Heh… wonder if I can get a flame war going with that title? 
I just watched this YouTube video and thought it was funny, and felt compelled to check out the comments to see if there were any amusing ‘macs are so lame’ or ‘PCs suck’ arguments going on. Why? Partly because it seems such an oddly emotive topic – probably the closest I’ll get to how it might feel to support a football team, and partly because I’m a switcher myself, curious to see if many have done the same.
There were quite a few flaccid remarks along the lines I expected, but quite a few reasoned comments as well. Some people mentioned that they liked both, but maybe one more than the other. Some mentioned that Macs are in fact Personal Computers, though I guess most people use the term ‘PC’ these days to refer to machines that ultimately descend from the IBM PC, now offered by a multitude of different companies in different makes and models, and often bundled with Windows.
I like both too, maybe the Mac a bit more than the PC. The main reason I switched to a Mac for my main machine was my experience of Windows Vista. Before I tried a Mac, I upgraded from a single-core laptop (running Windows XP) to a faster dual-core laptop with more RAM to try to improve performance. I figured all those multi-threaded applications I use would be quicker. Getting a new Windows laptop at the time meant getting Vista, and I thought that would be a bonus.
Right from the start though, I noticed how security dialogs would pop up with irritating frequency. They’re part of a Vista feature called User Account Control, designed to stop programs doing anything that could be risky without the user being made aware of it. Mac OS X and Ubuntu have similar dialogs for the times a program asks for elevated privileges (for access to things that can affect the whole system) but it pops up nowhere near as often.
By itself, that would be annoying. There was also, though, the painfully slow response when I tried to use anything. Hearing the fan still whirring away like a jet engine a few minutes after double clicking something with nothing happening on the screen, I’m thinking “what is it doing in there?”. I can only guess where these performance issues have come from. I expect a fair chunk of it was probably down to the indexing service, which gets better over time, as does the frequency of elevation prompts, but I’m wondering if the file and registry virtualisation part of UAC has anything to do with it. Even if this doesn’t impact performance, I found it maddening not really knowing where things were on the file system, as I had problems sometimes with following shortcuts to my own documents giving me ‘Access Denied’ messages. It felt like I’d been betrayed by an old friend; all those years of learning how to work with Windows since 3.1 suddenly seemed to have gone up in smoke.
I guess the problem is that Windows has been too trusting in the past, giving programmers the freedom to do whatever they wanted with the file system and registry, for better or worse. Ideally programs would only change files belonging to the current user, unless they’re doing something that should apply to the whole system. But it was easy for programmers to ignore this, whether through lack of thought or lack of discipline. So many programs have been written for Windows that expect to be able to routinely write or change stuff somewhere in C:\Program Files or %WINDIR% that it’s difficult to allow a new version of Windows to introduce better security while still running these older programs.
There is a way to automatically approve the elevation dialog if it annoys you to the point of insanity, but the user interface way of doing it is only available in Vista Ultimate, and the registry way might be a bit too tecchie for some people. It’s probably not a good idea to disable it, but the problem with security dialogs being too frequent is that it dilutes the message and allows habit to creep in. How can you tell as a user when allowing the access is fine, and when it might cause problems? What if you get into the habit of clicking ‘Allow’ whenever you see it, so that when it actually counts you click ‘Allow’ anyway?
I’d have switched to Ubuntu on the new laptop, as the things it now supports out-of-the-box astounded me compared to other Linux distributions I’ve tried, not to mention the user interface tricks you can do with it, but a lot of software I use is still (unfortunately) only supported natively on Mac OS X or Windows. As it was beforehand I was actually quite happy with Windows XP, and curious about Macs because I hadn’t tried them before. Disillusioned with the direction Windows seemed to be going in, I took the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro.
I was quite surprised how easy it was to work with a Mac having never used one before. Other than the initial small learning curve of getting used to new keyboard shortcuts and menu arrangement (as you’d expect when switching OS anyway), I was quickly impressed with the smooth performance, glossy user interface, the amount and quality of included software (including a music sequencer and full development environment), and the way it just gets out of the way to let you do your thing. What’s more, if you like to use a command line for things, with Mac OS X it’s bash (the Bourne-again Shell), so I immediately felt at home having tinkered with Linux for years.
Whilst Vista also has its glossy Aero UI it seems to run comparitively slowly on similar hardware. Granted, that hardware might cost a fair bit more from Apple, and the pricing in the UK compared to the US is particularly galling. The arguments about the design being much nicer than PCs aren’t necessarily true; at least with a PC you have a lot more choice in that department and firms like Alienware have been turning heads with their designs for a while. PCs have come a long way from the stereotypical beige breezeblock I owned in the early nineties.
There’s also the argument that you have more upgrade options with PCs. I guess for tower PCs this is probably true to an extent, where you can easily upgrade graphics cards, add extra hard disks, add a variety of PCI devices, or even change the processor, though with laptops it’s not the same. Many laptops (Mac and Windows) support ExpressCard devices, and there seems to be a move generally towards USB when adding extras, so maybe there isn’t quite such a big difference any more? More people are using laptops as their main machine these days too, so unless you have exotic devices without Mac-compatible drivers I personally don’t see the upgrade argument as a decider. For one thing, Macs have an impressive resale value so even if you don’t fancy upgrading the hard disc or RAM, you can easily sell it and cover a big chunk of the cost of a newer one.
It’s interesting that Apple hasn’t decided to release OS X for PCs. Sure, Apple would have the extra overhead of supporting a lot of different hardware (though sometimes they have problems with their own hardware . Some might say it’s because their kit is too expensive so they have to tie the OS to it to get people to bite, and releasing OS X for other kit would allow direct performance comparisons. I guess you have to bear the Mac Mini in mind here – it’s actually quite cheap for what it is, so this doesn’t quite hold up.
Seems to me that the cost of a Mac is balanced by the combination of good design (Alienware machines are expensive too) and the software you get with it.
This was done with hardly any resources, and the external networks guys with more funding and clout being mostly opposed to anything bar X.25, let alone something as un-European as IP…
Other delegates suggested a 
