Well, it’s been a few years since the OS wars were a big issue. Microsoft thought they had crushed all the competition. But now, the peasants are revolting. Firefox is rising from the ashes of Netscape, Linux is on the rise, and Macs are on the offensive.

Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost ponders about the wisdom of buying a Mac. He references 18 points of why a Mac is better than a PC.

Well, I disagree. I think that your average clueless computer user won’t be able to tell the difference, but when it comes down to it, Apple is just a niche market. In all fairness, Apple has done a great deal to try to bring their computers in compliance with standards for technology. It used to be that even under VirtualPC hardware still knew it was dealing with a Mac and wouldn’t deal with it at all. Now, with the advent of USB, and several other standardized technologies, Macs work better in general. But they’re still not compatible with a lot of stuff designed for PC’s. Running something in emulation is never as good as just straight up running it. There are always problems in emulators. Nevermind how bad it slows things down.

As for spyware, adware, and viruses, these are issues that are here to stay for all computer users. Windows users are getting hammered the worst right now, but as soon as they decide that it’s worth the effort to target Mac users and Linux users, they’ll be on the rise. Ditching IE for Mozilla does as much for keeping away from adware and spyware than ditching Windows. But even then, once Firefox takes back the web, they’ll start targeting the Gecko engine and the guys at Mozilla will have to keep up with the assault as the popularity grows.

The ability to make PDFs for free isn’t anything new or special. All you have to do is download OpenOffice which will let you make your own PDFs, and open and save documents in MS Office formats, as well as several others. And it’s free. Editing PDF’s is the real trick these days.

And you’re forgetting the ultimate evil in all computing. The One Button Mouse. They’re just plain evil. But on a more serious note, there is a lot more software available for Windows than the MacOS mainly because so many more people use Windows. Both Mac and Linux are going to have to deal with this. Since they’re both Unix based, I think we’ll eventually see some more standards for Unix based operating systems, which would let their market share increase.

If I were in charge of Apple, I would start thinking about making a version of MacOSX available for the X86 processor. I for one don’t much care for the multicolored Mac computers, nevermind that PC’s are a dime a dozen. PC hardware is everywhere and easily available, and PC components are pretty much the IT standard. And the compatibility issues within different releases of the Mac OS are a significant hurdle. Everytime Mac issues an upgrade, in addition to the upgrade for the OS, you have to get upgrades for all your software. They’ve got to change that.

I think we’re still one or two years off from another OS being able to take a signicant shot at WinXP. Although, if Microsoft goes through with all the invasions of privacy they’re planning for Longhorn, then they’re one (very likely to happen) disaster away from the Linux revolution.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 5:51 pm by The Flannel Avenger and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.