Macs Keep Going and Going

I was looking around on TechNN the other day (which is one of the places I visit in my daily Web surfing routine), and I found an interesting article on Cnet: Analysis: Windows 2000 clock ticking down. It talked about how companies who don't upgrade to Windows 2000 by the end of the current quarter should wait for Windows XP.

You probably think I have converted to PC and am worrying about upgrading Windows 95 on my own 200 MHz PC. I have not converted to PC; don't worry about that. (Yes, I am worrying about what version of Windows to put on my PC, but that's beside the point.)

What I did not like was a statement at the end of the article: "In practice, a machine should die with whatever operating system it was born with."

I do not agree with this statement at all. When you buy a machine, you don't buy it for a year and then replace it; you are spending that $1,000 or $1,500 or $2,500 on something that you hope will last you three years, maybe four. However, this may not be true for PCs anymore, but it is true with the Macintosh.

My Performa 6205CD, for example, shipped in 1995 with System 7.5.1 (which has been compared to Windows 95, but that is really comparing apples and oranges - no pun intended). Right now, the same 6205 is running Mac OS 9.0, and it can run 9.1. That's an operating system released in 2001 running on a six-year-old computer.

I can go even further than that. The Macintosh Plus was released in 1986. Nine years later you could run the then-current operating system (7.5.5) on it, even though it was sluggish. That was nine years later!

In terms of being able to run current operating systems on older hardware, the Macintosh wins almost every time. You can run Mac OS 9.1 on a Power Mac 7100/66 that shipped with System 7.1.2 in March 1994. You can run Mac OS 7.6.1 on a Mac IIci that first shipped with System 6.0.4 in September 1989. That's a 1997 operating system on a 1989 computer - and it runs well, too.

From my limited experience with PCs, Windows 95 does run on a 1989 vintage 80386-based PC, but it runs about as well as System 7.5 on an 8 MHz Plus. Windows 98 runs on a 75 MHz Pentium from 1995, but it can barely handle it.

This is one of those things that make me glad to be a Mac user. Macs are good, solid investments as computers that can easily last five or six years. Even if you don't plan to keep your computer for more than three or four years, if you have a Mac, you know that someone will be interested in buying your system once your needs have changed.

PC users can't guarantee this. Windows XP wants a 300 MHz Pentium-class chip (I have heard it is slow on this configuration), and setup is supposed to be somewhat difficult. In fact, what I have been hearing is that Microsoft recommends you not install it on anything made before 2000 (in other words, anything that shipped with Win95 is out of the question), and if you want fewer headaches, go out and buy a new computer with XP preinstalled. With some 34% of PC users still using Win95 and about 45% using Win98 (I bet a number of those people upgraded from 95), how many people are going to be able to use XP? The answer: less than half of PC users.

Now for Mac OS X. The beige G3/233 shipped in November 1997 with Mac OS 8, and Mac OS X's minimum requirement is a G3/233 with 128 MB of RAM and 1.1 GB of hard drive space. Very simple. None of that "Well, if you have this type of processor and this amount of RAM, it may work," or "Since your computer does not have a supported (graphics card/sound card), you will need to upgrade it by installing this, that, and the other."

Since Macs last a long time and have the ability to run the current version of the OS for longer, Macs end up saving you time and money in the long term.

"In practice, a machine should die with whatever operating system it was born with" does not apply to the Mac. Instead of dying with the OS it was born with, a Mac can keep going and going with an OS made years after the machine itself.