Mac vs Windows, no Real Difference?
If you’re a Mac fan you probably think that the Mac is superior to any other available platform. It could be successfully argued that many people arrive at this fact a priori, for them the Mac simply is better, to argue about something as completely obvious as that truism would be akin to positing the sun rises in the North and sets in the West. In short, for the Mac fans whose blood runs bondi-blue Mac superiority just is. In essence, for many people, the Mac’s superiority is taken on faith.
As faith driven as their opinion might be that won’t stop them from arguing with great zeal that the Mac is demonstrably (and thusly factually) better than the Windows platform. The platform wars may long be over (or never truly begun) but history provides no impediment to those with an Apple tilt from finding seemingly valid reasons to declare the Mac victorious in a mental Mac-v-Windows showdown. The rub comes when the arguments are carefully examined. While many of them are wrapped in truthful observations the arguments, in general, are of dubious value.
The most persuasive argument currently making the rounds is the issue of security. People will happily note that if you take a Mac running any Mac OS and an unpatched Windows system and connect them both to the wonder that is the world wide web the Windows machine will be compromised in moments while the Macintosh will sit there unperturbed. This is undoubtedly true, hooking up an unpatched Windows box to the ‘net and hoping your computer doesn’t get turned into an email zombie is a lot like rolling around in a great big pile of medical waste, picking the needles out of your skin and thinking you won’t start running a fever in a few days. Currently that might be an unfair comparison, Windows has come a long way since the introduction of XP and with the release of Tiger the Mac has taken a step back. At this point hooking up a fully patched PC to the ‘net is not the exercise in unsafe computing it once was and until Apple fixes the widget fiasco it is getting more difficult to maintain this point of veiw.
Mac fans, at this point, will argue that Macs are much easier to use. Which is probably true. From personal experience it is my fervent belief that from the box to the ‘net happens much faster on a Mac. Of course even supposing that is true (take anecdotal evidence for what it is worth) this is a one-time investment in frustration. If a PC takes a day to set up and the Mac takes an hour over the lifetime of the computer the difference isn’t very great. The argument becomes more questionable in terms of general use. Computers at this point have become so complex that some amount of training is required to use any of them. To illustrate: Suppose you had spent the last 20 years in the jungles of Hawaii looking for the Tiki god Greg lost when the Bradys took on Hawaii. Upon emerging from the jungle if you were presented with both a Windows machine and a Macintosh you wouldn’t know how to do much on either. Why, for example, would you click on “Start” when the machine is obviously on? How could you, with your musky jungle smell, possibly divine that a compass looking thing is really a way to access a vast amount of information? In the end it is easily shown that “ease of use” is less about the machine being easy to use and more about the machine responding in an expected manner. Obviously the more you know about your computer the more it acts like you expect it to because your knowledge has shaped your expectations. With that in mind it is easy to conclude that the Windows platform is actually easier to use than the Mac for the majority of people. The reasoning yielding the aforementioned conclusion is easily explained: Since there is no small amount of learning involved with either platform the more exposed platform will, all other things being equal, be easier to use to the majority of people because they have been trained with the more common platform.
Which bring us to aesthetics. Looks are, strictly speaking, not an integral part of the computing experience. Generally you look at the monitor instead of being constantly bedazzled by the deft styling of the box. Imagine your computer as a hammer, would a brushed aluminum hammer pound nails any more efficiently than a similarly sized and weighted beige hammer? Ask your local contractor if you’re stumped. The point being that aesthetic consideration are important if you’re trying to achieve a certain look but most folks are more than willing to trade a bad looking modular computer for compatibility with programs lifted from the workplace. It is also worth remembering that aesthetics are completely subjective, there is no caliper that measures aesthetic value and no conversion chart to subsequently monetize any discrepancy.
So there are your top three arguments, there are plenty of others. TCO (total cost of ownership), resale value, the list continues ad infinitum. Of course as the arguments get more obscure the objections become more easily made. In short all the stated reasons one can think of can be easily argued against or dismissed as irrelevant to the majority of computer users. So we are left with one inevitable conclusion: the majority of folks are right, the Mac is just a less supported Windows machine. Right?
Well, not quite. The Mac is better than a PC and better in just about every possible way. The exercise above illustrates not the sameness of the platform but rather the difficulty of quantifying the advantages of the Mac. On the surface this seems absurd, several hundred words have been employed with the express intent of painting the computing platforms as at least similar in most aspects, how can one espouse such a position and then dismiss said position with such ease? It does seem to be an example of willful ignorance but I ask you to consider two paintings. First I ask you take a long hard look at this painting (it’s no Chelvis but it will do) and compare it to this work of art. Now both paintings are merely oil on canvas (or velvet), both paintings are accessed in the same manner (by viewing) and both works would make an interesting statement hanging over your fireplace (respectively: you’re tasteless and you’re famously wealthy). Objectively one would be hard pressed to find any real difference in the paintings but only the most obstinate among us would maintain that the velvet-based painting reached the level of art or that the oil canvas work was little more than naked pandering.
And that is why the Mac is better. It may be difficult to objectively quantify the Mac superiority yet it exists. The great stuff about the Mac is in the small things, the brushstrokes as it were. These are the things most Mac users know. When you go to Panera Bread and don’t have to reconfigure your wireless settings that is a brushstroke. When you find yourself watching a television ad pushing internet service that comes bundled with virus blocking software and smirking that is a brushstroke. When the dock pops up with a mouse over that is a brushstroke. When you press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to login that is the sound of velvet stretching. And that is what makes the Mac so great and simultaneously makes the Mac’s superiority so difficult to convey, it is not any one thing, it the summation of the multitude of individual touches that elevates the Mac above the competition.
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I agree with you here and as I have said before, I use the computers as a tool.
The reason I use OS X more is because it’s my portable machine, I can happily use my Windows desktop is needs be. Probably because i’m familiar with both.
And if it was reversed i.e. I have a WinXP portable and a G5 desktop, I would probably find that I would be using WinXP more because I prefer to use a portable machine.
It’s all subjective. I just find that I “feel” more comfortable on Macs. The environment is for the most part less hostile. Thus the Mac is undeniably superior to windows. However others may feel the opposite and that’s their right.
The fact remains that Macs are much, MUCH easier to support. I’ve been supporting computers (Mac, Windows and earlier devices) as a professional, independent consultant for over 24 years. Ever since OS X 10.2 and later came around, if I help a client with their computer and set it up smooth and pleasant, it STAYS THAT WAY until they get their next computer, four or so years later. Zero support costs. I get three or four referrals a week from fully satisfied clients, and then THEY get satisfied. It’s a great business model.
NO Windows PC “stays that way” - It’s an endless, endless cycle of throwing chairs and sofas against the drawbridge gate, trying to block off the newest worm, virus or the other 90,000 nasties that keep arising. Adware, zombie PC’s, and on and on. Ick. At thi very moment, zombie PC’s infected by SOBER.G are sending you German Neo-Nazi spam. Thank the idiots who are still running Windows as it arrived, right out of the box. You can’t expect Grandma to endlessly check for updates every day, can you?
I feel so very sorry for those PC supporters who insist that they don’t mind checking and re-checking for updates to their firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus utilities on a daily basis. I’m glad they have a hobby, and get to be “right” about something.
On the Windows PC’s that are royally screwed up (and my, aren’t there a LOT of them), I back up what I can, reformat and re-install, and wait until things slow to a crawl a few months later, yet again. It pisses me off, frankly, so I don’t advertise my PC skills - I’m dedicated to the excellence of my clients’ computing experience.
My clients don’t want to learn a second career of PC support. They just want to get things done and then get the hell away from the computer. These folks use their computer as a Money Pump to run their careers, and they don’t have the time or the budget to spend thousands of dollars over the life of the computer in sheer Aggravation Expense.
That’s why I recommend Macs…
NO Windows PC “stays that way”
Mine does.
I was listening to MacCast today and he parroted what others have parroted about the Mac, these vague and unquantifiable testimonies like “it’s just better”, “you get more done,” and “Mac users love their computers, Windows users don’t.”
I submit that the ultimate reasons that seem to set the Mac apart for Mac users are unquantifiable by design. As Chris points out, the Mac and PC come out virtually even in any factual comparison. And in comparisons between setting and using PCs and Macs with “average” users, they find no difference between the two.
I am personally no more productive on my Mac than on my PC, and in many ways less production. I am also not “happier” using the Mac. To me, there is no difference.
The DIFFERENCE between the platforms is not the platform itself. It’s the user. Mac enthusiasts want something different and have found it in the Mac. THAT’s what makes the Mac a better platform for them and why so many others simply don’t see it. It’s so difficult to quantify externally because it’s personal, subjective, and largely unconscious. And like many such opinions, there is an attempt to express factual and logical reasons why this is a conscious and rational choice instead of a gut reaction or ultimately personal opinion. But it isn’t, which is why those factual and logical reasons usually fall short of a satisfying explanation of the intense passion that Mac enthusiasts feel over what is essentially a brand preference.
I have to agree with Tony.
I “am” more productive with a Mac simply because it is more forgiving when I tend to get lazy. Sure I could shut off ActiveX or java on my PC and reduce the amount of problems that plaque PCs but shouldn’t I be able to safely use “all” the benefits of my computer?
In the end computers are tools…but I just have a preference for the Mac tool. It just fits in my hand a bit more comfortable.
The Mac is just more pleasant to use on a day-to-day basis for business and design/web/audio work.
Beeblebrox, I hate using the tired old car analogy, but there is a difference between a Ford and a BMW. It’s not the driver.
There is a difference between a Mac and a PC. It’s not the user.
There is even a difference between whitebox PCs and Tier One PCs. It’s not the user.
Like you, I use both daily too and but still find PCs to be a rougher ride.
XP is very reliable and stable. On par with OS X (probably ahead until Apple get a few more bugs out of Tiger). XP does some things better than OS X, and vice-versa.
But using a Mac for the last two years has changed me about how I think about computers and my expectations. Since using a Mac I’ve lost my zeal for maintaining computers - I just want to use computers, not have to worry about spending so much time maintaining them. I don’t want to be one of those people in the tea room at work discussing how best to handle virus, spyware, system rebuilds etc.
It is the Mac that showed me this is possible. It wasn’t me the user who made Mac that way.
XP is rougher around the edges. Look at the application crash handling in OS X and XP. There is a difference. Many XP application crashes still bring the whole system down, forcing a reboot. Now, although application crashes are usually a third-party problem, it’s the handling of them by the OS that sets OS X apart.
Some of Tiger’s new features are a little rough around the edges but they don’t impact on the user experience as much as XP’s rough edges do.
When I go home after a day of using PCs - I want to use a Mac.
There is a difference that is not personal, subjective or gut reaction.
The Mac is not the BMW to the PC Ford. The Mac is more like the Honda to the PC Toyota, if Hondas only had 3% of the car market and were more expensive.
In politics, Republicans swear that Democrats are more crooked and that the perception isn’t just their bias at work. Democrats swear Republicans are more crooked, and that the perception is based on real data and facts.
There are people who swear they can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. They are so convinced, in fact, that they react rather negatively after failing a simple taste test. They would rather believe the test is rigged than acknowledge that branding and packaging has altered their perception of the product.
Of course, perception is reality to some extent. If you perceive that Coke tastes better than Pepsi, then it does, even if that perception comes from the packaging rather than the actual ingredients in the product. If you perceive that the Mac is a better and faster work experience, then it is.
I keep track of system crashes between my PC, my laptop, and the Mac for just such comparisons. I want the best tool for the job and have no prejudice for either OS. And I’ve been rather astonished at the parity between the two. Neither system has ever had a system crash because of an app. And I use my computers every single day, pushing really heavy duty apps (like Maya on the PC and FCP and Shake on the Mac), and run them on a LAN that is also connected to the internet.
And yet I often run into people who swear that their newly purchased 1.25 Ghz Mac mini is faster than their 3 Ghz Athlon. That seemed an incredulous claim, to say the least, so I ran a few tests between my Mac mini and my 2 Ghz Athlon, a third slower than the 3 Ghz machines getting their doors blown off by this little Mac.
It wasn’t even close. In every app, in every situation I could think of running, the 2 Ghz was either way faster or the difference, as in web browsing or word processing, was imperceptible.
And what of all these constant XP crashes? It seems to me that if XP were inherently less stable with any common mainstream apps, that my experience would be approximately the same as yours. But it isn’t. Not only have I not experienced “many applications” crashing XP, I haven’t experienced any. Hardware problems are another story, particularly regarding hard drives, but it would take a bit of a leap to blame the OS for that or to argue that Macs never have hard drive problems.
So is the difference REALLY empirical? I still haven’t seen anything to suggest it is anything other than a personal and subjective perception, either comparing a work PC to your home Mac or simply a subconscious overplaying of XPs problems and downplaying problems with a Mac.
On a side note, it occurs to me how inadequate the car analogy really is. The PC is not a brand, after all, it’s a type of machine. If the Mac is a Honda, then the PC is every other car manufacturer in the world if they all used one brand of steering control.
Not a big deal. Just sayin’.
I like your comments Beeblebrox (#8), but I do have a few quibbles.
1) having worked at McDonald’s for more than a year as a youth, I became very familiar with Coca-Cola, to the point where I could pick it out by smell. My point? Coke and Pepsi are NOT the exact same product. While I personally don’t have a preferance (and try to stay away from soda all-together), and many people may not have sensitive enough palletes to tell the difference, there is litterally a difference between the products.
2) I’m not sure a “claim” can be “incredulous,” since that is an adjective describing “a person or their manner” (source: Oxford American Dictionary).
Like I said, they are quibbles.
I have two computers, an iBook G4 800MHz that I got on ebay recently (my first Mac), and a Dell P4 2.8GHz with 1GB RAM, and 300+ GBs of HDD (two drives). Needless to say, the PC is much faster. However, I love my new Mac, and I find myself rarely using the PC. Besides, I’m on Windows XP all day at work. The Mac is a nice respite from that.
I personally have only been using Macs for about a year, and have been pleasantly surprised. XP for me was/is great, but after using the Mac for a while little things I’d always take for normal OS behavior now niggle me.
Examples: Those little balloons that keep popping up asking if you want to “clean your desktop” and the Windows Key that shoots a sprawling menu up the screen when you hit it accidentally. I now find XP quite intrusive.
Also when I used XP as my main machine I had a huge list of alt xxxx shortcuts in order to get to the special characters, much to my surprise OSX getting say a “é” is just alt e and a “¢” is just alt $ and there are loads more examples of that.
Things like that don’t just give a Mac a feeling of being more polished, but actually help my productivity.
Just my 2¢ (or $0.02 for PC users)
Well, what you did there is say you can’t quuantitively say what the differences are. Then you go on to raise actual things that make the experience better, calling them “brush strokes” to make Apple sound like a work of art (which you had previously discounted as being a quality people look for in computing).
The things you have said in this article are well documented attractions of the Mac platform, I think this article is just masturbatory self assurance.
I think that OSX is an excellent well thougth out OS, Apple hardware is the most beautiful computer hardware in the world. Apple fan boys are the only downside, it is like a cult and that is never attractive.
About those brush strokes:
==================================
XP automagically configures wireless connections too, this is nothing new, just the nature of a DHCP network connection.
The fact that OSX is not compramised by viruses is nothing to do with its inherent security, it is because not as many people write viruses for OSX because it is not as popular as XP, which you already recognised in your article.
Mouseover dock? Is that really all that fantasic? You could have said full OpenGL desktop rendering is a brush stroke, but you went with a dock.
CTRL-ALT-DEL login? Don’t think so. XP boots up with a login screen, much like OSX does, has done since the beginning. CTRL-ALT-DEL brings up the task manager.
I would argue, and have done so, that it is not an either or question. OS X is more secure than Windows but since it is crackable it is not impervious. Therefore I conclude that both factors are at play, obscurity and security.
You might also want to chat with Jim Allchin microsoft guy. The coffe shop complaint is essentially his;
’ Longhorn, he said, will make that process easy, along with many other common tasks. If you want a Longhorn machine to automatically configure itself so you can work in a coffee shop, it will.’
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,1052600,00.html
As for CTRL ALT DEL to log in it could easily be a security feature of my Wife’s corporately owned computer.
As for the rest of your comment I really appreciate the criticisms (I mean that) and appreciate the time you took to write them. Thanks
True, on a locked down corporate owned machine there are some differences. I personally have never had a problem in a coffee shop. I open my laptop and select a wireless network, done.
As you originally set out to say, the differences between the OSs are 12 of one and a dozen of the other. I have owned both platforms and found equal usability/reliabilty frustrations in both. When it comes to the crunch it is about a choice. Lifestyle Vs. cheap computing. Both will get the job done, but when it comes to choosing a Mac it is not just about doing the job. It is about luxuriating in eye candy whilst doing it.
There is nothing wrong with good looking products, I want my products to look fantastic. But let us not twist this by saying Mac has a mystical, “can’t put your finger on it” quality, they don’t, the draw to Mac is obvious, and as I said before well documented. They simply look fantastic. I can point out many flaws in the actual construction of my PowerBook Ti (flaking paint, fatigued/cracked chassis, bad battery life, too hot, crappy screen etc. etc.) and the iPod, well don’t get me started. The fact is, they still look great and generally they get the job done.
Next time just say what you mean, a short post just saying “Hey, I love my Mac” will do, there is nothing wrong with that. It will say as much as you said above without me having to read so much and get caught up in a discussion.
Got to go now, my laptop needs to restart because XP needed to patch itself, again. (Yes, secretly I want my powerbook back).
I find myself rarely using the PC. Besides, I’m on Windows XP all day at work.
You rarely use a PC, but you use one every day.
I don’t think any statement could sum up the difference between subjective perception and objective reality any better than that.