Windows vs Mac OS - the age old debate

[DragonBlaze]

Are you guys Windows fans or Apple fans?

I have a new Macbook Pro for work, and I just bought a new Sony VAIO for my personal computer. It seems like whenever I mention how I like one or dislike the other, 100 people on Facebook get into a huge debate over the subject.. Personally I'm a Windows fan. My Macbook constantly lags up and glitches on me even while I'm doing simple things such as text editing, plus several of my applications such as Microsoft communicator freeze up all the time and I have to force quit it and restart it in order for it to work again. I never have these problems with even cheap Windows computers. Though I do have to say the new macbook chargers and swipe gestures are super awesome.

[Osmose1000]

I have a Desktop PC as my personal machine and a Macbook Pro as a work machine.

The Windows machine is mainly a gaming PC, although I also use Fireworks for graphics editing and a few other beefy pieces of software that would be a bit awkward on the Macbook, either for performance reasons or because of the touchpad (even if I plug a normal mouse into the Macbook the sensitivity and feel isn't as tight as on my Windows box). It's fast as hell, and there's a LOT more software available for it. Downsides are that it breaks from time to time, and more than once I've had to mess around booting from USB sticks and other things to try and repair the boot partition.

The Macbook is lovely as a development machine, for two main reasons: 1. OSX is a Unix-like operating system, and has good terminal support (which, for both convenience and historical reasons, is useful to most forms of software development). 2. Lots of developers use OSX and Mac hardware, thus there's a wide range of developer-focused software that is Mac-only. Not only that, but while there is less software overall for OSX, the user experience of software on OSX is generally better than that of Windows software. However, it is sometimes slower, and I have few options for upgrading beyond sending more money (well, making work send more money) to lord Apple. Not only that, but I'm trying to avoid upgrading to the latest OSX versions because they have a lot of changes I really don't like, but more and more software is becoming Lion-only; OSX software doesn't have the backwards-compatibility that most Windows software does.

I like them both! I typically recommend OSX to less-computer-savy people, and Windows to people who want to play games or care about being able to upgrade their computer or use more specialized software.

[Archem]

I use Windows because I know Windows.

[Prpl_Mage]

Well I used to be able to say that Mac computers were all fancy pancy and hard on new learners. But now with windows 8 it's pretty much the same crap on windows.

I prefer my PC, games work on it and there is simply no fuss when installing hardware or software. And besides games and using the internet.... No wait, there is no point except those.

[fruckert]

Ozzy said it way better than I ever could.
That being said, I prefer PC because Apple business practices and such piss me off.
So does Microsoft, but to a lesser extent.

[DragonBlaze]

Good feeback everyone! Perhaps Linux is the way to go? I would love to use Linux if it had better support for programs and games :p

Osmose, you made a lot of great points, what kind of development do you do? My company does mainly java development, and so most of the tools we use (perforce, tomcat, jboss, ect) are cross platform, otherwise we use mainly web based tools, but are there any good tools that are only mac based or terminal based? (I would like to know so I could use them ^_^)

[zuhane]

I personally prefer PC because of the price, performance, layout, wider range of programs and none of this sugar coating.

I also respect Bill Gates, but thought Steve Jobbs was an awful human being.

[Meiscool]

Everything new scares me.

[Archem]

Anything resembling water fowl scares me.

Sorry, Linux penguin. You're out.

[Moosetroop11]

I've always felt that windows stuff respects its user's intelligence a bit more than mac, and I like that.  There can be problems, but you're in control.  Then again, I don't have as much experience of macs as I should to make a proper decision, really.

[DragonBlaze]

I've always felt that windows stuff respects its user's intelligence a bit more than mac, and I like that.  There can be problems, but you're in control.  Then again, I don't have as much experience of macs as I should to make a proper decision, really.

Funny story, I was talking to one of the people in my company's Experience Design department during a meeting, and he was saying how we were trying to use Apple's design principals. Which he described as making everything as dumb-down as possible. I made the comment "Wouldn't it be nice if people actually read the text on the screen", everyone started laughing because we all knew that people wouldn't :p

[Osmose1000]

Good feeback everyone! Perhaps Linux is the way to go? I would love to use Linux if it had better support for programs and games :p

Osmose, you made a lot of great points, what kind of development do you do? My company does mainly java development, and so most of the tools we use (perforce, tomcat, jboss, ect) are cross platform, otherwise we use mainly web based tools, but are there any good tools that are only mac based or terminal based? (I would like to know so I could use them ^_^)

I make websites for Mozilla! Primarily backend Python development (we use Django as the framework for almost all of our websites), but I also do tons of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as well.

For terminal-based tools, most of my needs are covered by the standard terminal commands that come with any decent shell. Notable non-standard ones would be git for version control and ack for text search. I'm not nearly as good as I could be at using a terminal, but I've never spent the time to sit down and get better at it.

Most useful Mac-only tools I use are Sequel Pro as a MySQL client, GitXL as a GUI for Git repos when I don't want to use the command directly, LimeChat for IRC, ImageOptim for PNG optimization (which happens rarely by hand but the tool is so well built), and iTerm2 as a terminal emulator.

Notable cross-platform tools that I use are Sublime Text 2 for all of my coding and text editing, zsh as my shell, Wunderlist as my todo list, Thunderbird for email, and Firefox Nightly for browsing and testing.

[drenrin2120]

Pretty much what fruckert said, apple as a company pisses me off. The only apple product i own is an ipod cuz i got it cheap like five years ago. Then again, i only use computers for minimal gaming, low performance programs like audacity and microsoft word, and youtube, so i cant honestly say i have any reason to prefer one over the other as far as quality of product. Im comfortable with windows and apple is an annoying company. Those are my reasons.