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New Re: I do appreciate that Winders Can handle (even such as you do.)
Never-ending fiddling: nope
Duelling DLLs: long since fixed by Windows SxS
Upgrading of drivers: only if you want to (there's rarely an option on OS X; if a Mac ships with a shitty NVidia or ATI driver, you're generally stuck with it unless Apple deign to update it, which they almost never do)
Bugfix check daily: Windows Update
Maintenance: No daily cost in time or money for me

I am not an outlier; like any OS, Windows will bite you if you dick with it enough.

OS X isn't some magical panacea of reliability and performance; it's a tightly controlled platform delivered on a strictly limited set of hardware and quite honestly if it didn't work at least as well as it does, you'd want your money back.

Apple are at least as massively bastardesque as Microsoft are now (hey, you're thinking of buying a laptop that has no post-purchase upgrade options whatsoever and there is no laptop in the range that does, at least MS never spammed all their users with a shitty U2 album, you have to sign into the Apple App Store to get OS upgrades, etc)

There's as much value bringing W98 into the conversation as Mac OS 9; they're both dead technology from twenty-odd years ago.

There's plenty to criticise in Windows - Metro integration is polarising, font handling is still not all it could be, malware is a thing, to pick on three - but it's stable and reliable and exactly as hard to keep running as OS X - that is to say, not at all, because you turn the auto updater on and you leave it be to auto-update.

But the Internet, I hear you cry! Well, of course the internet will be a torrent of shit, with people claiming that Windows has caused them to be completely unable to use their computers because apparently XP was the zenith of UI design and a side-effect was that everyone had their "learn new shit" synapses fried by its sheer brilliance. But so what? If I go to discussions.apple.com or any number of Apple support sites, I'd be forgiven for thinking that it's barely possible to turn a Mac on without something terrible happening, let alone actually get shit done. But we know that's not true, and it's as not true for Windows as it is for OS X.

History is one thing, and I'm not going to defend the shithouse that was MS business practice in the 15-20 years following 1990. But technology is another.

Bottom line is that OS X and Windows are both mature, stable, polished, usable operating systems, backed by companies that between them employ some of the finest software minds in the industry, and that will more than adequately serve the needs of any regular user. They answer different questions of hardware and budget, that's all.

Apple are not interested in the low end of anything; If you've got at least a grand to drop on a laptop, though, come in and sit down, you can park your fixie over there, do you like my beret, let's log on to Vimeo. Microsoft (in concert with Ticky Tacky Computer Systems), on the other hand, will get you on the internet for £300 all up.

And for the actual outliers, there's Linux and FreeBSD and all the other niche operating systems.

Don't get me wrong - I genuinely like OS X and would probably be running it right now if Apple's hardware offerings made any sense at all to me, my use case or my budget. The OS is awesome, but their hardware just doesn't fit for me right now. That may change, but the writing is on the wall: OS X comes on expensive, fixed-configuration appliances. If that works for you, groovy. It doesn't work for me. :sadface:
New +5, Insightful.
I ran a Linux desktop for ages because I liked dicking with the OS and the UI options appealed to me at the time - they were certainly better than the Windows options. The rise of Ubuntu helped, but then Canonical started going in a direction I didn't care for. And dicking with my OS is getting old. Most of the time, I want it To Just Work.

A few years ago, we had massive upgrades at work and I went from an elderly Ubuntu desktop to a MacBook Pro. Until then, I'd never used OS X much, if at all. In a lot of ways It Just Works, but using it every day has shown me I would never buy a Mac of my own: OS X has design features I don't like and can see Apple doesn't understand why people would want those things different.

My own laptop is Windows 8. It's great! And It Just Works, or does pretty much as well as an OS X lappy would. I wish I'd sprung for slightly better hardware, but that's not Microsoft's fault: AU$600 got me an 11" touchscreen 64-bit laptop.

In a lot of ways, I think Microsoft does their best work when believe they are not the dominant player. To me it looks a lot like they're adopting this model for Windows 8.

Wade.
New Thanks; second the Insightful (and dudgeon over Apple's now evident decline
(or perfection of?) pedestrian Corporate unvarnished-greed. (Remember, my query was on behalf of a knowledgeable user but not a deep-techno savvy one.)

I quite appreciate the nicety of your decision to swap platforms; the beauty too, of that decision for you (since you're er, ambi-OS-rous) is that (as I understand it) you can do the computing, produce photos from RAW--without (often? at-all?) exposing self to WIndows-preferring malware! at all. {so far.. I hasten to add; possessed of no illusions of OS X's invulnerability.] You just have to work a bit harder and soon there will be the profit to invest in Pro-grade OS X malware, I have no doubt.

Nice that 'SxS' actually fixed that-all; your case is well enough made in the comparo. I'm biased permanently against a Registry of mixed binary/ascii, and emotionally livid at the cutesy re-Namings of all functions/a mere contrariness of dumbed-down names: which never made their menus as logically obvious as, well OS X does.( Both are technically workable, but Redmond's very use of Language itself ... is an obstacle for me, while you can shrug-off the immaturity!)

My needs are pedestrian, though: a mere glance at the near-infinite Windows Knowledge Base (as covers n of their OS's of course) demonstrates the magnitude of these summaries of n+1000 bugs, glitches as earned an entry. I ƒeare that OS X shall experience a (1-x) magnification too (1 being M$ numbers ... as x rises)

I'll have a severe decision to make as Apple locks-down likely via soldered-in SMD components for miniaturization: then the [still.. 3 Years warranty? or less] will exactly describe the throw-away point of each purchase: resale of older units, unable to run the next insanely-great morphing, etc. will kill resale means of ameliorating new-purchase costs. New cars sales need old-car trade-in sales: doesn't work with techno-planned obsolete (not 'obsolescent')

I will Hate to further fatten A's already obscene profits (increased via their purchasing power, near monopolizing supplies of various critical items) in ~ 2 years when my '08 device won't be capable of running, likely beyond Mavericky. Yet for MY purposes: Snow L could suffice much longer, were it supported re the new malware etc.

Catch 22. In worst case I may have to capitulate to Win 11 or whatever, make a disk-image and just reload when it gets pwned, because I missed a patch for the nano-Root-Kit of a new day. Maybe I can snag a '10 iMac and delay this nasty decision. Or just read books?
New Actually
My workflow is better/easier on Windows than it is on OS X.

The Adobe apps I use are identical across platforms, so there's no gain/loss there, but Windows Explorer is still a much, much better file manager than the Finder.

(Although the colour categories are neat, and I'd like to have them in Windows)

New Heh. even moi can second the file manager options available
But then: one Needed to do a Lot of 'file-managing', just (in olden days) to keep the sucker on-the-air, while grumbling re. broken links to Get some new driver, dll, App!--promised to make the medicine go down smoother, next. {{Pure Illusion--each time.. mostly.}} Ya Can't add-in "security!"

For me the Realization struck sharpest when: a *friend was over ... looking at the cyclops screen. And we jointly remarked that (I think it was "2/3"? or 3/4) of the stuff on our disks--was about massaging, testing, Registry restoring/vacuuming yada. yada. yada.
* who died a few months back.. a bit early via own life-'style' perhaps; but I believe he lost Years in permanent-frustration: as he, (very-much more than I) was determined to MAKE THAT SHiT WORK! I est. that M$ cost him ~ 5 years. Conservatively.

So.. Yessss--doubtless it is now More-bettah in most of those regards, as you say.
But, you see.. [You Do see] I fucking-Lived {through} their nappy-years as the script-kiddies' spawn-generation gradually.. moved-in and tried ... to ~FIX things, from a more adult perspective.

I Don't 'just forgive' this megalopoly for All those Wasted hours, the wading through the bafflegab that Was the misnamed 'Knowledge'-Base endlessly. (Multiply that by the many Millions out there.)
I shall merely relish my Despising of what has-been/likely-still-IS: a Despicable Force which has handicapped the entire Planet, at the most-crucial-of times.. when a new technology:
either "grows quickly and intelligently to remedy its early oversights?" or IT DOES NOT.

IME and IMO: you 'forgive' quite too easily--simply because your chosen line of work happened to include the adsorption of arcanery which always helped you to do a lateral arabesque around many of the Fucked-aspects of this rich kid's romp into Super-$$-extraction from near-All of the masses. That is:

Billy was the First (soon-Big) player to Demand the ©®™-ization of Every Thought a one might have had, from the commutative laws of logic. He co-opted, fleeced every "partner"--we know this.
And We All became His prey. (Supinely, one might add.)
I 'despise' them--all quite logically AND--reasonably: He/'they' were despicable! That is, to my lexicography the fairest Equivalence I can conceive.
The DAMAGE they wreaked is un-Measurable in any compound-sentence or (50.) As bad, in a sense--this sabotage--as the disUSA's ignorant- oft-tragic- sanctimonious meddling everywhere.

(YMDV it seems. Hope He/they/it doesn't bite you on the bum ... at some crucial juncture.. Eh?)


/Me Old Testament, I guess:
An Eye! (-poke) for an Eye! (-poke)
New I was a young sysadmin in the mid-late 90s
As MS were completing the traverse to the zenith of control. IBM had already made all their retarded decisions about OS/2 by this point, DEC had yet to sell out to Compaq, and HP made expensive workstations and printers that we actually liked.

And everything sucked and everything was a lot of work. I looked after a modestly sized Netware 3 setup - maybe 150 PCs, two file servers, a GroupWise server. Things were transitioning from the previous PathWorks arrangements, which was a hideously complex (hey, it came from DEC! If it wasn't hideously complex, it wasn't value for money, right?) system that basically provided file and print sharing to PCs from VAX VMS systems. In the background we had a number of VMS systems that were used for development, and people logged into these primarily through VT220 and 320 terminals on their desk; there were a pile of terminal servers multiplexing the serial connections.

(Remember that MacOS at the time was a pile of crashtastic, incompatible - sometimes even with itself (hello my massive list of extensions! Which one of you is making my computer fail to start? who can say?) - unstable, expensive shit, and OS/2 was just Not A Thing. There were no Macs in our business, and the only OS/2 system was some third party box with which we were required to integrate one of our products)

The NetWare client for Windows was never great (my very first job was as a NetWare 3 admin for 30-odd WFW3.11 clients), but come NetWare 4 and Windows 95, it seemed that the Novell team were coding with their feet. Or someone else's feet. It'd crash. Or not connect to the server. Or connect to the server a lot, consuming the per-connection licences at a hideous rate, causing me to have to go down to the server console and manually disconnect the superfluous instances.

And did you ever see the fuckery that was involved in configuring a NetWare server?

This shit was all on Novell; we had a Windows NT 3.51 fileserver (airgapped for some super-sekrit project or other) and funnily enough the client connections to that thing might have been slow but they fucking well worked. Hell, PathWorks might have been a dog from hell (it was), but it worked.

And the dicking around you had to do to set someone up with a VT and an account on the VAXCluster - let's just say the technote for that ran to 3 single-spaced pages, and leave it at that.

With the advent of Windows 95 (which enjoyed a mercifully brief tenure at our place, being rapidly superseded by the dull-but-worthy NT4), we discovered a new type of user: the one whose Windows would become mysteriously unstable. Well, mysteriously more unstable than usual. They'd have many more than usual blue screens. They'd have trouble starting up and shutting down their machines. And they all - to a man (and it was always a man) - had discovered a tool called REGEDIT.EXE.

Y'see, I think that (and remember, I'm not defending business practice here; MS were evil, right enough, and they're not now, so I'm going to move on even if you can't) in the vast majority of cases, computers are fairly kindasorta deterministic. Even things like memory leaks and race conditions satisfy the conditions; do things X and Y often enough for long enough, and Mr Crash will come a-knocking.

But there's an old saw - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - and it's never more true than when (a) The Internet and (b) REGEDIT.EXE are in play. Windows 95 was perfectly capable of shooting itself in the head, and did so with alarming frequency, but that frequency was drastically elevated when the user in question was a "computer expert" (dude, just because you know VMS Pascal inside out doesn't mean you automatically know a damn thing about Windows) who was given to "tuning" or "tweaking" their system. And this extended to the domestic arena. Regular people would have the usual frustrations with their W95 or OS7/8 boxes, but for real, off-the-scale unfixable RRR stuff, you need a Power User. Or, as I like to think of it, "people who don't know much but they do know just enough to make a real mess".

And what we must remember is the harsh reality - Windows 95 was what let people Get Shit Done. Through all the crashes and the blue screens, it was what people could afford (OS/2 was hilariously expensive; Macs ditto) and it let them run that old copy of WordPerfect or WordStar without any excessive fuckery. Sure, it crashed - but it would be Windows 2000 that delivered a reliable desktop OS, and that was half a decade away.

Alternatives? Linux? In '96? Bitch, please. Mac? Sure, if you liked crashes and spending lots of money on kit from a company that had clearly lost its way and wasn't looking good for making it to the millennium. OS/2? Sadly, OS/2 required too much memory (which wasn't cheap, remember; Windows 95 would boot and sort-of run in four megabytes), hardware support was patchy (especially in the fast-moving-at-the-time world of display drivers) and wasn't cheap itself. Workstation offerings from Sun, HP/Apollo and so on were priced well out of the range of regular enterprises.

It was a fun time to be an admin - security was yet to be the overarching source of worry, paranoia and legislation that it is today, so there was a lot more freewheeling, there was a lot more diversity (everything's all Windows on the client and Linux/Windows on the server these days, with the odd OS X box for flavour), and things were changing fast - but it was frequently difficult, often frustrating, and when shit broke, it broke hard. And I went up and down the stairs a lot, too.
New By way of contrast
My work laptop bluescreened this morning; the Broadcom wireless driver fell over. (Look, interpreting a BSOD is a skill you never quite lose)

People gathered round to have a look, and the IT manager himself took an interest.

Yep, a Windows box crashing has become an event.
New So you're the kind of user who can still make that happen
--

Drew
New Wasn't even connected to the wifi
Laptop was on the docking station, thus connected to the wired LAN.

I'm that good.
     Seeking comments on latest Mac notebooks - (Ashton) - (37)
         Nice, expensive, not got much graphical shove - (pwhysall) - (7)
             What he said. Are you missing a "Do Not" in the last line? - (Another Scott) - (3)
                 No - (pwhysall) - (2)
                     Weird. - (Another Scott) - (1)
                         Re: Weird. - (pwhysall)
             I disagree about the keyboard. - (static) - (2)
                 Take your point, but... - (pwhysall) - (1)
                     Yes, the HHK is an outlier. - (static)
         They were updated in July, more extensive changes in 2015. - (Another Scott)
         Thanks all.. perzackly what I needed to know. - (Ashton)
         PS: about desirable mem for two Apps: - (Ashton) - (24)
             Max it. - (pwhysall) - (21)
                 I do appreciate that Winders Can handle (even such as you do.) - (Ashton) - (20)
                     windows sux - (boxley) - (10)
                         My dad recently got a Win7 machine after running XP for years... - (Another Scott) - (4)
                             recent? Win8 has been out for a while. - (boxley) - (3)
                                 Yup. Just a few months ago. They didn't want 8.x. - (Another Scott) - (2)
                                     Wow - (boxley) - (1)
                                         Win7 is on "extended support" until January 2020. It'll be around a while. -NT - (Another Scott)
                         +5, subtle. Yes, I catch your meaning.. - (Ashton) - (1)
                             apple controls what hardware goes into its boxen - (boxley)
                         It's not UNIX - (malraux) - (2)
                             yup, shoddy dev platform unless you are from other countries - (boxley) - (1)
                                 No kidding - (malraux)
                     Re: I do appreciate that Winders Can handle (even such as you do.) - (pwhysall) - (8)
                         +5, Insightful. - (static)
                         Thanks; second the Insightful (and dudgeon over Apple's now evident decline - (Ashton) - (6)
                             Actually - (pwhysall) - (5)
                                 Heh. even moi can second the file manager options available - (Ashton) - (4)
                                     I was a young sysadmin in the mid-late 90s - (pwhysall) - (3)
                                         By way of contrast - (pwhysall) - (2)
                                             So you're the kind of user who can still make that happen -NT - (drook) - (1)
                                                 Wasn't even connected to the wifi - (pwhysall)
             Would she be happier with a MacPro? - (Another Scott) - (1)
                 Plan to send her here to mull, cogitate - (Ashton)
         You might consider the refurbs - (Steve Lowe)
         you might want to check the iworm -NT - (boxley)

Many of the dead have finished being dead without the assistance of medical staff or fancy equipment.
140 ms