Well, like I said I don't mind them. But here's pretty much where I'm coming from... warning, long Mac OS X is pretty stable ... more than XP? Well, personal experience is at Uni I've had more Macs crash than PC's (and the PCs were original Compaq then Dell) over 3 and a half years. Of course, the majority of the time the Macs were using higher end programs such as Photoshop and Maya, the PCs varied much more from word processing to photoshop and flash. So it's a hard argument - I'd say they are more stable except for a couple of recent problems where two macs struggled to "eject" my USB drive. 5 minutes 23 seconds for one to disconnect, the other hung and crashed the system. And with Macs, more stable or not there are little to no error messages or abilities to recover once something has crashed. And it's true they don't have "cryptic" errors ... most of the time. Errors like "..has crashed for an unknown reason.." don't help much either. And Mac specific programs crash with errors such as ".. error 451.." Nothing cryptic there OS X is pretty, that's for sure. But it does get tired quickly (ok, going from XP to OS X it always feels fresh but staying with OS X does get tiring. For me, it's the over use of grey, that's probably all). The smooth animations for window movement etc. is nice - but it lags resizing a simple window. Buttons are nice etc. etc. And in my personal experience, having my work area "pretty" inspires me to work and work better. So the GUI is a big plus in most area for OS X. Using the OS to work on is fine as well, I wasn't too big of a fan with navigation through hard drives though, felt sloppy - but some of that was my Uni's fault. The dock bar is nice - again pretty and has functionality. As a replacement for the Start bar ... well, no. It can augment it but isn't a good replacement in my opinion. I do like it in some ways, I've got a docking bar emulator on my PC for additional programs rather than cluttering the desktop with icons. And this gets to OS X biggest draw back in my experience - multitasking. It's fine with a handful of things going, 4 programs or so, but I'm use to doing a lot of things at once, and having multiple files opened in programs (such as photoshop). The docking bar can't handle it, and you loose your programs easily. There are quick keys such as F9 to bring up all the windows to see what's happening (which some people think is fantastic) but I find it a cumbersome way of flicking between programs - nice, but again it's not a good substitute for something as simple as the start bar. Alt tab is there (mac tab) but only really shows an icon of what your going to - not much help with multiple program entities open ie. Word or web browsers. Personally I'd like an OS that combines both. Simplicity of Windows with the niftiness of OS X. Vista, well, it does some of that - but with so much copyrighting it'll only happen in 3rd party apps. The F9 functions, called Expose, is very nice and I was hoping Vista would have a version of it - alas, it does not. The problem with these Mac versions are, they come in handy and are a great add-on - but aren't a good substitute. Which is probably why there are a lot of quick keys in OS X, it requires a lot of these smaller functions to get the same "simple" functionality we know in Windows. I find it worst when using a program that opens up smaller windows within it - such as Photoshop or Maya. Here's an example in Maya, you're working on a scene and open up the material editor, make a material and then minimise it to get it out of the way - you don't close it because you know you'll need it again, several times again. You then render, open up other dialogues such as the dope sheet editor and curve editor, hyper graph etc. before minimising them for later use. Now you need to get back your material editor. In Windows there'd be a minimised tab within the program down the bottom. OS X it's on the docking bar, where it has a scaled down version of it as an icon ... which you can't actually make out what it's showing you. So you need to hover over it to wait for the text to appear or click on them randomly and hope you're opening the right window - I often end up opening a window from another program that I've minimised like from Photoshop. This is an overall design floor that, quiet frankly, is a big turn off for my personal use. Less so for work use when I'd more likely be using one or two programs - but even then I, and teachers, have had annoying problems with it. Another problem. You can't maximise windows to fill the entire screen with the maximise button - most of the time it resizes to the size of the document or stops at the dock bar (even if you've got it hiding). Sure you can try to drag the bottom right corner to make it bigger than the maximiser allows, but it's rarely filling the screen and is much more time consuming than pressing a button. Now, 9/10 programs - no biggy. But when you're using a graphics editing program and need 100% of the available space it's annoying - ditto for a laptop. Especially in a program like photoshop where there are a lot of free floating tool bars. It feels cluttered, but what's worse is you are constantly try to select the edge of an image, use the scroll bars, click on a tool bar and end up selecting the desktop dropping the program away. Frustrating. I remember my first year in a Mac lab, 1 hour of people grunting and cursing "stop dropping to the desktop! ... oh, but you're so pretty." (the last part was from a foreign female student who was actually saying that .. constantly). And finally multitasking the CPU, or lack thereof. Windows assigns memory usage and CPU power to programs depending on their need. If I'm running IE and 3d Max while rendering, Max gets the preference (and worse comes to worse I can also change it so my desired program gets more memory and CPU performance) in power while my other program still runs, even if sluggish. Having a program selected in Windows increases its priority as well, so if I'm rendering and playing music and music sounds like it's skipping I just select Media Player and problem solved (albeit the render takes a little longer). In OS X, the currently selected program gets the priority and even if there's program that needs more power for good reason it will have to live with whatever is left over from the "primary program". My perfect analogy to this was in one class I'd set up a test in Maya for some rendering with mental ray, mean while had Fire fox running to fill in the time while I wasn't listening to the tutor. The renders took roughly 3-4 minutes to do, and as I was experimenting this meant adjusting a variable and then re-rendering over and over again. So the average time wasn't changing much if at all. After starting a frame to render and ignoring the tutor I jumped on FF to browse the web. The tutor starting talking about something interesting, so I turned to pay attention. 15 minutes later I turned back to my computer and started browsing again. Then I remembered my render, so jumped back to Maya and it was STILL rendering. Why? Because the OS decided that Fire fox needed more processing power than Maya because I was using that at the time. This left jack all for Maya to use while rendering, and thus a 3 minute render became 15 minutes. That's not the only instance of that problem I, or others, have experienced. Finally, most recently I've been very anti-apple due to iPods, the related commercial, Steve Jobs arrogance and the Mac ads that have so much bull crap in them I just get annoyed. And I don't doubt for a second that those ads have made me overly biased, which is a shame - because I've only written bad things. OS X has lots of good things as well. Maybe some day I'll write about them In conclusion, OS X is a good Operating System. Simple as that. Windows XP is a good OS. Vista should, hopefully be one too once all the first service pack comes out and other companies update their drivers for it. But, like all OS's, they all have faults - and they all have some pretty hefty faults. XP isn't what I'd call stable - I still have programs crash and hang. It's not pretty compared to OS X (but that's a fundamental floor based on how the OS renders graphics .. among others). But it is easy to navigate and control. Extra functionality, on the other hand, is too hard to use or find for most people OS X isn't perfectly stable, or as secure as Apple claims it is. It's easy to use, often too easy and lacks functionality. It lacks some of the simplest features in Windows that makes windows popular. At the same time it is often very easy to set things up to work on them ... often. But as my expansive post shows it is flawed. Vista, haven't touched so not going there. But we all know that it's flawed (and from recent reading a lot of those problems might not be Microsoft's fault ... maybe that's a lie )
