The more I use my PC at work, the better I like my Mac at home.

It is easy to compare life under MS-DOS as life under the old command and control systems of the USSR. But the difference is that while MS' dominace of the applied technology (certainly not, the innovation) may have delayed the introduction of better technologies, it did provide a solid platform upon which to grow individual computer usage: scalable economics, scalable learning curves, trust. So think of the cost of MS dominace almost as traffic laws (which oj so fervently defended yesteday). In fact, to the extent that the look-and-feel of the Apple OS is now embedded in the genome of MS OS, we have gotten even more Technological bang for the technology buck. We are now at the the true edge of a choice economy for OS with the advances in Open Source development and the entrenchment of its champion, Linux, in this arena.

So in summary: I find little to be sad about the last 20 years of PC technology and I am very optimistic about the next 20.

MG:

Say that the next time a parent or grandparent biffs their whole system and calls you for help....

oj -

It would also help if they upgraded to XP from Windows 95! Maybe they got discouraged along the way, but in all honestly I can say that XP is a reasobale product. (Of course the Linux people will laugh at that, but I still don't see many gradpas wearing Penguin shirts.)

Also, life under Mac was not a bed of roses. I remember that infamous "bomb". Perhaps not as ubiquitous as the "Blue Screen of Death", but still annoying.

"Inferior" of course is a relative term here. One might as well say that a stickshift car is "inferior," which it is by the same metric.

When I use a Mac, I'm frustrated by my inability to tweak the system, and especially by the way it is more difficult to fix when things go wrong. Macs and recent Windows vintages make it much harder to get "under the hood" and really learn how things work or change them.

Of course, there's no reason that the average person, not interested in computers, should want to or have to do such things. Just as the average person doesn't have to drive stick. But that doesn't mean that stick is essentially inferior.

It does as an appliance, which is what home computers are.

John:

If you know Unix, you can tweak anything you want in Mac OS X.

My problem with Macs is that, because they claim not to crash, they are not prepared for it when they do (about as often as Windows in my own experience, though that's probably due to the quality of Macs I've used), and the situation is far more dire. Windows recognizes that crashes and the like are going to happen, and tend to be more well-equipped to handle it when they do.

Apple had a chance when they hired John Sculley, but they blew it when they didn't let him run Apple like a for-profit enterprise. Jobs didn't help win corporate buy-in with his anti-organization bias and his focus on the utopian educational benefits of the computer.

Tim:

My previous Mac crashed every bit as often as a Windows machine. This one hasn't crashed once in the 6 months since I bought it.

As for Windows machines, there is nothing quite as infuriating as having them crash during the precautionary save.

And then there is that vaunted Windows security...

Carleen Hawn misses the point of iTunes entirely. Steve Jobs has said publicly that the point of iTunes (where the profit is perhaps a penny per song) is to sell more iPods (where the profit is $100 - $200 per iPod). Indeed, iPod sales have quadrupled since the introduction of the iTunes Store, according to Apple. Now that Windows users have equal access to iPods and iTunes, that profit will grow.

Apple has also just put together a co-marketing agreement with HP that will highlight iTunes on their computers and allow HP to sell an HP-branded iPod. Perhaps iPod/iTunes demonstrates that Apple indeed has gotten the message about technical AND business innovation.

I suspect that a large number, though not all, of Windows crashes and other faults are due to two main factors:

1) Substandard equipment, or equipment that develops a hardware fault;
2) An OS that hasn't been tweaked to match the characteristics of the particular setup.
3) Just plain running out of memory.

In my own experience over the last 2+ years using a homebuilt system, I had two periods about a year apart when I was crashing, freezing, or BSOD'ing repeatedly, and both incidents were ultimately traceable to _hardware_ causes (an inadequate power supply coupled with an overly-demanding video card in the first instance, a motherboard whose capacitors had gone bad in the second instance). With good equipment, an OS that has been properly adjusted (in such things as swap file size, file cache, etc.) and an awareness of Windows' limitations, there's no reason why you can't have a rock-stable system (of course, barring the effect of somebody else's third-party software not playing nicely with the rest of your system...)

The Mac/Microsoft argument is the classic,

Boutique vs. Chainstore
quaint village vs. booming office park

As my favorite professor always said...

"You pays your money, you takes your choice."

Apple brought to market products that the mass
market was NOT willing to foot the bill for. What
they had in aesthetic appeal they lacked in flexibility, and expandability. A modern P.C.
can be purchased for outperform a Mac of twice the price (by objective
standards). Whereas the modern P.C. is a paradigm
of a globalized competitive marketplace, the Mac
applies an essentially mid-century industrial
model to the production of computers.

Jeff:

I agree, Wintel does a HORRIBLE job of providing security.
However, the individual users must share some of the blame.

Robert: Scully (sp?) was, hands-down, the worst thing ever to happen to Apple. When it came time to call Microsoft on the rather large infringement issues attendant with Windows, Scully turned tail and ran. The Microsoft Empire would be nothing had he had the brass tacks to be a man.

Me, I prefered the Amiga: Mac-easy interface, easy to get under the hood, too. Then again, I don't think a new program's come out for an Amiga in this country since, what, '94?