Are Macs still better than PCs, or isn't there any real difference any more?

[liam_on_linux]

They're a bit better in some ways. It's somewhat marginal now.

OK. Position statement up front.

Anyone who works in computers and only knows one platform is clueless. You need cross-platform knowledge and experience to actually be able to assess strengths, weaknesses, etc.

Most people in IT this century only know Windows and have only known

Comments

[bohemiancoast]

Macs are not as good as they used to be at 'just working'; I've argued that this is because Tim Cook is not minded to publicly eviscerate people who don't deliver perfection. And of course we do have new, modern operating systems; they just run on mobile devices.

[liam_on_linux]

*Nothing* is as good as it used to be, setting aside speed & capacity. My phone's battery life has shrunk an order of magnitude. My PDA's lost its keyboard & most of its functionality, traded for Teh Internets. My MP3 player's lots its replaceable batteries & its capacity has halved. My PC has lots its explorability, simplicity & programmability -- and much of its enjoyability.

There's more to power than raw speed or terabytes of space.

The Mac's lost its gorgeous smart UI, replaced by a shinier but far inferior copy. OTOH, it's massively more reliable than it was, networks better, understands non-Mac hardware better -- but now, like every other computer, it's a mess of cryptic text config files and arcane shell commands.

[bohemiancoast]

The Mac UI is still pretty lovely, and OMG Windows 8! My brother bought my niece a Windows 8 laptop (because she needed a laptop but he didn't feel it was sensible to get a 9 year old a Mac -- silly boy should have got her a second-hand Air about the age of mine for about the same money) and I practically died trying to get it to do anything. And it's just as bad for her; the programs she uses are scattered around the UI randomly, the number of weird things that pop up are bizarre, and neither of her parents really know how to help.

[liam_on_linux]

I confess I am bemused at how much it's thrown people. I always figured anyone vaguely competent would know how to do Win+E for Explorer, or Win+R for Run then control/devmgmt.msc/diskmgmt.msc/compmgmt.msc etc to run specific tools, or just Windows+type, Vista-style, for launching arbitrary apps

[liam_on_linux]

Sounds about right! :-(

[bohemiancoast]

Macs don't have a particularly high total cost of ownership though; never have. It's just the purchase price that makes you suck in your teeth.

[matrixmann]

Thinking back of that time, I wonder how it was with stability of Commodore's Amiga OS as a computer to work with.
Think these days also a continuation of that system still exists, but don't have any information how it's designed and how much useful it is in comparison with popular operating systems for popular tasks.

[liam_on_linux]

There are many positive words I associate with the name Amiga, but with the best will in the world, "stability" is /not/ one of them.

Its advocates like to say it was an early microkernel, but that's bending the truth into a pretzel. The thing that is hard about microkernels is not small bits of interoperating code cooperating to make up an OS, it's having them all safely isolated in separate memory spaces. That is the whole point, really. And AmigaOS didn't do that -- couldn't, on a 68000 -- so with that taken away, the result is almost easy.

AmigaOS 4.x is a reimplementation for PowerPC, so while it looks nicer and runs on much faster hardware, its design has the same limitations -- and they can't fix these, or they'll totally break backwards compatibility.

Old information?

[geoffcampbell]

There seem to me to be a number of articles of faith in that which are based on outdated versions of Windows - most jarringly, the swipe at "untrusted binaries from 3rd parties", which hasn't been true since Windows 7. Under Windows 8, it's quite a PITA to install a non-signed binary, although thankfully it is still possible

Couldn't be you are basing this on outdated knowledge, could it?

I'm also not sure that lack of diversity is a bad thing. A common platform across the industry brings some very important benefits, and was necessary before general purpose computing could get a proper hold across businesses.

Re: Old information?

[liam_on_linux]

I've installed, used and maintained both 8.0 and 8.1 (plus supported 8.0 for actual cash money) and I have to say I noticed no real difference at all in this department. It might be different with Modern apps, but I played with an assortment & their functionality was so poor, I gave up. I now uninstall *all* Modern apps that I can, leaving about 3 or 4 tiles

Re: Old information?

[geoffcampbell]

I wasn't talking about TIFKAM apps. Try installing CIX Reader - it's not signed, so you have to do a whole bunch of stuff to agree the installation. You can do it, but you are warned repeatedly that it's a bad idea. This is good.

As for diversity - you're plain wrong. I made a fuckton of money in the early '90s selling and supporting bits of software and hardware to bridge the gaps between different formats and platforms, and now that's not necessary, and that's a really, really good thing. That was diversity.

GJC

Re: Old information?

[liam_on_linux]

Hmm. This, as is often the case with you, directly contradicts my own experience.

I will have a play at some point, and try to reproduce this. But, as you say, on the whole, a good idea.

Diversity /was/ a pain, because of all the walled gardens. But today, it's all over the fairly-widely-agreed-upon WWW. Frankly, the WWW experience is nigh identical on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Chromebooks are a sign of the coming wave of radically-simplified FOSS clients for the WWW. There will be more, and better. Stuff like disk formats really doesn't matter any more. Even file formats are becoming irrelevant.

Now now Liam, be fair.

[anonymous]

Resume in brief: over 20 years of computer support: Vax/VMS, Mac OS 7 to current, Win 3.1 to current, Linux for a few years now