Four Years Later, Mac OS X Is Definitely Superior to Windows XP

It seems like the winner in the Mac vs. PC debate differs depending on what year it is. One gets ahead and comes out as the better value, then the other one gets ahead a couple years later.

In 2005, it's obvious that the Mac has the edge over Windows. The lack of viruses and spyware, the competitive prices, and the overall quality of the operating system make Mac OS X the clear winner right now.

Let's talk about four years ago. Both Apple and Microsoft were launching new operating systems: Mac OS X 10.0 and Windows XP. When anything completely "new" is released, it's pretty much expected that few things will work with it. And the more different from the previous version it is, the more compatibility problems it will have.

This was a big issue with OS X. When I first started running it, there were no OS X applications aside from the ones Apple provided with the OS - and maybe one or two written by independent developers. There wasn't even an OS X version of iTunes. That finally came along, as did Microsoft Office, and later Photoshop.

Prior to that, if you wanted to run these applications, you had to run them in Classic mode, which was generally slower than running OS 9 by itself - and if all your applications were Classic ones, why not just stick with OS 9?

Since OS X was completely new, Apple decided it would start with essentially a blank slate, leaving out a lot of the features of the old Mac OS (labels for files and folders, for example).

Until 10.3 came out last year, OS X was not much more than a "software toy" - and people recognized that.

Windows XP was almost a seamless transition from Windows 2000 Professional (which is what I had running on my PC), and the upgrade from Windows 98 or Me was relatively painless as well. You installed the new OS and went about business as usual. Perhaps a few games wouldn't work, but most applications didn't have a problem.

With OS X, when you installed the new OS, you had a new desktop altogether, a completely new Finder, and your documents weren't in the new locations - you were essentially installing a second operating system on your Mac, not upgrading your old one.

This made a lot of people wary, and people who had at one time considered switching to the Mac were put off by the new operating system - it was so different from the old one and had almost no software available. They were promised an easy upgrade to Windows XP on their existing PCs - and that's what many people ended up doing.

The other issue was software companies. At one point, AOL in the UK decided that they weren't going to support AOL on OS X at all (they reversed that decision not too long after OS X became the default OS on new Macs). Adobe took forever in developing OS X versions of some of their applications, and audio support when Mac OS X first shipped was pretty lousy.

All that made many people think they could have the next generation operating system without giving up software compatibility today - if only they bought Windows XP (or a computer with Windows XP on it).

Four years later, their Windows XP computers are slowed down to a crawl by viruses and spyware, and the operating system - which was only okay to begin with (and in some ways was a step back from 2000 Pro even) - is now completely outdated. Longhorn, the next Windows version, was supposed to ship this year, and now they're saying it won't be out until 2006!

Add to that the fact that Mac OS X has been through three major revisions and is now a fully featured, current operating system with a full complement of software available.

I've had no reason to switch on my PC for the past month, and when I finally did in order to visit one website (an Apple II emulator that ironically requires Windows), I had so much trouble with my antivirus software trying to update itself every 3 seconds that I gave up and plugged in my Mac again.

When Longhorn finally shows up (probably about the same time OS X 10.5 does), things may change, but right now there's no question which operating system is ahead.