as they wouldn’t get it (and I probably wouldn’t either)
I have worked on Macs for two years and PCs for 1 and 1/2. So far in terms of software (Excel Word etc) except for the right click it is very similar. In terms of adding memory the Macs were MUCH easier to handle but the PCs tended to run databases (we used 4-D) faster.
This is a tricky question, and hard to simplify. One note I should make, you can buy two-button mice and it does supply all the right-click Windows-style functions on the Mac.
There are many fundamental differences between Mac and PC. The basic one is that the Mac is totally “user-centered.” Every function of the Mac is designed around how the user wants to interact with his work. Everything in the PC world is centered around how the computer wants to work, and tries to force the user into working the way the computer wants to work. This is a huge, but subtle difference. Apple devoted much research with actual computer users, and created a set of “user interface guidelines” to give all applications a consistent way of working. Working on the Mac, the machine will assist you in doing your work, but on Windows, it is an uphill battle all the way.
The reason this is so is due to the legal battle between Apple and MS over the Mac graphical user interface. Windows copied all the superficial aspects of Mac’s user interface, but it could not legally copy all the details which would be patent and copyright infringement. Thus, every detail that Windows copied is done in a slightly different way, without regard for how the user works, only caring that it is implemented differently to avoid patent infringements. So on the Mac, the trash can is on the right, on Windows it is on the left. But this causes deeper, counterintuitive GUI problems.
The way I describe it most succinctly is this: Everything on Windows is ass-backwards. To shut down the machine, you hit “Start.”
Bill, everything I said is 100% true and I can document it. If you can’t provide any factual information to this thread, and can only fling insults, then keep silent. If you CAN provide any factual information, I will be glad to refute it.
You can start with this one: Please provide a citation of any documentation on Windows user interface standards.
Thanks, pmh, but your evidence only proves my point. The document you cite only describes a bunch of technical gobbledygook about .dlls, keyboards, multiple monitors, etc. Microsoft apparently considers this the “fundamentals.” Like I said, MS focuses on the computer, not the user.
Chas, may you enjoy your mac for years to come, regardless of whether you have the slightest clue what makes it tick. You haven’t proven that Apple’s HI guidelines are the reason it’s easy to use – you’ve merely proven that they exist. And I would contend that they are only a small, almost insignificant part of the reason (although they are nice).
The real ease-of-use win Apple has is that it’s easy to troubleshoot and fix a broken system. There are dozens of variables you don’t have to worry about on a mac that you do on a PC: the boot sector getting hosed, the OS loader getting moved on the hard disk, the boot disk failing to be found because you changed the order of your hard disks, disk geometry translation, blah, blah, blah. This is all due to the fact that your OS runs on a very small range of hardware which is all made by one company. Unfortunately, the downside of that is that the hardware is on the expensive side, and your choices are somewhat limited as far as configurations go (for example, Apple seldom sells machines without hard disks or RAM, and buying those from Apple is an insanely bad deal).
Markxxx: if you want a good, fair discussion of the two, this thread is pretty nice.
My two cents: Macs are nicer than PC’s to use for novice users. For power users, it comes down to which UI you have a preference for. Under the hood, there is a lot which is terribly wrong with the mac from an OS standpoint, but people in love with the UI have long demonstrated an ability to pretend that’s not true. And OS X should eliminate a lot of that, given that it’s a real OS under all the pretty graphics.
What the heck does THAT mean ? It doesn’t crash at inopportune times. It doesn’t get a nasty virus every few days. It actively facilitates work flow. Perhaps Apple can remove these terrible wrongs with OSX ?
-Most of the discussions of the “technical merits” of the two competing OS’s are nothing more than technobabble.
Markxxx, I apologize. I know that you had good reason to think that this might actually be a General Question.
But it is not. Unfortunately, apparently every person who has any knowledge of computers whatsoever is so bereft of a life that they form strong emotional attachments to whatever platform they prefer, as if they were married to the platform or they received money every time someone else chose the platform.
Because they are all completely incapable of discussing this issue factually, I send Apple/PC threads over to Great Debates, where DavidB and Gaudere wait for someone to really lose it and then they send the thread to the Pit.
Warning: I was originally trying to reply to this while it was still in GQ. I have no interest in participating in this emerging pissing contest. Let’s fight ignorance and not perpetuate it, people.
Nonsense. I’ve used lots of Macs and they always crash at the most inopportune time, just like PCs do. Let’s be realistic about this. PCs blue-screen, screen-freeze, or, for milder faults, pop up an error dialog and kill the offending program. We like variety! Macs, in my experience, just tend to get screen-freezes that halt the system. As for Mac virii, as has been mentioned by many people many times in the past, that’s because there’s not quite as much software available for the Mac. There are still some very interesting Mac worms and virii out there, though. Both our platforms have some nice flaws and bugs; let’s not pretend otherwise.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’d like to make some comments about what I’ve observed of the architectural heritage of PCs and Macs.
PCs started in earnest with the early IBM boxes. The PC was a basically open hardware standard (with a proprietary BIOS at its heart), and thus has always had a variety of clone manufacturers (especially after Compaq reverse-engineered the one proprietary chip). This has not always been a good thing because it creates compatibility problems.
Windows traces much of its history back to the days of DOS, and in fact was originally just a UI that was loaded on top of DOS. Earlier versions were notoriously unstable, but with the advent of Windows 3.1, Windows began to become a flexible, usable operating system. It could be argued, with a fair deal of success, that Microsoft began to take usability lessons from successes other companies had with their own GUIs, specifically MacOS and AmigaDOS (for which a very nice GUI was available, if I recall). At this point, Windows was still very much 16-bit and was therefore quite slow compared to Macs at the time. Worse yet, it also used cooperative multitasking, which basically meant that the operating system couldn’t allocate CPU resources very well at all. Although you could run two programs at once, if one of them was doing a lot of heavy-duty computation, your system basically wouldn’t respond until it was finished.
Another spin-off of the Windows 3.x GUI was Windows NT, which traces part of its heritage back to OS/2. This operating system was intended to implement “new technology”. It was vastly more 32-bit than any prior version of Windows, had virtually no DOS compatibility (because it didn’t really load on top of DOS), and couldn’t be expected to run 16-bit programs. Such was the price of progress, but at least it wasn’t running on top of DOS anymore.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft finished development of Windows 95. Like WinNT, Win95 had vast 32-bit capabilities. However, since it traced its heritage back to Windows 3.1 and DOS, it still had full DOS support and could run 16-bit Windows apps with ease. This was obviously huge for home users. Windows 95 also marked the implementation of a more aggressive multitasking scheme–preemptive multitasking, which basically meant that the operating system didn’t have to wait for programs to finish what they were doing. The OS, in fact, could dynamically scale back or reallocate processor resources. You could run heavy computations in one program in the background and still have a bit left over for a game of Solitaire while you waited. Windows 98 (and some later Win95 releases) integrated Web browsing support directly into the operating system, a move that landed Microsoft in some serious legal trouble that they are still in today. Windows 98 also added a few other nifty features that supported emerging standards like USB and AGP, which were intended to improve speed and flexibility. However, because of all the legacy crap still in Windows 98, stability overall was somewhat compromised. Enter the new generation of Windows operating systems, Win2K and WinME.
Windows 2000 traces its roots back through the NT heritage and thus is basically a really bloated version of Windows NT with the Win95/98 UI tacked on. It actually now has limited 16-bit support and can run emulated DOS services, but Win2K is still rightly billed as the most “legacy-free” Windows. It integrates features such as memory protection, which prevents programs from intruding on each others’ memory addresses (at the expense of using ludicrous amounts of RAM). It’s possibly the most stable of the Windows family, excepting perhaps its ancestor, NT 4.0, which came out shortly after Win95 and has since gone through 7 service revisions (some users swear by it still). However, it’s still not a marvel of usability. The control panels work a bit differently than their Win9x counterparts, the drivers are incompatible with their Win9x counterparts, and so on.
Windows Millenium Edition, or WindowsMe, represents the latest revision of the Win9x heritage. It’s basically Windows 98 without proper DOS support. Since it’s marketed at home users, especially beginners, it has a lot of “safety net” features designed to prevent users from screwing up vital system resources. Although it is arguably the most stable home-user Windows yet, it’s also possibly the slowest and least capable (no DOS!). Many power users still use Windows 98 Second Edition, which represents, they feel, the best compromise between stability and sophistication.
Now, for the Mac.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were business partners in Apple since before the development of the Apple I, which was sold only as a board. They subsequently built the Apple II, which caught on as a home-user machine for its flexibility, ease-of-use, and remarkable power (for the time). Capitalizing on the popularity of their previous projects, Apple Computer began development of a new box which was supposed to set new high-water marks in power and user-friendliness. The result, Lisa, may not even have been sold (correct me if I’m wrong). However, Apple did go to market with the Macintosh computer in 1984. It had its own custom-built GUI (based on the Lisa project) and was graphical through and through (even the BIOS-like screens), unlike even today’s PCs, many of which still boot from very scary looking text screens. The Mac was supposed to be everything to everyone. For home users, it was a friendly environment for playing games and getting work done. For others, it was the most stable and flexible machine at the time. This ease-of-use, coupled to the fact that Apple was often on the very bleeding edge of technology for quite some time, made the Mac enormously popular with graphic designers, animators, publishers, and other artists. To this day, this is one of Apple’s largest target demographics; IBM gained most of their momentum in the direction of getting regular businesses to use their computers for “real work”.
What’s truly remarkable about the Mac is how little it’s changed over the years (don’t flame me, I mean this as a compliment!). The user interface, originally designed to maximize simplicity and usability, hasn’t changed dramatically in its appearance since 1984. It’s gotten a lot prettier with the advent of true-color graphics cards and powerful processors, but it’s retained the same classic look and feel that made Apple popular in the first place. OS X, Apple’s latest project, is supposed to remodel the look and feel of the operating sytem somewhat to make it even more usable and powerful. Only time will tell, but if it’s typical of Apple OSes, it will be warm and inviting for home users and beginners but powerful enough to satisfy the Mac die-hards.
A few things are notable about the Mac. For one, there seems to be a lot of complexity hidden under the GUI. There are numerous “secret” keyboard shortcuts and backdoors that give power users near-total control over their computers, but which remain hidden from the average Joe. Even so, even the aforementioned average Joe can easily do tasks as difficult as partitioning and formatting a new hard drive and reinstalling the OS. Macs have almost always been able to boot from pretty much whatever media was available, so it’s understandable that Macs were able to boot the MacOS install/configuration utility off the CDROM long before PC users were able to do the same with Windows. These are all very good things, which explain why schools often use Macs, as well as why Mac users are so devoted to their favorite box, especially the graphic artists (many of whom are self-admitted Macfanatics). It is also noteworthy that new features, like USB, have been added to MacOS with an appropriate minimum of fanfare, and the implementations of these features have often been quite good. Note, though, that the Mac has, for most of its history, been a fundamentally “closed” hardware standard, so only a few times did clonemakers ever get a foothold in the Mac world, unlike the PC market, which is dominated by clones. This has its upside and its downside–MacOS stays clean and fast because it doesn’t have to try to support as much hardware as Windows does (perhaps the PC’s biggest problem), but in the past, Mac hardware prices have often been, well, unrealistic. However, since Apple makes both the hardware and the OS, unlike MS, it could be argued that development on the MacOS often more elegantly mirrors hardware development than Windows development does (on its respective platform).
However, that doesn’t mean that MacOS is perfect. Just like Windows 3.1, even fairly recent versions of MacOS use cooperative multitasking, so program crashes could, theoretically (and often do) produce hard lockups. Unlike Win9x, which dynamically allocates memory (to an extent), MacOS has traditionally required that programs specify their memory requirements at run-time. Although this could theoretically serve as a crude form of memory protection, it often means that older programs don’t fully take advantage of new computers with plentiful RAM, at least not automatically (it is possible to play around with the memory settings somewhat). To Apple’s credit, OSX is also supposed to eliminate those beefs by introducing a new, heavily UNIX-inspired kernel designed for more serious multitasking and capable of more aggressive memory usage, as well as impressive stability. However, it is likely to do this at the cost of legacy compatibility (like WinNT).
On the hardware architecture front, PCs started out as CISC computers and have fundamentally remained CISC (at least in outward appearance; almost all current PC CPUs are RISC at heart), although this may change within 2-3 years (AMD SledgeHammer, Intel Itanium, etc. use a new standard called EPIC). Macs too started out CISC, but made the jump to RISC many years ago, integrating the PowerPC chips developed by IBM and Motorola and putting them to good use (often without compromising legacy compatibility). On the downside, even with the new G4 chips, which actually have some vector-computing functionality, clockspeed scalability has been a sore point, keeping Macs below 1GHz even though PCs have long since surpassed that mark by quite a margin. This in no way detracts from the innovativeness and inherent power of Mac CPU design, but it does mean that they just can’t keep up in terms of raw clockspeed, and heavy program optimization is required to even try to make up for the current MHz gap. To Apple’s credit, AltiVec-enabled Photoshop apparently hauls some serious butt, though, and many other programs could be optimized in such a way.
So, what’s the difference between the Mac and PC? A lot of history, a design philosophy (open vs. closed standard), and a few fundamental capabilities (multitasking implementation, specifically). This has produced two very different families of operating systems that, despite their obvious UI similarities, have to contend with the requirements of two very different hardware platforms and user-bases.
Me? I’m a graphic artist, but I run Win2K because I’m an “unsalvageable Microsoft zealot”. However, I love BeOS (made by disenfranchised Mac guys) and will be interested to see what OSX turns into after it matures a little.
Markxxx, let me take a stab at your real question, even though this thread is already down the heated political path.
As far as raw architecture of the OS of the two systems go, there really isn’t that much difference. There are a million mini design benefits of the mac, and another million mini benefits of the PC, but as far as true difference of OS capabilities, there really isn’t much.
In general, I think it’s fair to say that the mac is friendlier, simpler and prettier than the pc, but the pc is more configurable (and some would argue therefore more powerful). (And unix variants are more configurable/ powerful and less friendly/pretty than the pc, but that’s another story).
I know you said you weren’t interested in the applications as much, but the truth is this is the real difference between the two. Over the years, some apps have grown both technically and in the customer base on the mac and some on the pc. You’ll find a lot of graphics folks who swear by the mac for their apps and a lot of business folks who swear by the pc for theirs.
As it turns out, I have my biases in this war, but I hope the above is pretty neutral.
Not really…since OSX is built on top of Unix. Which I guess will settle the question once and for all, with Mac winning!
(Although, as a hardcore MacFanatic since 1985, I am not at all happy with what I’m hearing about OSX. I am hanging with the old school for a long time to come, myself.)
I’m a Mac user with sufficient familiarity with the Microsoft OS world to be able to use a PC if I have to. This posting will be scoured for traces of “better than” characterizations before submitting.
Hardware Geeky Stuff: Although you as the user don’t need to know about it, there is a basic set of hardware components of a PC that are always essentially identical, even if one PC and another of a different brand implement them with different chips. A Mac is not a PC in this sense–the set of chips and components is fundamentally different. This is why you can’t run Windows on a Mac, or MacOS on a PC, except through emulation. Emulation is where a software program pretends to be the other platform’s chip set and sits between the real chips and the pretend chips, passing signals back and forth. The main chips, the CPUs, don’t even read instructions in the same order (sort of like Latin vs Hebrew).
Software Geeky Stuff: Individual software programs for Mac and for Windows are platform-specific in TWO important ways: first, they “expect” to be surrounded by a running copy of the operating system environment for which they were written. This is also true for Unix applications that could run on the same physical computer if you’d loaded a Unix operating system instead of Mac or Windows, so even if the application could run on the hardware, it needs the right operating system before your computer knows what to do with it. Try to run a Windows app from within Red Hat Linux and you won’t get anywhere with it unless you have a Windows emulator running in Linux within which for it to run. Second, the software programs DO have some hardware expectations that would make it impossible to run the software on the other computer EVEN IF you could get the same operating system to run in both places. Consider Linux, an operating system that can run on a Mac or a PC–not only does (let’s say) Netscape for Linux expect and require a Linux OS environment, it also has to be compiled to run on an Intel-compatible processor (PC) or a PowerPC environment (Mac), so copying the PC version of Linux Netscape to a computer running the Mac Linux STILL leaves you with software you can’t use.
Less Geeky Generalities:
€ The Microsoft operating systems keep track of a file or folder’s existence by file path. The MacOS can “comprehend” a file path, but keeps track of files and folders by an internal (hidden from the end user) reference number. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but it is a major difference that makes a lot of differences in a lot of places.
€ The Microsoft operating systems keep track of a file’s function (executable program or batch file or data file requiring another executable program to open or run it) via a 3-letter extension on the end of the file name. (Beginning with Windows95 and NT 4.0, these extensions can be optionally hidden from the end user, and are automatically generated by programs when files are saved). The MacOS keeps track of a file’s function via a pair of hidden 4-character codes called File Type and File Creator. The Microsoft technique is easier to determine or edit (which can be good or bad, depending on the degree to which one wishes to protect the environment from end user idiocy); the Mac version is capable of handling a larger potential number of associations (which would make more sense the other way around, as it is the Windows environment that needs the larger pool of possibilities). The Microsoft technique hard-wired a given file type to a given application, whereas the MacOS’s separate codes for type and creator allows for different JPEGs or plain text files (to give 2 examples) to launch different applications when double-clicked. Again, there are advantages and disadvantages to both situations.
€ The Mac, during boot, looks for a valid System Folder (MacOS) at a location saved to parameter RAM (PRAM). If the machine does not find a valid System Folder at the designated location, it will look elsewhere among local drives, and if it finds one elsewhere, will boot from it instead. The OS itself then looks through all buses (SCSI, ATA, FireWire, USB, etc) for other drives to mount during boot, and all drives show up on the Desktop by individual volume name. (Some specific network drives may also be mounted at startup if the networking protocol (AppleTalk) was set to mount them automatically. A drive not mounted at startup may require user interaction (such as SCSI Probe for local drives that weren’t turned on, or a trip to the Chooser to mount a networked drive) before being accessible to the user, although some (FireWire; Zip cartridges; PowerBook Expansion Bay) will auto-mount. The Microsoft OS’s, during boot, have a drive or set of drives set in the BIOS which are the places it will look, in the specified order, for a PC operating system it can boot from. The concept of “mounting” a drive, as the Mac does, is pretty much foreign to the Microsoft OS; instead, it responds to requests to display, access, save to, launch, or otherwise address a given volume by seeking to that path to see if it is valid at the moment. In a networked environment, users log on during startup, and with logon come privileges that allow or disallow access to networked volumes. Each local drive has a logical drive letter assigned to it by the OS, which is the primary means by which it addresses the different volumes. Networked drives MAY be mapped to a drive letter but may also be known to user and OS alike by a network-drive string such as \SERVER-1\Shared. These different mechanisms for identifying and addressing volumes and drives cause the operating systems to give different user experiences. If you insert a Zip cartridge named “Susan’s files” into a Mac with a Zip drive, it appears on the desktop as a volume named “Susan’s files”; (the default icon will identify it to the savvy user as a Zip cartridge, but if a custom icon has been pasted onto it there is nothing that screams out to the user that “Susan’s files” is a Zip cartridge). The Get Info function reveals more about a given volume on the Mac: it identifies the bus (ATA, SCSI, etc; which bus in case multiple buses of that type exist; address, where applicable; remote location if not a local drive). Meanwhile, take the same volume to a PC and insert it in a Zip drive. Nothing happens until and unless the OS receives an instruction to address the drive. Double-clicking the My Computer icon reveals a list of drives (not named volumes that are current occupying them) so an icon clearly identifying a drive E: might show up indicating that a Zip drive exists as the computer’s E drive. Double-clicking that icon reveals the contents of “Susan’s files” if “Susan’s files” is in that drive. In various applications’ Save / Save As / Open dialog boxes, the user navigates to “Susan’s files” by going to the E drive. Now suppose you write a routine that is supposed to always save a backup copy of “My Important File.doc” to the E drive. This routine will execute properly on the PC regardless of whether the cartridge in E is “Susan’s files” or “Susan’s files II” or, for that matter, “Customer’s files”. This can be a good thing or a not-so-good thing. Back to the Mac: if you write an AppleScript that saves a backup copy of “My Important File.doc” to “Susan’s Files”, it will execute properly on the Mac as long as “Susan’s files” is mounted, even if it is mounted by putting in in David’s Mac and sharing it over the network and mounting it on your Desktop. If, however, “Susan’s files” is full, and you format a new Zip as “Susan’s files II”, you’ll need to edit your AppleScript or it will eject “Susan’s files II” and instruct you to insert the expected volume “Susan’s files”, which can also be either a good thing or a bad thing.
€ On a Mac, you open an application, such as (let’s say) WordPerfect. The application most often opens a new blank document; sometimes it opens an existing default document (like Netscape opening your designated home page, for instance); and in a few cases opens nothing at all until you tell it to. The application puts its menu items on the overhead menu bar, replacing those of the Finder or whatever application you had open previously. The overhead menu bar, in other words, changes with context. If you close your blank WordPerfect document or your Netscape home page, the only sign that WordPerfect or Netscape is running is the application-specific menu items and the icon (and, optionally, full name) of the application in the Application Menu at the far upper right of your screen. On a Windows PC, you open an application and your application opens its own window which occupies most of your screen by default (you can resize its default size in most application); if it creates an empty new document or opens a default document, that document appears in its own window within the application window. The document has less of the monitor to display itself on than it does on the Mac because of the screen real estate occupied by the application window. You seldom if ever have the “empty application screen” phenomenon I described for the Mac under Windows, though–you can shrink the entire application window to see other concurrently running apps, but the application window is always there unless you minimize it (in which case it is no longer the frontmost, active application). If you shrink two different applications and arrange them both on your screen so you can see them both at the same time (and perhaps occasionally copy selected information from one to the other), you have TWO applications menus, each within its own application window. On the Mac, there are no application windows, so you size the document windows themselves and arrange them so as to see and view both at the same time. So the same situation that confronts the Mac user with the “empty application screen” if no document is open allows the Mac user to resize and arrange open documents of several different applications and work with all of them without surrendering real estate to application windows. Meanwhile, the application menus are in the same place on the Mac (but with less compellingly obvious clues about which app those m enus apply to), whereas you have separate application menus on the PC (but with the applications windows shrunken you may not see them in their entirety in the application window).
€ The somewhat geeky person who buys a Mac will wish to add functionalities that aren’t intrinsically part of the OS at time of purchase, ranging from the ability to print to a different and somewhat esoteric printer or the ability to participate in a NetBIOS network with PCs…to such everyday elegances such as having the Open / Save / Save As dialog box “hop” to any location (open window, Desktop, etc) clicked on with the mouse, or having the contents of a drive display as a hierarchical pop-up list when clicked on in the same dialogs…to such silly things as changing the GUI so that it looks like Sun’s Solaris or displays as pastel curly widgets or chromium tubes reminiscent of a late 1950’s Cadillac’s trim. On a Mac, such changes are implemented (usually) by installing an Extension in the Extensions folder of the active System Folder. If the item is customizable, it may exist as a Control Panel as well as (or instead of) an Extension. Similar tweaks on the PC are generally implemented by installing a driver, which generally installs itself via a package installer, configuring the Registry, adding files to Windows\System (or the NT equivalent), and spraying DLL (dynamic link library) files hither and yon. The Mac Extensions often patch the OS during bootup, and the code that they attempt to patch may have already been patched by previous Extensions, a situation that can result in a messy and annoying situation called “extension conflict”. On the one hand, extensions can be disabled one at a time until the user isolates which combination are in conflict, and the load order can be modified (sometimes) or the user can pick which ones are the most important to keep (more often) to solve the problem. On the other hand, extension conflicts can be intermittent; they can cause system instability without causing an outright refusal of things to work at all; and this can take weeks to diagnose. Meanwhile, on the PC, very few programs work quite like a Mac’s Extensions do. (The closest PC equivalent is a Terminate-and-Stay-Resident, or TSR program). On the one hand, that means that PC users seldom clog and clutter up their OS code with a plethora of customizations; on the other hand, this can cause the PC environment to feel rigid and inflexible. Printer and protocol drivers on a Mac are as easy to remove as removing the offending file if they fail to work; the PC onto which a misbehaving driver has been installed can be more difficult to restore to pre-installation functionality. Generally, PC users appear to tend to leave their OS in more pristine condition, installing what they need and leaving well enough alone. Mac users tend to install all kinds of widgets and interface-modification doohickeys right and left and often have patches that are patching the patches of the patches of the patches that they installed 4 OS versions ago, and therefore more often have a highly customized user experience that isn’t necessarily as stable as the OS could and can be.
Having been admonished before for my methods of participation in a thread on religion (catholicism, not computers) I have learned my lesson in how to participate in contentious threads, and tried to stick to the facts. Therefore, I bristle at the implication that “all” people in the GQ thread are incapable of discussing this issue on a factual basis. I can. I presented only documentable facts, which so far have not been refuted. I even admonished the windows responders to proceed on a factual basis, which they apparently cannot. I can. The worst thing I said was that windows was ass-backwards, and I don’t think anyone can possibly dispute that hitting the START button to shut down is anything but completely backwards and illogical. But to the moderators, I apologize for inadvertently triggering a flamewar in GQ, despite my best intentions of keeping this on a strictly factual level.
But anyway, now that we are not in GQ, I will tell the REAL difference between Mac and Windows and not pull any punches.
Both Mac and Windows systems are “single source” operating systems. Well, until NOW that is, when MacOS X shipped, now Mac is a partially open source software, you can run Darwin, an open source OS and the core of MacOS X, on Intel machines too. You can even modify it to your hearts content and sell Darwin under your own name. But that is not the main difference, or commonality. Any success of Windows systems is solely due to how successfully they copy the Macintosh interface. And Microsoft copies it poorly, giving the appearance of a proper GUI without actually doing it right.
The real difference is that Mac OS is based on open standards developed by a multivendor consortium, the IEEE, etc; while Windows is based upon proprietary standards which have one sole purpose, to lock you in to Microsoft products and make more money for Bill Gates. If something might benefit the user, Mac will embrace it as a standard (i.e. Java, USB, Firewire, etc etc) and Microsoft will do everything possible to suppress it or “embrace and extend” it so it becomes a Windows-only standard.
If you don’t believe me, consider the new .NET initiative by MS. Its sole reason to exist is to move people from the OS, which now MS considers “commoditized” (that is, no longer serving the MS monopoly) and irrelevant, and to move them to proprietary MS servers. In the future, with .NET, you will not store your data on your PC, it will all be held in MS servers; you will no longer own applications, you will rent them from MS’s servers for an annual fee; you will no longer be able to control how you want to use your computer, it will refuse to store MP3s and other data that are deemed troublesome by MS and their fellow monopolists (i.e. the RIAA, MPAA, etc), even if you created them yourself. Imagine a world where you cannot record yourself singing “Happy Birthday” to your child and store it on your disk, then forward it by email to your child without registering the MP3 with the RIAA and paying a royalty for the performance rights to the song. That is MS’s vision of the future. Like it?
But let’s deal with TODAY.
The fundamental difference, as I said in my original post, is that the Mac is designed as a “Human Interface” and Windows is a “Computer Interface.” This is incredibly significant. Someone asked if doing things the way computers want to do them is a bad thing. Yes, it is. Computers do not work the way humans work. Much effort was spent by Apple developing methods that allow people to work more efficiently. These little efficiencies in the Mac appear every single moment you work on the machine, and the opposite inefficiencies appear just as often on Windows.
The classic example is hierarchical menus. Macs have a feature called “forgiveness” that allows you to drift outside the target zone and still hit your target. But on Windows, if you do not keep PRECISELY inside the target zone, the menu evaporates and you have to select the whole menu from the beginning. For a detailed description of the problem, consult this web page: http://www.mackido.com/Interface/hysteresis.html
You see, humans make mistakes, but computers do not. Windows expects you to be as infallible as a computer. Macs account for human fallibility and allow for it. It should be fairly clear that it is preferable to work the way humans work and not the way computers work. If it wasn’t, we’d still be using CP/M and typing PIP A:. B:
Let me add one more thing. Macs are the universal machine. On my Mac, I run MacOS 9, MacOS X, LinuxPPC, with Virtual PC I run Windows 98 and Windows 2000. If I cared to, I could run Solaris, Redhat Linux for Intel, and several other popular Intel OSs. No Windows box can run all these OSs. If you work in a multivendor world, Mac is the only realistic choice. But if you work in a world where BillG’s monopoly is the force of law, then you will be happy to ignore the rest of the world and work in a solely Windows enironment. And you will be missing out on the REAL innovations.
So let me simply explain it one more time:
Mac: Open standards
Windows: Tool of monopoly
Mac: User friendly
Windows: Intolerant of mistakes, inefficient.
Mac: Universal compatibility
Windows: One way, the MS way. You will be assimilated.
<Stoid explodes to her feet, clapping wildly, tears of joy streaming down her face> Yes, yes <sob> YES! PREACH IT! SING IT!! MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND!!! YES!!!
Ohmygod… bad trip flashback, man! Don’t make me relive the magic of THAT shit… <shiver>
Chas, you are officially my complete hero. THANK YOU! May I send this to everyone I know?
Well, I suppose it’s ok, but AFAIK, the Chicago Reader now owns my remarks. I have no objections if they don’t, but you should probably clip out my remarks about contentious arguments and substitute my original remarks about Mac vs. Win in this thread.
But no matter how widely you spread this, nobody is going to listen. I’ll give you an example.
Long ago, I was the top Mac guy at the largest computer store in the world, in LA. I actually made more money selling IBM, but I always loved the Mac best, after all, some code I wrote was IN the Mac OS. Our store’s largest client was Disney, they were buying upwards of $1million of Macs a month at one point, and they absolutely insisted that NOBODY know how much they had invested in Macs, it was a top secret (even though Michael Eisner’s photo appeared in the Apple corporate annual report).
Windows had just come out with their first graphical Windows version, and Disney executives and employees wanted us to demonstrate its capabilities. So I set up “The Great Mac vs. PC shootout.” IIRC, it was a Mac512 vs a Compaq 386; MacWrite vs Windows Write, MacPaint/MacDraw vs. PC Paintbrush. I demonstrated how easy it was to use the Mac with scalable fonts, WYSYWIG, mixed graphics and text, etc. And I showed how Windows tried to emulate those features, mostly unsuccessfully. The PC couldn’t do scalable fonts, it could only print in dot-matrix fonts resident on the printer, it couldn’t mix text & graphics, it was slower, etc etc. And you know what they said at the end of the demo? “Thanks a LOT, now we know that Windows can do everything the Mac can!” Our Mac sales dropped precipitously.
a) contrary to your ‘I can’ nonsense, you threw the first load of dung that sent this off into argument land.
b) contrary to your ‘I can’ nonsense, you continued down that path. To date on this thread, you’ve added nothing but dillusional political nonsense.
So, all I can add to you, sir, is that the mac owns a teeny-tiny bit of an enourmous market because the market never lies. And all your crazy claims about Microsoft yearning to copy mac but being unable to because of patents, and all of your silly attempts to discuss architecture, when it’s clear that the closest you’ve been to a kernel is a bucket of chicken from KFC, don’t change a thing. The market is God, and God says the mac is next to worthless. So, dream away my friend. But know that God stands against you.