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Macintosh fanboy nonsense
Well these guys couldn't of picked a better time to unleash their Mac mouth-foam session.
Their article opens up with:
Apple has given Microsoft a lesson in software development with the launch of its new Leopard operating system which is faster, slicker and packed with a lot more practical features compared with the slow, underperforming Windows Vista operating system that is prone to crashing or locking-up systems.
Well that's a lot of claims chucked into a small space. Gish gallop?
Leopard huh? Oh yeah that came out today didn't it, funny I haven't seen much about it on the news. On all the news sites I've read it's all been about Microsoft selling 88 million copies of Windows Vista, Microsoft's biggest quarter growth since 1999, and how they blew away Wall Street's expectations by over a billion dollars.
Faster and slicker? Hmmm not according to Wired's Cult of the Mac blog who installed Windows Vista on their Macintosh and reported the following:
Vista really flies on this beast, and feels like it's faster than OS X - it boots faster, folders burst open and apps launch instantly...I'm especially delighted with Vista's "glass" Aero interface, which works in all its glory on this machine...The OS is dark and handsome. It's really quite exciting...Vista's icons are big and colorful, and frankly, a lot more logical and easy to read than some of OS X's, like the intelligible iWeb icon.
The guy then pulls out the whole crashing and locking up systems line, yawn that is so Windows 95, get something new and fresh please. Windows doesn't crash anymore.
With Vista the "Gadgets" have to be stacked in a frame on the desktop. In the Leopard environment they can be placed anywhere.
In Windows Vista they can be placed anywhere. Maybe if you actually bothered to use the thing you'd know that.
Unfortunately that's the trouble with these sort of people, like David Richards, they rubbish this and that without bothering to actually use them, they don't have a clue and their opinions are therefore worthless.
The bottom line is this, Mac OS X - whichever version is a 6 year old operating system, upgraded as often as Apple can with $130 upgrades, the sort of thing Microsoft do for free with Service Packs and applications on their website. Leopard introduces amazing new features that they copied from Windows 95, like the ability to backup your files, although on the Macintosh it is much more limiting requiring you to have a separate hard drive, you can also preview documents in the shell - like Windows XP. Oh dear, Leopard is a damp squid of a release, it’s a flop and a really late flop, Steve Jobs said this thing would ship before Windows Vista, well they're only a year behind at best, in many areas like Media Center and Tablet PC they haven't even started yet.
Mac OS X is a solid operating system and has been for the last couple of revisions, but I don't believe it is in the same league as Windows Vista. What these fanboys don't understand is that their foaming at the mouths and spending 80% of their time attacking Microsoft isn't winning anybody to their cause. Nor is preaching the lies that Steve Jobs come out with, just the other day he said that Windows Vista came 7 years after Windows XP. It is 5 years Steve, as you well know. I however believe that is a good thing. I'm sure the consumer would rather a big jump every 5 years at £120 a pop, than tiny little jumps every 18 months at £120.
26th October 2007 22:19:40, 598 words, 511 views
1 comment » 1 comment
- Leopard introduces amazing new features that they copied from Windows 95, like the ability to backup your files
- Let's look at the vaunted Time Machine while we're at it too and compare it to Previous Versions
Problem is, neither of those features are in any home version except Ultimate, which is a good $260, twice OSX's $130. Upgrading multiple PCs? Apple's $199 5-pack puts MS to shame. And my point isn't about the cost, since I know it's not apples-to-apples vis-a-vis frequency of paying, but why does MS not consider these backup options as needed by home users? I find that disheartening. This is similar to Visual Studio, in which you can't get the code analysis and profiling tools unless you put up for the "Team System" version. Right, because only teams need fast and reliable code.
-"Vista's icons are big and colorful"
I think they're getting too detailed, to the effect that they are not fulfilling their purpose which is to be a quick representation of its task. On that same note, that idiotic effect in the Start Menu, where there is a single icon at the top which changes depending on the menu also is a mistake - now you've gone from icons+text for each entry, wherein you can recognize the icon you want on sight, to having nothing but text, thus requiring you to read the options. The icons have completely lost their purpose there. That's a big gaffe to me.
It's fairly early to call it a flop, and if you go by consumer opinion, regardless of its validity, Apple wins for sure. I see more and more people I know pining away for Macs, and many have no interest in Vista because of all the bad press - regardless of whether it's unwarranted press, the point is, MS has done a terrible job of convincing people.
I think MS does an absolutely horrific job of marketing; most people that see my Media Center set up had no idea there was anything like that. In the same vein, there were some really nice media players like the Gigabeat Portable Media Center that certainly matched the iPod feature-wise and were easy to use, but I've never seen them advertised, no one knew about them, and they just died out (to be reincarnated in the Zune - which, by the way, if the new Zune had been the one released last year, I think MS really would have had a shot (assuming decent marketing as well). More minus points, by the way, for not integrating with Media Player but rather reinventing it thus requiring you to manage two libraries, and also not supporting WMP Lossless (IIRC) and PlaysForSure. The latter is a particularly painful joke.
Although I find much of the negative press about Vista unwarranted, I had a chance to use XP again the other day, and damn, Vista /is/ slow (this is on a quad-core, 2 GB RAM, etc). XP really flies. You get used to the sluggishness of Vista, but when you see XP again it really is a wakeup. Also, there's still that completely awful thing where copying large files wipes out your working sets in favor of disk cache, thus reducing your machine to a crawl. This comes into play for me whenever a Restore Point is made (like installing apps) and its mind-numbingly awful. Well, what can you do.