(via DB, Bynkii.com )I actually agree with Matt on how Vista is being picked on by everybody. Most users out there aren’t very in tune with technology, and often regurgitate the same opinions and generalizations they hear everybody saying. I believe Vista is actually a decent product, and the problems with it’s launch probably weren’t worse than XP when it launched.
However, I’d like to point out some issues:
“I ask you, how many Apple users do you know that own a 3 year old Mac, and install Leopard on it?”
The answer is, many many people. As John C. Welch mentions Leopard supports Macs as old as the G4 867MHz, which was introduced August 13, 2002( Lowendmac ). That’s more than 5 years old. I’m running Leopard on just such a machine, and it doesn’t feel any slower than when it was running Tiger.
“First of all, in the little experience I’ve had with Leopard, I’ve had horrible hardware compatibility issues with printers, especially older printers (which just work natively in Vista) when setting up customer offices on consulting jobs.”
This of course is true. I hate dealing with the old printers as well, and Windows definitely is much better at supporting the older printers. The problem is, the majority of these printers were Windows GDI printers. The manufacturers of these printers moved more and more functionality to the Windows drivers to save on hardware cost. ( LinuxPrinting ) As a result, these printers are much harder to get working outside of Windows. Thanks to the Linux community, many of these printers can still be ‘forced’ to work with OS X. The good news is that many of the new printers on the market now are supported in OS X.
“To me, this is a horrible thing. Having lots of vendors make parts for your system provides you a much greater variety of options, as well as driving prices down, the beauty of competition.”
It’s great for prices, but not so great for stability. This is also one of the reasons it is difficult for Microsoft to control the stability of Windows. Although MS certified drivers is supposed to remedy this.
“This is one of the reasons why owning a Mac has been so notoriously expensive.”
Well, this hasn’t been true for a long time. You really have to compare systems spec by spec. Comparing a $500 DIY PC to a $2500 Mac Pro is not fair to both the PC and the Mac. Since Apple starting using more commodity hardware in their systems there hasn’t been a large difference in price for comparable PCs and Macs anymore.
ComputerWorld: Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up?
System Shootouts: $3200 Workstation Shootout
“Why aren’t all the open source people crying foul of Apple? OSX is based off of Open BSD, which is open source.”
Like one of the comments pointed out, OS X is based on FreeBSD. In which the BSD license allows “[r]edistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification.” Also, people aren’t complaining because Apple does contribute back to the Open Source community. The Apple Open Source page provides access to Open Source code modified and used by Apple, as well as links to various successful Open Source projects like Darwin, Darwin Streaming Server, Bonjour, and WebKit.
“This, I’m sorry to say is Microsoft’s fault for daring to tell everyone what they hoped to accomplish in their next OS release, starting back in the very early days of the first Longhorn 4000 build series.”
Although Microsoft seems to do this quite often. I understand that MS has a lot of business customers that demand to know long term road maps of MS technology. But if these announcements repeatedly fail to materialize, perhaps MS should be a little more cautious next time.
“It is a fantastic, stable OS that is a huge step in a direction that Windows has needed to move in for a long time.”
I don’t know about fantastic, but I believe it is moving in the right directions with stability and security. Although, I’d recommend Matt and any MS developers read Peter Bright’s article, “From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X” ( Part1, Part2 ) Peter points out many valid points as to why Vista is getting such a bad rap compared to Leopard these days.
