Can someone explain the hardware thing? Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
XP was the first version of windows to offer comparable performance to mac's OS offerings of the same era in this category. Vista has been a huge step back because they crippled it with what I refer to as sociopathic levels of DRM (which goes all the way down into the hardware level - we're not just talking encrypted media here).
Before I spark a mac/pc war, I'll note that only a subset of mac fans are deluding themselves - there are certainly legit reasons to go for mac products.
you are the media you consume.
That's not to say it doesn't look good and perform well, but they all have problems and there's no perfect platform. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Performance is so-so. I've been using Macs for about a year and a half now, and a bunch of stuff either doesn't work, works weirdly, or works in ways which are distracting and unproductive.
OS X seems more stable than XP, in that you can leave it running for days on end. But Mac Mailer crashes reliably, and I have a weird Firefox bug which only appears on dKos and suddenly slams the processor load up to 100% across both cores.
We had true pre-emptive multitasking back in the 80s on both Amigas and STs, and between Linux, M$ and Apple not much has changed in terms of core OS features or cool new tools.
I'm bemused by Linux - it's yet another reincarnation of Unix, which makes it pure computing nostalgia. I'd love to see some cool new stuff happening, but we seem to have reached a plateau for applications where nothing much is changing - the web-based stuff seems to be spinning its wheels for now as well.
