May 23, 2007
Late to the party...
I haven't bothered to write about Macs vs.PC's in a long time. (Last one 2 years ago.) I'd just be stating what's become obvious. Knocking Microsoft now is like kicking the Soviet Union in 1989. Stating the obvious is boring. But what is interesting is that the "press" has started to catch on!
From a Macworld piece by Christopher Breen...
What was unusual about that coverage was that—for once—it didn’t portray Apple’s products as pretty but overpriced and Apple’s customers as artsy-fartsy kooks. Rather, the press seemed willing to entertain the notion that Mac users might be savvy consumers seeking quality and ease of use in an attractive wrapper.
As someone who has followed Apple for the better part of two decades, I’ve seen the company go through plenty of highs and lows...
....Through it all, one theme remained constant in the coverage of the company: Apple and its customers were an anomaly. This was frustrating. Knowing what the Mac was capable of, seeing how god-awful clunky Windows was, and glancing at the declining rate of Mac adoption, I’d wonder, “What am I missing here?”
It’s that disconnect between how I see Apple’s products and how the mainstream media portrays those products that’s changing....
When Apple started stumbling back in the 80's it was unfortunately cocooned by the press, which continued to crank out stories about Apple-as-fabulous-innovators blah blah blah for long after it was true. They finally switched the story-line to Apple-the-stumblebums-marginalized-by-the-Microsoft-powerhouse. They are now starting—years late— to catch on to the current story...
Posted by John Weidner at May 23, 2007 06:46 AMI think the original author is correct that Vista is a big part of this. I used to upgrade Dark Empire operating systems as I replaced computers. Now, for the first time, I am actively avoiding upgrading, because Vista seems to (even for a Dark Empire product) consume enormous resources for very little benefit.
Beyond that, however, I think that changing consumer demographics and hardware. The performance differences are (effectively) much smaller now, both because there is less absolute difference and because machines are so powerful that only fanatics notice a 20% speed difference, which previously would have mattered. We are also seeing a much greater adoption of computers as general tools, as opposed to either hobbies or to run the one killer application. All of this plays to Apple's strengths more than Microsoft's.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at May 23, 2007 10:45 AMSir, you are a smart, successfully, and likable guy. I have never understood how you can be consistently wrong on every major issue of our time! I've used Macs. I have never had a full hour of Mac usage that didn't have a problem. Seriously-- the only time I have ever lost a document was on a machine running OS10.3...
Now, MS has problems. The gods know IE7 is too little, too late. The X-Box 360 elite looks to be the single best media computer on the market-- but they released it after everyone who wanted one had the "vanilla 360". Vista's nagging security got so bad I had to shut off it's warnings...
Having said all that, I can say that I vastly prefer my experiences with Microsoft over my experiences with Apple...
Posted by: Andrew Cory at May 23, 2007 07:36 PMYou are, I think, in a minority. But it's not something to argue about; tastes differ.
What will be interesting is that it is now possible to run both OS's on the same machine. I think it's even becoming possible to have them running concurrently! A lot of people will be making comparisons in a way never before possible.
Posted by: John Weidner at May 24, 2007 07:24 AMWow, Andrew, that's some weird karma. Not sure I'd trade you for it, though, because though I have to suffer through Windows at work, my home computer is a Mac, and I'm not sure I could handle having stressful times on my home computer, even if it did make my work easier.
To give you an example of recent weirdness, I use Photoshop almost exclusively at work, and I get very used to doing work two-handed— my right hand weilding the pen for the tablet, and my left doing various keyboard shortcuts. Something that has been happening lately is that the keyboard shortcuts will change suddenly for no apparent reason. The bracket keys, instead of changing the size of the cursor, will start flipping through the layers. When using transform, the arrow keys will start going up in increments of 10 instead of 1. So on and so forth— and the caps lock is not on, I've checked.
Only solution is to stop and reboot.
The other thing it's doing lately is to save very large JPGs (door size) with "an invalid markup" which means that they don't open. It saves PSDs just fine, and small JPGs, but not the big ones. Thankfully, I figured that out early enough to be able to set everything up so I could do the final steps on another person's computer.
It does thses things without warning. Damned schizo computer. I'm not even going to get into the Access issues, or the fact that the same sequence of events won't produce the same results...
Posted by: B. Durbin at May 25, 2007 05:23 PM
