The last study I saw, which I posted a link to in one of these stupid shin kicking threads, was pretty darn reasonable as far as not being too tilted had XP at something like 98 points and OS X at 100. Their early preview of vista was that it tipped past OS X. My personal vista experiences suck. Its got a long ways to go.
Sorry about that elf thing.
After years of glitches, crashes and once (really) smoke coming from the cabinet of an expensive Gateway piece of crap loaded with Windows Millenium (as unstable as the San Andreas fault), I have spent three and one half trouble free years as a very heavy user of a 17 inch Mac lap top that doubles a desk top with blue tooth mouse and key board. Worth every cent.
For what its worth, Windows ME was one of the worst commercial operating systems ever released, and the late 90's, early 2000's Gateway machines were also some of the worst mass produced computers made.
You enjoyed about the worst possible experience.
While I've worked for company's who used macs and had them in mixed environments that I had to use and support, I'll briefly relate one of my personal Mac experiences. I used macs for years and always found them appealing visually, functionally about equal to their windows counterparts if you stuck with the standard Office product (no surprise there), but expensive and often slow.
My wife (girlfriend at the time) had some crappy pc that was built by a local computer retail store and Windows ME. I had to spend the first 45 minutes of every visit to her house fixing whatever was broken THIS time. We decided to get her something new, and since she was a heavy digital camera/videocam/mp3 user, a Mac just seemed to make the most sense. After all, its *the* machine for the high touch, media savvy person.
We bought an iMac, a lovely indigo model. IIRC it was about $1200 out the door, and I paid an extra $129 for the very spiffy and highly regarded OSX 10.0, since the machine came with system 9. I had to bite some bullets on this, since a similar Dell machine with a flat screen LCD could be had with a lot of goodies in it for about $400-450 cheaper.
I also had to buy a new indigo printer, since her old one had no Mac drivers, and she didnt like the mouse so we bought an indigo blue trackball.
Then we found out that her mp3 player wasnt even remotely compatible. And her videocamera with a firewire out port wasnt supported on the mac either. At least her digital camera worked. But iPhoto was a pretty sparse application that had nowhere near the features that the supplied windows based editing package came with. And when we got a new videocamera that worked with the mac, I found myself pretty disenchanted with iMovie. It did the job, but even crappy Windows Movie Maker was easier to use and about twice as fast. I couldnt produce anything in windows media format, only quicktime. Her parents windows computer didnt have quicktime and after spending 3 hours trying to download it over their dialup line, I gave up.
Then I made the mistake of installing OS X 10.0. What initially received gushing and glowing reports from the media suddenly became a "less than alpha" product that was barely usable, incompatible with many applications, required a slower than molasses 'compatibility mode' for many others, and had limited or no driver support for many devices.
After downloading lots of new drivers and a ton of patches, and enjoying several weeks of "this is better..." :
quipping from the wife, I reloaded the system 9 disk. Which had none of the games, photo samples, video samples, extra's, apps or almost half of anything else that was originally preloaded. I was told by apple support that yes, that was the case...those materials are preloaded but licensing prohibits them from including the material on the recovery disks.
Over the next 18 months I regularly had humongous downloaded updates over dialup, frequently had to find and download drivers specific to our cameras, trackball and printer, and pretty much had to unplug it and haul it to my house once every few months to use the broadband connection when the updates just got too far behind. We got OSX 10.1 for free as an upgrade. It sucked too and back to system 9 we went. When I was offered OS X 10.2..."The good one", for a $49 upgrade price...I declined.
I found it a pleasant enough machine, but I found no glaringly easy or simple aspects to it vs the early versions of XP. Better than windows 98 to be sure, and way better than windows ME. I did however have to agree with my friend Jerry Pournelle, who once said "Macs *are* easy to use, because you either figure out how to do something right away or you'll never figure it out. Once you learn that and stop trying to do things that arent apparent and just live with it, its great".
I had several opportunities to disassemble it. Once when I discovered that the measly 256MB of ram included was inadequate to do anything and had to add another 256MB just to get some apps to run faster than I could perform the task manually. I had to replace the disk drive once when it started whining too loud to sit in the room with the machine, and the replacement also started whining about a year later just as we were about to sell it. Not enough ventilation was just cooking the drives, since Apple doesnt believe in putting a fan in the machine. The dvd drive also crapped out and I had to pay about $200 to have a new slot drive unit put in just so I could boot the recovery disk to wipe the machine to sell it.
While perusing the interior, I found a standard motorola processor, some pretty weak nvidia video chips (128K shared), a maxtor disk drive, lucent "winmodem" soft modem chip, and a mediocre but solid internal display.
In short, similar quality and inferior capability to the much cheaper Dell machine I should have bought, and system 9 wasnt as good as XP became during that time period.
At no point did I feel like I had escaped from Microsoft Hell and gotten a good value for my money. I swapped one set of problems I understood for a bunch of problems that I didnt and bought a mundane machine at a premium price. The much ballyhooed super duper applications that all worked so seamlessly werent very powerful, were slow, and didnt do a lot of things that I needed them to do. I had a ton of windows software that would do the job, but that didnt work on the mac.
I know this is a worst case, xx years ago anecdotal experience, but its a fair and honest one and if we're going to draw comparisons around old hardware and software, I guess this balances that out.
The grass is not usually greener on the other side of the fence...new operating systems stink no matter who makes them...paying extra for something doesnt mean its better...compatibility with what you want to do and what you own is realllly important.
