Hey, Preston Gralla fans! His latest missive has just hit the webwaves and he’s mad as hell and shan’t take it anymore. His thesis? Vista beats OS X. Let’s go through his suppositions and take umbrage with his arguments.
Reason #1: Vista runs more software
Mac OS X is a very pretty operating system, but beauty runs only skin deep. An operating system by itself is a poor thing — it’s the applications that run on top of it that matter. And here’s where Mac OS X falls short. It can’t run much common software, including enterprise applications and games.
It’s true that OS X is unable to run enterprise applications and games. This is a horrible oversight on Steve Jobs’ part who, when OS X was being designed, implicitly stated that this operating system would not run enterprise applications and games, just as Vista can never run a good photo manager or movie making system. This is a design failure and absolutely unacceptable. In fact, the kernel itself will crash if you try to write Quicken for OS X. It’s horrible and nothing can be done about it.
Reason #2: Vista is safer
Vista is clearly safer because it often crashes and has very few drivers for popular hardware. This prevents people from using it and possibly getting into trouble.
Reason #3: It’s the money, stupid
If you’ve got a lot of extra spare cash laying around that you don’t care about, then by all means, buy a Mac. But if, like most of the world, you’ve got to work for a living, then you’ll find that a Vista machine is far less expensive than a Mac.
It’s true: Mac computers cost over $5 million dollars at Apple Stores and more online. This is another business oversight. I sold my kidney to get a MacBook Pro when I could have bought a $500 laptop from Dell that can’t run Vista.
Reason #4: The Mac is closed; Vista is open
Any person or company who wants to build a PC with Vista on it, and either sell it, or use it themselves, is perfectly free to do so, as long as they buy the operating system. Try to do that with a Mac, and you’ll be spending some face time with Apple’s attack dog lawyers.
Yes. He’s right. Jobs has attack dog lawyers.
Reason #5: Two words — Steve Jobs
Two words+this.wordcount(): Steve Jobs has led a company that has consistently put out a strong product on schedule and with few major support snafus. Say that about Vista, Dell, HP, and Matt Hickey’s mom. There is plenty to recommend for both operating systems, but this gripping yarn is absolute bull. Each of these points have been discussed endlessly and to repeat them at Computerworld in the guise of a column is lazy and digg-baiting. Mr. Preston Gralla, for shame. Your ham-handedness demeans the name of fanbois everywhere.
Jesus, the John Biggs Own Machine is in high gear today.
Seriously does OS X not run ANY games? I was seriously considering buying the 24 inch iMac, my main motivation is video editing but I’ve be known to take down a few terrorist cells from time to time via the gaming world.
buy a 360 and let your macbook do your work. A PC powerful enough to play crysis well will cost you $2K at least.
you can put vista or xp on ur mac if u want 2 play games. Its kinda like the best of both worlds. :)
LOL who wrote this, a 5th grader?
I’ll bet this guy likes the Wii too! He’s so dumb. When will dumb Vista users stop being so dumb. And also not cool, have you seen those Apple commercials? They’re so not cool!
it can also go like this:
I’ll bet this guy likes the Wii too! He’s so dumb. When will dumb Mac users stop being so dumb. And also not cool, have you seen those Apple commercials? They’re so not cool!
So if you like Vista then you probably like the Wii. You’re absolutely right: the PC operating system and Japanese gaming console must be in cahoots. You are enlightenment.
Wow! So PCs can’t aren’t good for professional movie making? Boy – myself and tens of thousands of other professionals better stop using PC’s then.
I like how you didn’t even quote him on his Steve Jobs bit.
I don’t know if I want to continue to read a Tech-based blog that is so, obviously, single-OS biased.
Why don’t you continue insulting over 90% of the computer users in the world?
“just as Vista can never run a good photo manager or movie making system.”
wow, i guess adobe surely fucked up in introducing a 64bit photoshop without the mac being able to support it. Who will ever buy CS4 then?! AHHHHH OH NOEZ!
That’s it, guys. Just let out your anger. Sooooft. Sofffft.
All of your anti-this and that posts are quite therapeutic John, thanks for that. And it helps you guys get loads of traffic without having to resort to nasty tricks like real journalism. And shame on Computerworld too.
And why can’t I get any Tang around here?!
Exactly. Where is all the tang? Dude: We try to do reporting. We do reviews and we report on the news when it happens in a fairly objective way, adding our own dick jokes where appropriate. This is a reply to a fairly outre story by some guy about Vista. CRUNCHGEAR NEVER HARSHED ON VISTA. My own review was positive and I really LIKE THE OS. BUT I THINK FOR MY MONEY – and the money of someone who is fairly new to computers AND power users (note the “and”) – the OSes of choice are, in order 1) some flavor of linux 2) OS X 3) Windows. The average get stuff done and be happy user needs Windows. My dad and Neo from the Matrix need Linux.
I agree with the first point: it doesn’t matter whether it’s possible to design business software or games for Mac OS – what matters is that there’s hardly any pieces of software in those categories out there.
Fortunately, he’s wrong in the second half of the point: Parallels/VMware Fusion will take care of most problems in that regard. And for gaming, there’s Boot Camp. And you can use your Boot Camp partition with Parallels/VMware too. Sure, you have to use Windows, but if you’re only using it because you have to and not because you want to, is that really a win?
– Samir Talwar, proud MacBook Pro owner
I totally agree with that
I use Xp and OSX for video editing. For video in fast assembly, nothing beats Edius on XP for getting the jobs done on tight deadlines. Final Cut is not all that is cracked up to be, with the exception of film editing for the long form.