8 Reasons for Mac Supremacy

September 5, 2008 – 3:03 pm

I have to admit a love/hate relationship with the Internet. There are so many things to love, the openness, the wealth of information at your finger tips, unfettered communication with all kinds of people. Unfortunately the downside to this is that stupid people tend to be the loudest on the Net.

One particular pet peeve of mine is the flame war that arises out of the Mac vs Windows debate. A couple of months ago I set out to contribute to this debate in a more meaningful way than bickering and snipping in comment threads.

First thing first, I am a Mac user. I have used and worked on Windows, Novell, Linux and Unix PCs and servers for more than 10 years now. I also happen to have both Bachelors and Masters degrees relating to the IT field. I have dozens of vendor certifications from Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, CISSP, AVID and etc. Suffice it to say I know computers pretty well.

At a previous employer I was tasked with learning to produce video (this was at a major University) and the computers they gave me to perform this task were Macs. At the time I was a huge Linux nerd. I spent my free time recompiling custom kernels, building Asterisk phone systems from the CLI and all kinds of nerdy pursuits. Well after I got past the initial learning curve of the Macs, I fell in love. The Macs had all of the power of Linux and all of the polish that was lacking from Linux at the time.

So how does this relate to this article. Well I set out to prove over the course of two months that the Mac platform was superior to Windows. Furthermore I had a point to make. Ultimately either the Windows or Mac fanboys had to be wrong. Both sides cannot be correct that their platform is better than the other. Bear with me here - this may sound a little pretentious. I felt my experience with both platforms coupled with my educational background left me qualified to pick a winner. That winner is the Mac platform.

After comparing many of the key aspects of both platforms I hoped to prove my point. Below are the weekly articles, each one comparing an aspect of the two platforms and offering supporting evidence for my conclusions.

The Articles

Back to the Future

I have no doubt that many of you out there are going to disagree with me. That is partially the point. I am not claiming to be infallible, I will admit that I am wrong under the right conditions. What are those conditions? Well first you must be able to prove your point with supporting evidence. It must be a valid argument, “You are a stupid Apple Fanboy” is not going to make the cut.

Understand that I am not claiming that Windows is useless. The Windows platform took computers to the mainstream and drove the costs down to the low level that they exist at today. All computer users, including Mac users, have benefited from this situation. However the compromises that the Windows platform made to get to this point are now coming back to haunt them. Things are going to get worse for Windows before they get better.

In the past thirty years we have come full circle. The home computer revolution began with the Apple II. For years everyone else was playing catch-up. Eventually the Windows PC platform surpassed the Macintosh platform both technically and in market share. This continued until 2000 when Apple released OS X. The next version of OS X (Snow Leopard) is poised to make the transition to true 64-bit computing. Apple is also making a concerted effort to streamline every aspect of the operating system. Initial numbers from the beta builds indicate that the OS will shrink to between 1/4 and 1/5 of the current version. True 64-bit, more efficient code and the advantages covered in the articles above all seem to point to the Mac platform leaving Windows behind.

Share and Enjoy:

Binary Rescue