Cult of Mac: a blog about the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone - and the people who love them

41 comments

Does Walt mean it now *looks* like Mac OS X? Because if it still *works* like Windows, I’ll be maintaining my distance.

Johnny Appleseed, on October 8th, 2009 at 6:17 am

^ Read the comment above.

Reader, on October 8th, 2009 at 6:38 am

Windows7 doesnt matter to Me , I will not try nor buy it.

Josh L, on October 8th, 2009 at 7:05 am

If it’s all the same to Walt, I will be staying with Snow Leopard if he doesn’t mind!!

Jim, on October 8th, 2009 at 7:13 am

vmware for Mac snow leopard and windows 7 perfect match

Namhar Udba, on October 8th, 2009 at 7:14 am

To be honest: I think Apple’s latest release of Mac OS X was disappointing. I hardly notice a speed increase, with the exception of Mail. Although my MacBook is capable of 64-bit, Apple won’t allow it. The few new features are not worth the upgrade. If Snow Leopard would not have cost € 29, I never even considered an upgrade.

Windows 7 on the other hand, has really surprised me. I switched to Mac a year ago, because I was sick of Windows Vista and Microsoft in general. Now that I switched, I almost regret it. Especially because Apple is heading the wrong way.

Totie, on October 8th, 2009 at 7:18 am

A tablet device, you say?

Hmm…

Andrew, on October 8th, 2009 at 8:06 am

Walt: “I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows. Now, however, it’s much more of a toss-up between the two rivals.”

Hmmm… doesn’t sound like much of a toss-up to me.

d.lete, on October 8th, 2009 at 8:08 am

what I would like to see in an operating system Apple or Windows is when I press the on button a boot time of no more than ten seconds, if you only want to check email why should we have to wait nearly a minute just to boot.
A new OS release says it will be better than the last one with better features,but is it really just new packaging same old shit?

Poppa, on October 8th, 2009 at 8:59 am

In general, the big problem with Windows has not been the out-of-the-box experience. It’s that Windows installs don’t age well. From an incomprehensible bloated registry to files left all over the hard drive (including system directories) by long-ago-uninstalled applications, older installation of Windows just get slower, less reliable, and less manageable. The entire system is built to restrict what a user does to protect copyright holders from the suspected criminal at the keyboard. Just try to upgrade to a new computer and move the applications and settings on Windows. On OS X, it’s easy with Time Machine. On a PC, it’s built to be difficult and painful.

And many typical Windows users don’t have anywhere to turn, giving rise to criminal gangs, like The Geek Squad, that prey on those without computer expertise, charging them hundreds of dollars to do simple things like run anti-virus software or write a single DVD with a backup of user data.

Fred M., on October 8th, 2009 at 9:00 am

If it’s a toss up then it seems from his piece the coin falls Mac up everytime.

Phil Spencer, on October 8th, 2009 at 10:26 am

Walt Mossberg is always reluctantly ‘positive’ and not a fan of Apple at all.
(More a wolf in sheepskin I would say.)

Anyhow, he lacks real insight because Mac OS X is way ahead of any competitor with WebKit (HTML5), GCD and OpenCL. Apple is at the forefront of software technology and this is essential for future success.

J.

J, on October 8th, 2009 at 10:36 am

I’m stuck using a variety of Mac and PC devices – - no choice due to employer.

I will go to Win 7 on my current Vista device the next time I need to do my every-6-month re-format of the PC hard drive. XP was Ok for me, but the forced movement (employer-related) to Vista was a bad dream. Never reformatted an OSX device yet.

It’s pretty amazing that the sales pitch for Win 7 is pretty much “It doesn’t suck as bad as Vista”.

Erin's Dad, on October 8th, 2009 at 10:38 am

So… what’s changed? Underneath, it’s still not Unix. It is till problematic, vulnerable, bloated, confusing and on and on!

Tim Baker, on October 8th, 2009 at 10:55 am

just goes to show the only people on here are mac fanboys who can’t even open their minds to other ideas. Walt is a great reviewer, one who is unbiased and truly judges a product on its quality, not who made it.

have any of you even tried windows 7?

woah, on October 8th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

It is still the same multiple hardware interfaces. It is still the same multiple hardware interfaces. It is still the same multiple hardware interfaces. It is still the same multiple hardware interfaces.

It is still MS-DOS buried under seven layers of band aid releases. It is still MS-DOS buried under seven layers of band aid releases. It is still MS-DOS buried under seven layers of band aid releases. It is still MS-DOS buried under seven layers of band aid releases.

A little Googling will lead to this statement:
Although the MS-DOS operating system is not commonly used today, the command shell used through Microsoft Windows is.

Please explain if I am wrong.

Thank you

Charlie, on October 8th, 2009 at 1:38 pm

I don’t understand why anyone would care of Mossberg’s opinion. Reading his review, I realized that he gave no valuable information, other comparing apples and oranges – no pun intended. I wonder if he has a few shares of Microsoft!

“…Windows 7 is much more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary product”. I think Microsoft really needs a revolution, and not an evolution. If Windows 7 is truly an evolution of Vista, XP, or any other Microsoft failed family of Operating Systems, then I would say Windows 7 is as bad as any other versions of Windows.

joeg, on October 8th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

No woah, I was sick and tired waisting my time with awkward MS software.
Also, MS politics: trying (and succeeding) to dominate by ruthless and lawlessly (yes MS is convicted several times) eliminating the competition, is unethical and disturbing.

If you don’t have a problem with that, I think you have a problem.

J

J, on October 8th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

woah, I have never owned a Mac, and I’ve been running Windows 7 for the last 8 days: Windows Explorer has crashed multiple times, Microsoft Visual Studio has crashed about a dozen of time without any prompt or reason, and once the computer became unresponsive for about 20 minutes. The OS was installed fresh – no upgrade or anything. But now, having seen Windows 7 first hand, I’m considering a Mac.

jm, on October 8th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

Have Windows 7 running along with Mac OS X in my Mac. Definitely a better windows than ever, but also definitely not better than Mac OS. Is still the same boring windows we are used to and we walked away from. I only installed itbecause i need to use autocad, the rest of the stuff I usually do with the computer I can handle with Mac OS.

Enrique, on October 8th, 2009 at 2:01 pm

and what about Terminal? i dont care if Windows looks nice. i dont care if OSX looks nice. i care about terminal, and unix core.

Vogel, on October 8th, 2009 at 2:40 pm

Like Enrique, I’ve been running Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro. I agree that it’s definitely better but still not as good as the the Mac OS. I’ve religiously read Walt Mossberg’s columns for many years, and hold him in the highest regard, but I find it unfathomable that he can possibly say it’s a toss-up after stating: “I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows.”

Chris, on October 8th, 2009 at 2:51 pm

Does anyone know if there are any thoughts going on releasing a touch version of mac – macbook touch or something like that before they think about a tablet?

Neel R, on October 8th, 2009 at 3:10 pm

What about Win 7 search?
The entire way I organize my time on the computer is through spotlight. I don’t care how great the file exploration or task menu is because I don’t use it. I basically dump my files all in one place and then search for anything I want using key terms.

Spotlight makes this delightful.

In XP (don’t have Vista) MS’s equivalent “Desktop Search” sucks and is unusable. For win 7 they say “searching your computer is as easy as searching the internet” well searching the internet with Bing is pretty darn painful.

Katharine, on October 8th, 2009 at 3:15 pm

@woah

Dude, the site is Cult Of Mac and you were expecting us to rave about Windows? Really?

And yes I have used Windows 7, not bad for bloatware.

Jim, on October 8th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

i’m looking forward to dumping xp for win 7. it’ll do nicely on my macbook pro with snow leopard in a vm under parallels. i prefer mac, but i use both at home and at work. don’t be a hater.

firesign3000, on October 8th, 2009 at 3:34 pm

@Katharine

Yes, Spotlight makes the difference.

IndianFAIL, on October 8th, 2009 at 8:40 pm

@ Totie:

You said you hardly noticed a speed jump, except in mail, maybe? I beg to differ here. I’ve noticed a huge speed difference in every, or almost every app I have and use. I really don’t believe your comment and I think you might want to take another look. If you want to switch back to windows, by all means do so. Apple will happily refund your misery. You remember your words the next time your PC system gets virus ridden and starts sending porn to your mother in law. Ta Ta….

Steven, on October 8th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

@ Totie:

You said you hardly noticed a speed jump, except in mail, maybe? I beg to differ here. I’ve noticed a huge speed difference in every, or almost every app I have and use. I really don’t believe your comment and I think you might want to take another look. If you want to switch back to windows, by all means do so. Apple will happily refund your misery. You remember your words the next time your PC system gets virus ridden and starts sending porn to your mother in law. Ta Ta….

Steven, on October 8th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

Totie you must not understand what Apple was doing with this release. Apple did what most companies are too scared to do – attack the behind-the-scenes and core function of the OS to improve efficiency, speed, and capability, And focus on just those things making them improtant, instaed of feature cramming. then since they knew mac users wouldn’t see an immediate and big change, they made it super cheap. Every company should do this. Adobe, Microsoft, etc… Go back and clean it up, slim it down and make it rock solid, while preparing support for new technologies. Snow leopard is awesome. Windows may finally have gotten a nicer interface, and have improved some other features, but I doubt it can touch osx.

I used to be a solid windows guy, built, serviced, and used them for years. After using Tiger in a class I took a few years ago, I was sold. I never recommend a pc to anyone. As many have said, it’s now about how it runs on a fresh install (which is still not that reliable). It’s how it runs after a month or two. Doesn’t take long before it gets sluggish and even less reliable. I would also 1-2 times a year reformat and fresh intall to get it runnig ok again. Never have to do that with my
macs.

Tyromind, on October 8th, 2009 at 9:41 pm

I also prefer to use Windows as my Operating System, I am not that familiar with Mac-OS..

Zoe Chastain, on October 8th, 2009 at 9:46 pm

@Fred M. – an insightful comment. As one astute commenter at WSJ put it: “‘After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced.’ — Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18, 2007″

I’m disappointed that Walt completely glossed over the real upgrade/reinstall time involved. His “45 minute” install didn’t include any of the additional tools he needed to download, including the download time. While he said the Mac was superior to Windows connecting to networks, he didn’t say what it took to connect with W7. And if you’re an XP user with more than the most basic applications, all those installs/configurations look to be a number of DAYS, not hours.

This may, finally, be a decent OS from Microsoft, but their history says they usually do great right out of the box. But history also says that Windows doesn’t know how to maintain itself, and starts to buckle under the weight of all the garbage it collects over a few months time.

I’m giving Snow Leopard a couple months before i bite the bullet. I’d wait at least 6 before deciding on upgrading to W7.

imajoebob, on October 9th, 2009 at 12:51 am

“I still give the Mac OS a slight edge because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows.”

It’s plain illogical to give a “slight edge” and justify it by a whole slew of advantages for Mac OS X.

Could that be that says “Windows is as good as Mac OS” is more likely to get attention than “Windows still isn’t as good”?

StuartAB, on October 9th, 2009 at 1:31 am

Competition drives development and improvement – bring it on! At least MS only charges for upgrades to new OSes – I’m not paying for another OS10.x upgrade…

Matthew Hawker, on October 9th, 2009 at 3:56 am

@Steven: These were my experiences. I don’t ask you to believe me. Mail launches really fast now. iTunes is even slower and buggier than before. Emptying trash is taking forever and Exposé sometimes lags terribly.

The “Windows has viruses” argument is becoming really absurd. I used Windows for years and had only very few viruses. I used a decent virus scanner and had no problems with it. Mac OS X will be a target of hackers in the future, as more and more people switch to Mac. Then we’ll see if Apple is better at handling this.

I switched to Apple because Mac OS X has really convinced me, when Windows Vista had not. Now that Snow Leopard is released, I expect just a bit more from Apple. The greatest bummer for me is that I can’t use 64-bit mode. Apple prevents the Unibody MacBook from enabling it, although it’s capable of doing so. That’s a decision I just don’t understand, and I begin to question Apple more and more.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac. But Apple is making strange decisions lately. From the bloated, ugly and unfitting iTunes 9, to the 64-bit restrictions and the current issues of Snow Leopard.

I plan to use both Mac OS X and Windows 7 on my MacBook. Microsoft did a great job on Windows 7, you just have to admit that.

Totie, on October 9th, 2009 at 10:05 am

I’m pretty much a Mac fanboy but currently I’m typing this from work on a Win7 machine (that’s what they gave me). I’ve got to say, the Win7 experience is much better than previous Windows. There are a few usability tweaks that still annoy me (like why the heck can’t I mouse over a window behind my focused window and scroll with the scroll bar–the only sane thing to do if I’m reading some technical document while coding on a small screen) but for the most part it does well. Mac people need to just suck it up and admit that MS has done a pretty good job on this one.

To the person mentioning OpenCL as an added bonus for Mac–I somewhat agree (I’m currently developing in CUDA and OpenCL) that the nice packaging of OpenCL and XCode could be a benefit but where are the apps? In fact, what is the killer app for the average user that uses OpenCL? Except for games most apps that would derive speedup from GPU processing are pretty data driven and tend to be academic. I don’t really see Pages or Safari deriving any speedup from GPU computing. The GPU is slower than the CPU in terms of clock speed, it just has more parallelism. That parallelism isn’t the same as CPU parallelism, however. It’s a SIMD arch which means groups of procs running in parallel must execute the same instruction at the same time. This is not the same as normal multithreaded apps that use multiple core CPUs which can execute different instructions in each core. Most applications would be slower if run on the GPU–only specific kinds of problems derive speedup.

Oh yeah, and OpenCL and CUDA run on windows, so how is this even a Mac related argument?

John, on October 22nd, 2009 at 10:54 am

@Katharine

I haven’t noticed any marked difference between Windows search and Spotlight. Like you I basically use spotlight for everything and on my win7 machine I just hit the windows key and start typing in exactly the same manner. I usually hit enter before seeing the search results because it is good enough to trust.

John, on October 22nd, 2009 at 10:57 am

I’m not a blind follower of apple like most of you.
I’m actually intelligent enough to keep a windows machine running without any viruses.
The rest of you can enjoy being coddled and having your hands held while using you computer.

Mike, on October 27th, 2009 at 12:15 am

from someone who’s used windows, solaris, linux, irix and macs for 15 years for education, work, and leisure here’s my humble opinion:

- there is the unix paradigm, and then there’s the windows way; the late 90’s mac os i disliked until it was replaced by NEXT; mac os x is built on free bsd.
so most things boil down to unix/windows if you drill down. what apple does is very clever: using a closed system they limit the number of bugs in their systems thereby giving the semblance of a better designed product (it is, but for other reasons)

- i would love to use a cheap laptop with linux on it, but the reality is when your boss sends you an excel spreadsheet or asks your help with powerpoint, you’re stuck; this is where a mac comes to the rescue allowing you to use a command line and X graphics seamlessly with microsoft office which is a very well integrated product (i’ve used framemaker, pagemaker, openoffice, neooffice and prefer ms-office).

- that said, i use all 3 os’s today on different machines depending on what needs to get done. the power of microsoft isn’t as much ‘windows’ as it is ‘office’. i’m certainly enjoying my mac a lot more, especially when i did a rough bill-of-materials comparison and found macs cheaper. but i’ve been able to enjoy my windows machines for years without viruses (hint: use the unix approach of super user/admin vs restricted user accounts).

(& no, i’m not a photographer, graphics designer or writer; i don’t even do fancy softare or web development. i’m a plain ol hardware engineer who designs and builds chips)

mr.siggie, on October 29th, 2009 at 12:57 am

I cannot buy a mac, because it have the worst of the worst shortcoming:

Puny hardware.

For my last PC, I got the best motherboard, the best processor, the best storage (In RAID 0), the best video cards (In SLI), and installed the OSes I wanted.

I cannot do that on any apple computer, and I cannot install any apple OS.

That render macintosh useless. Not a choice.

Marraco, on October 31st, 2009 at 1:16 am

OpenCL is about maxing out the GPGPU capabilities.

If I need maximum performance with OpenCL, I need as many video cards I can install.

With PC, I can connect up to 7 (SEVEN!!!) video cards (for example, with ASUS P6T supercomputer motherboard).

With Apple is not possible even to connect 2. Not a second PCI express motherboard is provided.

Tomorrow, Intel will release a 8 cores processor, with hyperthreading, and I want to update the processor without asking permission to apple, which still does not supports any i5 nor i7 processor.

Apple does not support DDR3 or triple channel memory.

Apple notebooks are sold with shinny screens, which appeals at the new buyer, but he cannot see the screen when it reflects things. You ends paying extra money for an inferior screen.
Apple touts “usability”, but his screens are right away unusable.
Is not a “mistake” from apple. They know perfectly that shinny screens are unusable outdoors, and even cause headaches, and strain the eye.
Anyway apple DECIDED to sold shinny screens, because unaware people buys them.
After you are stuck with a mac, then you need to pay extra money for a screen cover to hide the shinny surface. (after you payed premium price for the notebook).

For that reason, the best hardware cannot be found on any mac. Apple needs to do a lot more work to appeal to smart buyers.

Marraco, on October 31st, 2009 at 1:34 am

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