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Windows
has more software; Apple shows more style
By
ROB PEGORARO
Washington Post
Should
you purchase a computer that runs Microsoft Windows or Apple's
Mac OS?
This
little question is the third rail of technology journalism.
No other aspect of personal computing attracts so much emotion,
or lands so much hate-mail in journalists' in boxes accusing
them of bias.
To make
my own background clear: I've got a Mac on my desk at home
and a PC on my desk at work. I swear at both. If it means
anything, I've gotten a little more hate-mail from Apple
advocates than PC partisans.
But apart from those true believers, there are people who
would just like to know which platform will be a better
fit for their own purposes. There's no right answer, but
here are a few things to ponder:
Cost: At the entry level, there's no longer a big difference
between the prices of Macs and PCs. The cheapest PC-and-monitor
combo with 64 megabytes of memory (a realistic minimum)
at Best Buy's site costs $580 after a rebate. The cheapest
iMac system available costs $800.
That $220 isn't pocket change, but it's not a huge gap,
either.
Apple stays roughly competitive with its rivals throughout
the iMac line. But between $1,500 and $2,000, Apple has
nothing to compete with Windows machines. If you're looking
for a computer with some open expansion slots and a 17-inch
monitor, a desktop PC will be awfully cheap compared to
a Power Mac G4.
Reliability: Both operating systems crash. A lot. Yes, it's
possible to fine-tune either system to a remarkable degree
of stability, but most users have neither the time nor the
aptitude for that kind of tweaking. (I'm not addressing
Microsoft's more reliable, more expensive and more resource-intensive
Windows 2000, which is designed for business use.)
The two operating systems differ in their bugginess, though.
In my experience, Macs crash more often than PCs, but when
PCs do blow up, they're more likely to need major repairs,
like reinstalling Windows.
Thanks to Microsoft's cavalier attitude toward system security,
PCs are also considerably more likely to be disabled by
e-mail-borne viruses.
Both Microsoft and Apple aim to fix these reliability problems
next year. Apple's Mac OS X, due early next year, will bring
the stability and performance of a Unix-derived core to
the company's traditional interface aesthetics - or so Apple
promises. Windows users will have to wait a little longer,
until the second half of 2001, for Microsoft's consumer-friendly
release of Windows 2000, which currently goes by the not-so-secret
code name of "Whistler."
Ease of use: The Mac OS is easier to use than Windows -
but not overwhelmingly so. These days, a new user should
feel about as home (or about as confused) getting started
on either system.
You can't say the same about third-party programs, though.
There is a tradition of user-interface refinement on the
Mac side of the fence that just does not seem to exist to
the same degree among Windows developers. The result is
a raft of Windows applications that willfully ignore even
Microsoft's lax user-interface guidelines; their sole concession
to usability concerns is some optional "wizard" front end.
Software: Even the Department of Justice and Microsoft agree:
More programs are available for Windows than for the Mac
(70,000 to 12,000, by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's count).
A cursory look at the best-seller lists illustrates this.
On PC Data's list of the 10 best-selling personal-productivity
applications for September 2000, only two - Intuit's Quicken
and Quicken Deluxe - are available for the Mac.
But it's not so simple. You can easily find Mac programs
to do the jobs of seven of the remaining eight programs
on the list. (One of the eight, an Internet postage-meter
program, has no Mac equivalent that I could find.) For instance,
AppleWorks nicely substitutes for Microsoft Works. Fundamentally,
the Mac market is big enough to ensure that somebody will
develop an application to perform a given task. It just
may be the only program available, while Windows users will
have two or three to choosefrom.
In possibly the most important area of all - compatibility
with Microsoft's near-ubiquitous Word and Excel - you have
complete freedom of choice. Microsoft's Office 2001 for
the Mac not only reads and writes Office 2000 files created
on Windows PC, it can even be infected by the same macro
viruses.
As for games - a traditional weak point of the Mac platform
- four of September's top 10 games, as ranked by PC Data,
are available for the Mac as well as Windows. This matches
trends I've seen for the last year or so. But hard-core
gamers will still be frustrated by life on a Mac, where
games tend to be ported months after their initial release
on Windows.
Hardware: Here, the choice is largely one of flexibility
vs. style. PCs offer a bigger selection of parts and functions
than Macs. You can't buy a Mac with an internal CD-RW drive,
because Apple has yet to offer one. The company's philosophy
is to let its users add to their Macs by connecting external
devices, instead of adding more stuff to the inside of the
computer, which is generally a cheaper approach.
But which machine is more fun to sit in front of? That's
not much of a contest. Most PC makers continue to crank
out bland, forgettable beige boxes while Apple's designs
are stylish, refreshing and marked by a surprising attention
to getting details right. How much that means is a matter
of personal taste.
By now, several dozen readers have probably chambered a
round into their e-mail programs and are about to fire off
a blistering screed explaining how woefully misinformed
I am. But this isn't a matter of objective truth; there
is no one "best" computer or operating system out there,
just what individuals are comfortable with spending their
money on.
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