Technology Review on Microsoft’s forthcoming Vista operating system: “Windows is complicated. Macs are simple.”

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Microsoft is about to obsolete its entire user base yet again, as it prepares to release its long anticipated replacement for Windows XP, the new Vista operating system. In a scathing assessment in Technology Review, long-time Windows champion Erika Jonietz reluctantly ends up here:

Ironically, playing around with Vista for more than a month has done what years of experience and exhortations from Mac-loving friends could not: it has converted me into a Mac fan.

Here is an extended rendering of her findings:

My efforts to get Media Center working highlighted two big problems with Vista. First, it’s a memory hog. The hundreds of new features jammed into it have made it a prime example of software bloat, perhaps the quintessence of programmer Niklaus Wirth’s law that software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster (for more on the problems with software design that lead to bloat, see “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta”). Although my computer meets the minimum requirements of a “Vista Premium Ready PC,” with one gigabyte of RAM, I could run only a few ?simple programs, such as a Web browser and word processor, without running out of memory. I couldn’t even watch a movie: Windows Media Player could read the contents of the DVD, but there wasn’t enough memory to actually play it. In short, you need a hell of a computer just to run this OS.

Second, users choosing to install the 64-bit version of Vista on computers they already own will have a hard time finding drivers, the software needed to control hardware sub?systems and peripherals such as video cards, modems, or printers. Microsoft’s Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor program, which I ran before installing Vista, assured me that my laptop was fully compatible with the 64-bit version. But once I installed it, my speakers would not work. It seems that none of the companies concerned had written a driver for my sound card; it took more than 10 hours of effort to find a workaround. Nor do drivers exist for my modem, printer, or several other things I rely on. For some of the newer components, like the modem, manufacturers will probably have released 64-bit drivers by the time this review appears. But companies have no incentive to write complicated new drivers for older peripherals like my printer. And because rules written into the 64-bit version of Vista limit the installation of some independently written drivers, users will be virtually forced to buy new peripherals if they want to run it.

Struggling to get my computer to do the most basic things reminded me forcefully of similar battles with previous versions of Windows–for instance, the time an MIT electrical engineer had to help me figure out how to get my computer to display anything on my monitor after I upgraded to Windows 98. Playing with OS X Tiger in order to make accurate comparisons for this review, I had a personal epiphany: Windows is complicated. Macs are simple.

This may seem extraordinarily obvious; after all, Apple has built an entire advertising campaign around the concept. But I am obstinate, and I have loved Windows for a long time. Now, however, simplicity is increasingly important to me. I just want things to work, and with my Mac, they do. Though my Mac barely exceeds the processor and memory requirements for OS X Tiger, every bundled program runs perfectly. The five-year-old printer that doesn’t work at all with Vista performs beautifully with OS X, not because the manufacturer bothered to write a new Mac driver for my aging standby, but because Apple included a third-party, open-source driver designed to support older printers in Tiger. Instead of facing the planned obsolescence of my printer, I can stick with it as long as I like.

And my deepest-seated reasons for preferring Windows PCs–more computing power for the money and greater software availability–have evaporated in the last year. Apple’s decision to use the same Intel chips found in Windows machines has changed everything. Users can now run OS X and Windows on the same computer; with third-party software such as Parallels Desktop, you don’t even need to reboot to switch back and forth. The chip swap also makes it possible to compare prices directly. I recently used the Apple and Dell websites to price comparable desktops and laptops; they were $100 apart or less in each case. The difference is that Apple doesn’t offer any lower-end processors, so its cheapest computers cost quite a bit more than the least-expensive PCs. As Vista penetrates the market, however, the slower processors are likely to become obsolete–minimizing any cost differences between PCs and Macs.

From my point of view, Windows is the Yugo of operating systems. Whatever money you might save at point of purchase, you give back ten-fold in after-market costs. It works badly, crashes repeatedly, self-destructs in unpredictable and often uncorrectable ways. Even when it works as advertised, it taxes productivity in hundreds of ways that are alien and, seemingly, hostile to Macintosh users.

Even so, at a certain point, these debates become academic. The retards who build our MLS systems, for instance, can’t seem to comprehend a universal browser language, so, at an absolute minimum, we’re stuck with Microsoft Internet Explorer for MLS access. There may be other vertical market applications you are using that would make it difficult for you to switch all your work to the Macintosh operating system, no matter how much you might want to.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Even if you elect to continue running XP for now — as most Windows users will — at some point you will need to upgrade your hardware. When you do, you will have a meaningful choice about what to do.

You can buy a Vista-ready Windows machine and continue to suffer with a Microsoft operating system, albeit a somewhat more Mac-like Microsoft operating system.

Or you can buy a Macintosh and continue running Windows XP side-by-side with Mac OS X. You could even run Vista, if you wanted to, but why would you want to? At this point, you are running Windows to retain access to legacy software, all of which will run in the Mac world in due course — or will become obsolete altogether.

There is a piece of software for the Macintosh called Parallels. Using it, you can run multiple instances of disparate operating systems at the same time, in virtual machines. Your Mac could be running OS X, Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98 and Linux, all at the same time. High-volume file servers are running paired instances of Microsoft’s SQL Server on Macintosh Quad-Core XServes. The fastest, most-reliable Windows machines on the market are made by Apple.

And that’s the point: “Windows is complicated. Macs are simple.” The hardware and software combination that makes up a Macintosh is a high-performance productivity machine. You may be working at your new Mac for months before you realize that it is not chewing up your days with wasted time: Inexplicably trashed drivers and libraries, spontaneously lost network connections, repeated trips to the geekatorium, where they invariably volunteer to wipe your hard disk. Ten zillion viruses, for goodness’ sake! What you’ll have instead is a machine that quietly and reliably does what you expect it to, and behaves the same elegant way in each piece of software you use.

The point is this: You will be replacing your hardware. Your need for Windows is almost entirely vestigial, and is easily handled within the Macintosh world. You no longer have any reason not to make the switch…

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