Flame Bait!

Support this page! So hey. What's up with super-advocate RocketMan seemingly dissing the Mac? Well here's MHO. While I clearly prefer the Macintosh platform on an overall basis, I'm not such a knee-jerk advocate that I miss for trees for the forest [sic].

The Mac OS in its current state is a compromise, and Windows beats it on several measures:

Speed--I use Windows 2000 at work everyday, and for application launching, file services and windowing, it's faster. According to a bunch of benchmark tests (not Bytemark), a G3 processor is roughly equivalent to a similarly clocked PII or PIII. My Mac is clearly slower than my PIII, so what's slowing it down? It must be the OS.
Of course then there's the issue of Microsoft Office performance. Mac OS loses hands down here, with no credible argument from the Mac camp. Blame whatever you want--incompetent MS programmers, evil MS conspirators, differential investment in optimization, the use of "forbidden" APIs, etc, but the effect at the end user level is the same. Word, Excel and PowerPoint run 2-3 times faster in Windows. And for the user, that's important.
Resource efficiency--The flat memory model and virtual memory scheme of the MacOS causes it to require more RAM than Windows to do the same tasks. On my ThinkPad at work, I can keep Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Navigator running simultaneously, with Navigator having Mail, News and 4 or 5 browser windows. As an experiment, I opened Navigator 4.75 with 50 browser windows, each with a copy of my my main page. Doing this on my Mac with a comparable amount of RAM just isn't possible.

But all that said, I still prefer my Mac. Why? It feels better. More intuitive. Less frustrating. The devil is in the details, and Microsoft doesn't quite have it there on the UI or in the usability. The little gremlins, bugs and quirks in Windows make it a constant frustration to use, even if it is marginally faster. The slower mechanical performance of my Mac is more than compensated for by my personal productivity, creativity and spontaneity when using my Mac to get work done.

It would be great if I had the Mac UI without compromising on the speed and resource requirements. With OS X, it looks like I'll be able to :)

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Last updated: 5/11/99

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p.s. Use Netscape, or be viciously mocked, taunted and ridiculed.