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Apple v Microsoft

Colin Barron

pfm Member
I am using my daughters 3 year old Macbook. What a fantastic piece of kit, it actually works. Apart from damage due to dropping etc, it has been excellent. No popups. No advertising rubbish, no virus, as i get with windows. My real question is how can Microsoft windows be so poor with all the thousands of superbrains they employ.
 
The late Steve Jobs (were he still alive) and the very much alive Bill Gates might suggest that both business models work and work quite well.
 
Apple work out of the box whereas Windows can be just as secure but takes a lot of tweaking to get it there.
 
The answer is simple.

Apple's OS works on their computers only, whereas Microsoft's has to work on a wide variety of different hardware.
 
Word on the Mac. Fusion of all the worst of both worlds. Copy and paste crashes unavoidable, unpredictable and regular. Badness. Unfortunately no current alternative at work. Not a concern for a home machine, but given how much time I spend writing reports on my work Mac using Word, it's a significant thorn in my Appley side...

Still wouldn't dream of going back to a PC for most everything else, but it's worth bearing in mind that much of the responsibility for the user experience on either system is down to the software that runs on top of the OS rather than the OS itself. So, you might find the PC version of something being much better or reliable than the Mac variant (as per Word) or vice versa... just something to bear in mind.
 
Yes Microsofts Word on apple is astoundingly bad. I rather suspect they are going to jump us straight to the 360 model so we might as well settle in.

I have PCs and Macs in the house now, never used to entertain PCs but they run games far better. I also have windows server 2008 on a dell poweredge, thats rock solid.

The biggest issue I have pcs is the crap they come preinstalled with usually, and not the fault of PC persay, but pretty much every downloaded app or what ever has a tiny little bit of text wanting to install some sort of so called 'tool bar' which so far as I can tell is nothing more than an ad tracker.

In terms of general reliability, macs/pcs they are both as bad :)

The only other game on the block, linux/debian is atrocious for normal people and so split and messy that finding answers to questions on google is nearly impossible meaning that the internet is full of everyone asking the same questions and all the toss pot linux builders ignoring the question because we should have 'found the answer ourselves'

What is undeniable is that apple make the very best hardware there is nothing else out there built to the same standard and with that lovely track pad on macbooks, nothing like it out there.
 
Well, I'm not a computer nerd, wouldn't recognise a command-line if it took me out to lunch, but I've been very happy with Linux for the past 10 years. First Mandarke, then Kubuntu. Does everything I want, never crashes, no vulnerability to viruses su I don't have to mess around with firewalls and anti-virus software, and nobody asking me to register or download the latest "service pack." It is super-easy to install. And its free!
 
The late Steve Jobs (were he still alive) and the very much alive Bill Gates might suggest that both business models work and work quite well.

That does not answer his question. Products are not business models.
 
I am using my daughters 3 year old Macbook. What a fantastic piece of kit, it actually works. Apart from damage due to dropping etc, it has been excellent. No popups. No advertising rubbish, no virus, as i get with windows. My real question is how can Microsoft windows be so poor with all the thousands of superbrains they employ.

Apple software on apple hardware and Microsoft software on anybody's hardware is a large part of this. Having said that I am typing this on a new Microsoft Surface and it is still buggy compared to our lass's iPad. My Mac has been retired after five years with a broken board. 500 quid to replace!
 
A late friend of mine (he died a month after sending me this) responded to my question about Macs not suffering viruses with this, in 2008. I'm not sure how true it is as I'm clueless.

"I have taken some liberties with the following for brevity
Mac OS X is basically a UNIX-like system based on BSD UNIX and the core MACH kernel developed in the mid 80s at Carnegie Mellon university. Add a large dollop of code from NeXT Computers NEXT Step OS and it started to look pretty sharp.

Unix based OS's started out as tightly written and pretty secure. The Mach kernel has a plugin architecture and as well as custom code there is in Mac OS X a substanstial amount of open source bits where literally hundreds of thousands of geek programmers worldwide debug and refine the code. Possibly it's that vast number of eyes passing over the code that closes holes and security flaws which help keep it virus free.

Others will argue that it's security through obscurity where hackers cannot be bothered to write for it. That frankly is shite. To date the only major hacks into Mac OS have been facillitated by introduction of poor third party drivers.

The viruses that go about simply address issues with poorly written elements of Windows which being so large there are plenty. The mechanisms they use simply have no analog on the Mac OS

Concise code of MAC OS helps make it easier to secure."
 
The fact is mac users and laterly IOS users are all bragging twats, if it was easy to hack macs, then surely someone would have done it just to shut us up.
 
There have been a few articles that Microsoft are in trouble. I tend to agree with them.

The xbox has done well and it might be the product they need to rely on to save the company.
 
The thing is, IT is built on it surely? I know plenty of IT guys in work because basically windows is a bit shit. I thought it was done on purpose?

I think Windows 8 has done for them. The thing is computers are complex enough, mac is no easier than windows in that respect, if you don't have a lot of experience using them, they are both daunting. My parents have my old 27inch imac sat on their desk used soley for facebook, they are terrified of it.

However windows 8 managed to alienate people that know their way around computers and windows. My sister in law bought round an new toshiba POS with 8 on it to get it set up for her, its a bloody nightmare mess of shit.
 
Thats great, write to MS and explain you are the guy that likes it.

In the mean time they are rushing through windows 9 for release this year, which removes the touch 'feel' elements and brings back the start menu.
 
I was wondering why my server was playing up with my streaming music glitching. Took a look and what do you know 'Searchprotection.exe'

ffs, I hate windows.
 
Indeed, I have hardly anything on my server other than plex/bittorrentsync/cobian.

Running malwarebytes now. Sigh.
 
Apple work out of the box whereas Windows can be just as secure but takes a lot of tweaking to get it there.

I have a friend who has spent thousands of pounds to become a certified microsoft engineer but even he says things like well you could try Norton or Mcafee etc when you have a problem. As opposed to saying this is how to sort the problem. What other product would you accept at this level of reliability?
 


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