OSDev.org

com1 wrote:after all ive seen here, if anyone can provide me of a list of facts of why a Mac has better benefits then Windows, i will consider changing my views.

Rather than just repeat Apple's marketing (which exaggerates like all marketing), I'll tell you what convinced me to switch. It basically boils down to two things for me: Performance and usability. Be warned that this is very subjective -- your mileage may vary.

First, performance. I use Windows every day at work. My development machine is over 2 years old, more or less custom built, with an Athlon 64 (2.2 GHz I think), 2 GB RAM, and a mid-range NVIDIA card. It runs XP SP2.

Back in November, I bought an old PowerMac G4 for my Mom for $5.00 (surplus from my company's Mac development team). It was about 7 years old, with a PPC @ 350 MHz, 512 MB RAM, and I don't know what kind of video card (I'm not sure if it was integrated or a separate card... I never really looked). I'm sure it was 7 years old, whatever it was. That old Mac ran OS X 10.3.9 ("Panther").

After using my Mom's old Mac for a few days for basic web surfing, organizing photos, basic administrative stuff, installing things, browsing around the file system to see what's there, etc., I found my work machine to be annoyingly slow. In OS X, I would minimize a window, and it would minimize immediately with that genie animation. It was totally smooth and responsive. With Windows on my work machine, when I minimize something, there's a pause, then a chug, then the window minimizes, leaving a blank area for a short but noticeable interval while the contents underneath re-draw. I'm sure Vista with Aero Glass has fixed this, but holy crap is it ever annoying in XP.

Anyway, long story short, the old Mac definitely had worse throughput than my work machine. It cranked through less work per unit time, as you would expect from such an old machine. But it was highly responsive. I never felt like I was fighting for its attention. The GUI remained snappy under all but the most extreme loads. I can't say the same for XP, even when I just have a few apps open. I figured if OS X was that responsive on a 7 year old PPC, it must fly on a modern machine, so I bought a 24" Intel iMac in February, and I was not disappointed.

Next: Usability. After three days with the old Mac, my Mom (66 years old, novice user) was so much more comfortable with it than with XP that she decided to switch and hasn't looked back since. I chalk it up to the consistency of the UI. There tends to be one or maybe two ways to perform each task, which is a lot easier for me to teach and a lot easier for her to learn. If you have a parent or other non-technical user that bugs you a lot to support their Windows box, tell them to get a Mac -- it will definitely ease your stress (I don't even want to think about the hell that Norton Anti-Virus put me through on my Mom's old PC).

For me, those three days were a real eye-opener. Suddenly I began noticing all the things about Windows that had been annoying me in tiny but cumulative ways for years:

• Why does every little icon next to the clock have to put up a bubble telling me that it's doing its job? I only care if it isn't doing its job! Otherwise, those icons should shut the hell up and stop interrupting me!
• Ditto with that damn dog that shows up when I want to search for something!
• Speaking of search, why has Microsoft been completely unable to duplicate the efficiency and ease-of-use of Spotlight for years now, even in Vista?
• Why is the default icon and font size so small? Monitors are bigger and pixels are smaller than they used to be...
• Once I started using Exposé for switching between Windows, alt-tab became painfully inefficient. Squeezing the sides of my Mac's mouse makes all the windows scale down so that none of them overlap, and then I just click on the one I want. Flip 3D in Vista is a half-assed attempt at duplicating it because most of the window contents are still hidden! WTF is the point (besides eye candy)?
• I took a course on human-computer interaction at university and I remember learning about Fitts' law -- the time it takes to hit a target is inversely proportional to the size of the target and directly proportional to the distance from the target. This is why the menu bar in Mac OS has always been at the very top of the screen -- it makes the vertical size of each menu's target area effectively infinite. It is way easier to slam my mouse up and click, for example, "Bookmarks" in the Safari menu on Mac OS than it is to zero in on the same menu attached to the top of the window in Safari for Windows.
• Sheets are awesome. No more modal dialog boxes being lost behind other windows, leaving most of the UI disabled for no apparent reason. When I close an app and it wants me to save, I know exactly what app, and I know exactly what I can and can't do, and why.
• When I close a Finder window, there is an animation zooming the window back to the icon from which it sprang, so I know what I just did (in case I change my mind and want to open it up again). Ditto for minimizing to the Dock. There is also a "jumping-out-at-you" animation when you click an icon, again, so that you realize what you've done. These visual cues are actually very helpful, but Windows lacks most of them.
• Speaking of springing, spring-loaded folders are awesome. It makes it much easier to move files around with drap-and-drop.
• Speaking of drag-and-drop, it works properly almost everywhere, and normally you can actually see what you're dragging (a clipping of text, a picture, etc.) instead of a lame icon from 1993. Also, there's a big green plus sign if your drag operation is going to make a copy, and a big red circle with the number of items you're dragging inside it in bold white lettering. It is really easy to see what's going on.
• I really prefer bash to the NT command prompt. Having a translucent Terminal window is also cool as it allows me to read web pages in Safari while fiddling around at the command prompt (it made following the GCC cross-compiler tutorial on the wiki way easier ). Linux users already know the joys of such tools.

I could go on, but I'll just summarize it like this: If you're a control freak, and you absolutely must do everything your way, Mac OS X is not for you. However, if you're open minded and willing to try new ways to interact with the GUI, you'll find that the ways in which Apple has decided that things should work are usually the most efficient and the easiest from a psychological point of view. I am way less annoyed when using Mac OS X than I am when using Windows. I've always had a habit of swearing loudly at my computer (which can disturb my co-workers ), but when using Mac OS X, I just don't feel the need.

Oh yeah, I also hate wires. That's another reason why I bought an iMac.

Alboin wrote:Not Microsoft

Almost reason enough alone to go and buy me a Mac...

Colonel Kernel wrote:You're assuming that the only thing great about the OS X GUI is its pretty visuals. Unlike Vista, there is actually a great deal of thought and psychology behind it.

Oops, I contradicted my own comment... I think there is a good reason why OSX is more secure, and that's because a virus writer can't have the same effect on a Mac than a Windows box. A virus writer wants to cause the most damage (either that, or he only knows the Windows API) so he would select Windows because it has market dominance (so far).

There are ways to make Windows secure, but they cause massive compatibibility issues - Jeff Atwood's blog post Trojans, Rootkits, and the Culture of Fear covers a lot of the Windows security problems (comments to the post also cover a lot of stuff about the Mac).