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Windows Journalist Takes On Tiger
BRSQUIRRL writes "Paul Thurrott has posted a review of Mac OS X 'Tiger' on his SuperSite for Windows. He gives it a score of 4 out of 5. Interesting to get a Microsoft Windows journalist's take on Tiger, especially one as hardcore as Thurrott. In the article, he actually confesses that he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past."
I mean come on. Why the hell does anyone who runs a site called Supersite for Windows think that they have to review OSX? I've seen stuff like this before, but usually, they're hoaxes. This is just moronic.
Podunk Inc won't sell any cards if they don't work acceptably with Windows. They work or Podunk is dead. MS doesn't have to worry about Podunk either.
Windows' stability problems are mostly pure software, not drivers. The classic buffer overflows that they issue patches for every month. The intertangled browser, media, MSOffice apps that all fuck deeply with the internals of the OS. The registry that decays with every app you install or remove. Multiple DLLs. Open wide networking.
(Maybe this really is all fixed now, but not in any version I've used.)
"According to this guy, every Mac OS system since 10.0 has been an update."
He's wrong.
Everything since 10.2 has been an expensive service pack.
I loved 10.2, but felt that most of what followed was just marketing hype (although I bought this stuff anyway, and happily, because I'm a geek and I feel like a loser if my systems aren't all running the latest bits).
"So the best way to think of OSX vs XP is that OSX is a generation ahead of XP in many ways, but it was pretty much brand-new in its 10.0 incarnation."
I completely fail to see how OS X is a "generation ahead." It's a fantastic operating system, but in terms of its core and its development tools, it's actually a bit of a relic.
Cocoa (the "proper" OS X framework) is just carried over from NeXTStep, and the ideas behind the OS are older than I am.
Granted, OS X has the best desktop Java integration I've ever seen, and I give it points for that, but the gurus out there will tell you to stick with Objective-C and Cocoa, which means that they're telling you to stick with the technology that was sitting in a corner of Steve Jobs' garage until he came back to Apple and found a use for it.
Not saying it's bad - I love OS X - but just that I don't see how it's a "generation ahead."
Especially considering that the vast majority of "new features" announced in each release can already be found in another prominent OS...
- Rory [Microsoft Employee] | Free dirt: neopoleon.com
Just kidding. What I would like to add to this discussion is the following: The Apple web site claims there are 200 new features, as I understand it. And there are a hundred different ways you can navigate this site. If you want to use the word "Web Site", then Apple is the best example, as it truly is a web, and it's difficult to find the way around it.
Anyway, so I was on the Apple site trying to figure out what these 200 new features are that they're worth over 100 dollars to buy, and other than the ten features (automator, spotlight, dashboard, mail 2, ichat, and all those things), I couldn't for the life of me, find out what the other 190 new features are. What are they, 190 bug fixes deep in the code somewhere? 190 lines in total throughout the Darwin code that were modified in some way? A new function that is 190 lines long? Or are there really a bunch of new features that simply aren't wiz-bang enough for Apple to waste time listing them? I'd really like to know, because:
Spotlight will certainly make a lot of things better; Automator is something I'll probably use a lot. Dashboard is something I would bring up to impress my friends. But under all that, I use UNIX most of the time, and I spend most of my Mac-usage-time using their busted-ass X Window server that isn't quite that well integrated into the user interface, or in a Terminal window, or in Xcode, or something like that. So where the heck are the other 190 features at?
Ok, where the heck are the other 190 features at, asshole?