Mac and Windows: Different but Equally Productive

In my previous installment, Switching Back to Windows after 3 Years with Mac OS X, I wrote about some of the reasons for my frequent switches between Mac and PC. Now, I would like to go into a bit more detail about the systems themselves and what attracted or repelled me at the time.

1985: First Mac Exposure

1993 was my first Mac purchase, but not my first Mac exposure, which was back in 1985. I was working as a summer temp at Hughes Aircraft Company doing light clerical work and helping them enter data into spreadsheets. Being 1985, that meant green text on black screens in some version of DOS and using either VisiCalc or Lotus 123 (I honestly don't remember which).

Off in a corner they had a Macintosh 128K that nobody used, and I played with it a few times on my lunch break.

That first impression lasted eight years, including its negatives.

What impressed me was the GUI, of course, which was far easier to deal with than any command line and its required syntax could ever be. Where the Mac failed, for me at least, was in its single floppy and lack of a hard drive, which meant that to do anything required the constant swapping of floppy disks, as the Mac's minuscule 128 KB of RAM were insufficient for the OS and an application at the same time.

I loved the concept, but I couldn't imagine getting real work done with the constant demands to switch disks.

1993: Going Mac

Needless to say, a Mac was not something that I thought about actually buying until it was time to move overseas, and even then I only looked at the PowerBook because of the design issues of 1993 laptop PCs.

Laptop PCs in 1993 came in many shapes and sizes, just as they do today. My brother had a nice Compaq that was less than 2" thick, had a color screen, and weighed about 7 lb. This was fairly representative of the market, and it cost a then-reasonable $1,800.

I would have simply bought the exact same model in monochrome at $1,200 - except that I saw a PowerBook commercial and noticed the built-in trackball.

After playing with a real PowerBook at an Apple dealer, I was hooked. With its 80 MB hard drive, I didn't have to deal with the constant disk swaps of the old Mac 128K, and with its built-in trackball and broad palm rest, it was a far more elegant package than anything on the PC side at any price.

I spent $1,500 of my very measly finances to buy the absolute cheapest PowerBook available, the 145b.

Despite its limitations, I fell in love with that machine. System 7.1 was worlds better than Windows 3.1, and even after the arrival of Windows 95 I still felt more advanced using System 7.5.1. I stayed with the Mac for both my laptop (I eventually moved to a PowerBook 5300c) and desktop (Power Mac 7200/75) and kept my old 386 PC, which was still fast enough using Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95.

1998: Back to Windows

What forced my next switch was my landing a government job. I worked as a Special Agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) starting in 1997, and by early 1998 I had found myself traveling quite frequently and doing a lot of work in the field.

My PowerBooks were struggling to keep up with the work I was doing, which often required multipart forms and reports generated using mail merge functions in MS Word and an Access database in Windows - which only sort-of worked when imported into FileMaker Pro. [Editor's note: Microsoft has never made a version of Access for Macs.]

In addition to Access, I wanted the ability to watch DVD movies on long flights and in lonely hotel rooms when I traveled, so a new laptop was in order.

My first thought was to buy another PowerBook and use SoftWindows to deal with Access, which was necessary only once or twice per month.

The problem was the DVD issue. Yes, 1998 PowerBooks played DVDs beautifully, but only on the high-end WallStreet model that was well out of my price range. I had seen passive matrix screens and always found them quite poor, and on a machine for DVD movies, passive matrix was a deal-breaker for me.

With my absolute budget limit of $2,000, I simply couldn't have a DVD movie capable PowerBook. $1,600 bought me a generic laptop PC running Windows 98 that included a DVD-ROM drive and an active matrix screen.

Windows 98 crashed constantly, enough that I finally upgraded it to Windows NT 4, which was rock-solid reliable, although inconvenient and difficult to configure. I still had my DVD movie playback and Access database (a miserable program, even today). While not as elegant and pleasant to use as my PowerBook (I still had the 145B, but I had sold the 5300c), it got the job done and generally didn't draw any attention to itself.

1999: Windows 2000

Windows 2000 came out in late 1999 and was a revelation. Windows 2000 was faster and even more stable than Windows NT, and it brought plug-and-play functionality that really worked (in earlier versions of Windows, it only worked sometimes). It was so good that many business PCs still use it, with Windows XP and even Windows Vista offering little improvement in core functionality.

In short, Windows 2000 was perhaps the first modern desktop OS suitable for mainstream users. Macintosh System 7.5, OS 8, and OS 9, while far more feature-rich and elegant, couldn't come close to the stability of Windows 2000.

As I upgraded to newer and more powerful laptops (the Power Mac G4 remained my desktop computer), I eventually was upgraded to Windows XP, as it came preinstalled on the hardware. In the early years of XP I downgraded and kept running Windows 2000 for stability and compatibility reasons, but by late 2002 XP was finally mature and stable and the utility programs had caught up with the OS change. (The same problems face Macs with each OS release as essential utilities like DiskWarrior usually break until an updated version comes out.)

2003: Viruses and Other Malware

Late 2003 was a very bad time to be a Windows user: Melissa, I Love U, and my personal favorite, A32.Swenn. These are all pieces of malware that were the scourge of Windows users.

I was infected with a number of viruses in late 2003 despite using Norton Antivirus and the Windows Firewall. The up to 300 A32.Swenn-infected emails (the one that looks like a Microsoft Service Pack), at 146K each, slowed my email to a crawl, overloading my account limits and seriously ruining my day.

I don't think I was ever infected by A32.Swenn, as I like to think I was smart enough to never open one of those attachments, but somebody with my name in their address book sure was.

Back to the Mac

While it did nothing to ease the flow into my inbox, I became so paranoid about malware that I went right to the Apple Store and bought a new 1 GHz 12" PowerBook.

I used that 12" PowerBook for about 18 months, and then sold it for almost what I'd paid and bought the faster 1.5 GHz version of the exact same computer. That says a lot, as I love playing with technology and always want to try something new. Buying an essentially identical computer was a very boring thing for me to do, but I was really that pleased with the technology and design.

Four hour battery life, small size, fairly light weight, and something I'd never had before in a laptop, excellent sound from the built-in speakers that made DVD movies a treat when I traveled.

In 2006, I upgraded to a black MacBook and notwithstanding the early shutdown and extreme heat issues that plagued the three MacBooks I went through (see MacBook Pleases, but Two Weeks for Repair Is Excessive and MacBook Repair Saga: Botched and Botched Again, but Third Time's the Charm), I still look at the 12" PowerBook as a better machine.

2005: Back to Windows

After three years of OS X bliss, I'm back to using Windows on my primary computer, a Toshiba Portegé M400 Tablet PC. It's nowhere near as elegant as an Apple portable, with a cheaper look and feel to the case. It's lacking sophisticated touches like slot-loading drives and a third speaker.

It's also bulky by comparison, despite sharing the 12" screen size, actually being about as much thicker, deeper and wider than a 12" iBook, as the iBook was larger than the svelte and sexy PowerBook. Only in weight is the Toshiba competitive, coming in at 4.5 lb., or just a hair lighter than the PowerBook's 4.6 lb. and the iBook's 4.9 lb.

Other than size, the Portegé is very similar in specification to the MacBook and PowerBook laptops that I had before. Its 12" screen, despite its built-in Wacom digitizer, is far brighter and has better color and contrast than the PowerBook screen, actually looking just about as nice as the MacBook's gorgeous glossy panel. The Portegé's screen is semi-glossy and shares the same glare issues as the MacBook, but both are outstanding in use.

The keyboard is very good, sound is better than the MacBook's (but not as good as the PowerBook's), and at five hours real world, it gets better battery life than either.

Finally, its 1.66 GHz Core Duo processor and GMA950 integrated graphics make it almost a MacBook clone in power, except for the slightly slower processor speed that is partly negated by a faster 7200 rpm hard drive.

Hooked on Tablets

None of that stuff mattered at all in my decision to replace the unreliable (pre firmware-patch) MacBook with the Windows-only Portegé, especially as I was enjoying the versatility of Boot Camp and thus could run Windows whenever I wanted to on the MacBook. No, what got me was the Tablet PC features after a brief trial with an older model (see Tablet Computing Can Improve Productivity).

Okay, so there is the hardware, how about the software?

Quite simply, while many Mac fans are quick to point out how inferior the Windows UI is and just as many Windows users will point out how inferior the OS X UI is, the truth is that both groups are right - and both groups are wrong.

Here are a few examples.

Different Copy Schemes

I'm not the first and won't be the last to mention that Windows and OS X handle file management differently. Imagine this simple scenario: You have a folder called "Work" where you keep your work documents. If you plan on working at another computer or sharing the files within, you might copy them to a flash drive, usually copying the entire folder if you want to work on more than a few documents within. When you get back home, how do you move the documents back to your hard drive?

Imagine that while working in that folder you deleted a bunch of documents that you no longer want, created new ones, and modified existing ones. You may even have simplified the organization of subfolders during an hour at the airport when you were bored and had finished all of your movies.

So when you get back home and update your primary computer, how you do so is very different depending on whether you're using a Mac or a Windows PC.

On a Mac, if you copy the "Work" folder from your flash drive and paste it back onto your Mac, it will replace your old "Work" folder with the new one. On a Windows PC, it will update your old "Work" folder with new or newer documents from your flash drive.

There are plusses and minuses to both approaches.

In Windows, if you had changed the subfolders, you would end up with duplicates, and worse, multiple versions of the same file, making it easy to work with old data by mistake. In OS X, you may delete important documents that are not in the new folder when you replace the old one.

Which is better? It depends on how you work and what you are used to.

To a Mac user, the Windows approach will lead to annoying duplicates, while to a Mac user, Windows will lead to messy folders and multiple, often outdated file versions. Using the platform you know, however, will result in simple, predictable behavior and not so much as a second thought about what the file system is really doing when you copy and paste that folder at the end of your trip.

Shared Folders

There are examples of functions that take half as many clicks to accomplish on a Mac as on a PC, but there are likewise examples in the other direction. I would much rather share files and printers from a Mac than a PC, for instance, but it's much easier to attach to someone else's shared folder from a PC than a Mac.

Yes, navigating to a share is about the same on each, but unlike OS 9, which had persistent shares, in OS X you need to remap your shares each time you log onto the network (this can be automated). In Windows, once you map a share, it's yours until you don't want it anymore.

Which is better? It depends on what you're doing and your depth of knowledge on that particular platform.

I'm a platform geek and love moving between Mac and Windows. I am equally proficient with each and am generally equally productive regardless of what type of computer is in front of me at a given moment. Yes, finding and opening a document or application differs between Mac and Windows, but once open, the differences are minor.

Working with a Word document makes very little difference in platform, with most keyboard shortcuts essentially the same and things organized in a similar way. The eye-candy is different, but the underlying structure and function are the same. The same applies to Photoshop, Acrobat (which you might not need on a Mac), and many other cross-platform applications.

Mixing Platforms

One thing I won't deny, however, is that mixing platforms is more difficult that standardizing on a single system. While Macs and PCs can communicate and share with each other, they do so in different ways, with different procedures and different limitations. Windows clients can play nice on an OS X network, and OS X clients can play nice on a Windows domain, but both will definitely be second-class citizens on those networks, lacking many of the automation and other features that single-platform users enjoy.

In the end, what it all really comes down to is familiarity. Macs are probably easier for a new user, but how many new users are out there? I was a new user in 1981, and every child is a new user at some point, but the fact is that today most computer buyers are upgrading from an older computer, not buying their first. In that context, familiarity really does matter.

Switching

In conclusion, I'll highlight another major shift in the industry, that from WordPerfect to Word as the dominant word processing application.

I remember using Word for Windows 2.0 back around 1990, and it had an option to duplicate WordPerfect menus and commands. Microsoft did that because it recognized that most people who did word processing did so in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, so to get those people to switch to Word for Windows required making the switch as easy as possible.

If you want existing users to give up a tool for a better one, that better one either has to be so easy to use that no thought is required to make the switch or it should allow users to do what they always did and get the same result while adding the new functionality on top of that.

Many Windows or Mac commands can be used in the other platform without more than a simple control/command key swap, but other things are so fundamentally different that it takes a bit of investigation to figure out.