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Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the both-barrels-double-shotgun-explosive-bullets dept.

aalobode writes "The New York Times is running an article on the narrowing window that Apple has for beating Microsoft's Vista. According the Times, not enough has been done to capitalize on the Mac user experience versus the 'world of hurt that is Vista'. It also points out that that restructuring of Apple leaves ambiguities about Apple's exact commitment to the computer end of its business. The article calls MS Vista's certified vendors, developers and driver writers a flywheel that takes a while coming up to speed - and then becomes unstoppable."

1 of 773 comments (clear)

  1. Re:service pack by wootest · · Score: 4, Informative

    The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case, and even THAT is a matter of taste.

    Bullshit. First of all: This is not about Linux not being all you make it out to be. Your depiction seems accurate, and desktop Linux distributions are continuously improving. This is about Macs being put down. I've used a Mac for a number of years now, sliding over to using it full time (in the place of Windows + Linux where I used Linux mostly for server stuff) and I can testament that it's not just about the look of the case.

    The number one reason I use a Mac is not to get to act all "look at me, I'm special" or to pay more for my computers. It is because of the applications and the operating system. Some of the third party Mac applications are, in my opinion, unsurpassed in their genre on any platform. Like the app I'm writing this in - NetNewsWire, a feed reader (full disclosure: I'm a beta tester, but I'm not saying nice things because I'm a beta tester, I'm a beta tester because I like the app so much). Generalization is dangerous, but paying more attention to detail, especially in the user interface, seems more pervasive on Mac OS X than on any other OS.

    I am a developer. I'll admit it: my bread-and-butter today is (and has been for the last year or so) .NET. I love Perl and Ruby and PHP, and I can use them as good on OS X as on any other OS (and significantly easier than on Windows). But I also really like Cocoa and Objective-C, and I believe it's a good example of what .NET could have become had they actively tried to keep the class count down. You can't really claim "marketing" or "RDF" on developer APIs - you start to notice as soon as you use it, and while Cocoa might seem eclectic at the start, it works really well.

    There's also a level of chutzpah in the frequent OS updates that I appreciate, even if I have to shell out $129 before rebates every two years or so. When was the last time your OS added automatic backups with one-button setup (and easy full-disk restoration), a layer animation engine and resolution independence in an update? They're also following existing standards (like CalDAV, Open Directory and soon ZFS) - or creating extensions or new standards and publishing them and open source implementations (like HFS+ and launchd) - almost across the board (yes, except for anything possibly involving DRM where they have to deal with the **AAs; I don't like that any more than anyone else). I think the best thing I can say about the operating system and software is that I'd rather use Mac OS X in a regular PC than I would use Ubuntu or Vista in a MacBook.

    There's tons of valid points of criticism for Apple, for their computers and for Mac OS X. None of this passes me by unnoticed. QuickTime Pro and .Mac upsell offers are persistent and horrible, for one thing. They're not perfect. But putting off Macs and Mac OS X by the blanket statement "The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case" is simply unfair.