Why I will probably continue to buy Macs
Technorati Tags: linux, mac, osnews, alcibiades
OSNews recently published a really poorly argued piece by a former Mac enthusiast who subsequently became a Windows and then a Linux fan (Why I will probably never buy another Mac). It lasts for five pages, and in the first page he goes from becoming a Mac enthusiast while other office workers were being lumbered with PCs, through the whole history up to OS 8 and 9 and Windows 98: after that, he says, the quality of Mac hardware went down, the price stayed more or less the same, the operating system became vastly less reliable and fell behind Windows, and the community did not want to be told that their hardware was a poor choice compared to a PC running Windows.
The reader will notice that this author glosses over two important issues in attacking the Mac community. One of these is that Windows, at least since 95, has always been notorious for its reliability and security issues. He does not mention the “Blue Screen of Death” even once. He does not mention the fact that, to run Windows reliably, you need anti-virus software which costs extra (unless it came bundled with the machine), and uses extra system resources. He does not mention the continual updates, which as time goes on, detract from the performance of Windows – or even that the last fresh Windows OS was released as long ago as 2001. He was pleased with XP on a system which was fast, with lots of memory and a huge hard disk; on the system I use XP on, a 450Mhz Pentium 3 with 256 megabytes of RAM and a 7Gb hard drive, it’s an absolute dog.
He also fails to mention that actually OS X has become an excellent operating system. The presentation values speak for themselves (notably the fonts, unmatched on any other platform including Windows), it’s fast on my hardware (1GHz G4, 384Mb RAM), and it’s reliable. I’ve not had the whole operating system crash on me once, although individual applications sometimes do. And it has commercially-supported applications – not as many as on Windows, but certainly more than Linux has, which is what prompted me to move to a Mac having used Linux on a PC. (The Mac versions of the Microsoft Office packages are said by some to be better than their Windows equivalents; it’s just as expensive, though, and I got my copy only because I had a student discount at the time.) As for the original OS X being “a total dog”, first-release operating systems often are. Machines running that version of OS X were configured to dual-boot with OS 9, not least because a lot of applications had not been rewritten for OS X yet.
The author notes that internet forums on which Macs were discussed became less friendly and the inhabitants were often snobbily dismissive of PC users:
Windows machines were ridiculed for being boring beige boxes. Windows users were the subject of snobbish jibes. Contemptuous references to Walmart appeared. Macs kept being compared to high end designer brands, in particular to cars. If you chose differently, it was because you had no taste, no class. BMWs appeared to have a particular fascination for the Mac aficionado. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The chorus of people who seemed to think that Macs were high class, and that buying them was a route to social mobility, was astounding. Could there really be so many people who were so naive about how social class really works in America? And could so many of them be Mac users? I shivered a bit at the thought.
