Stalking Venus

First off, let me say just how much I loathe Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” adverts. They are stupid, condescending snobathons that do nothing more than increase the divide between Mac and PC users. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that a Mac is called a Mac, it would be a PC. The days of different processors, RISC vs. CISC and all that, are gone.

Probably for good.

Every Apple Mac now runs pretty much the same hardware as a ‘PC’ equivalent - Intel processors, standard RAM, Nvidia or ATi Graphics, you get the point.

That said, Apple goes out of its way to ensure that the best and most compatible parts are put into their computers, and their OS knows how to optimise the living shit out of those parts. OS X, is for want of better words, fucking excellent! The boot time is about 40 million-kajillion times faster than Vista, or so it seems when you urgently need to get your powerpoint presentation up on a screen in a room full of foot-tapping executives. I know OS X can crash, but in 6 or so years of using it, that’s only happened to me 5 times. That’s less than one crash per year. In the entire time I’ve owned my Mac, I’ve never installed antivirus or anti-spyware software on my machine and have yet to experience these things on my Mac.

I can see ‘PC’ users shaking their heads: “I’ve heard all this before”, quoth they, as they fire up Steam and head into the incredible 3D world of Half-Life 2. As a friend of mine recently said, grinning at me: “Let’s see your Mac do this”.

I whipped out my laptop (my laptop), fired up my Boot Camp partition, running Windows Vista, and then headed on in to Crysis. “I see your Half-Life and I raise you a big fat wet slap in the face, motherfucker!” He wasn’t amused. Impressed, yes. But not amused.

However… If you go to the same sort of trouble that Apple did to build a PC, in other words, you choose a main board, CPU, RAM, bus speed and take all of the interoperability factors into account, you’d have hardware that will compete, or even outdo current Mac models. Sadly the only thing that won’t be better (yet) is the operating system. Microsoft has been doing a great job in maintaining backwards compatibility with just about everything, whereas Apple Shnaaied their customer base at least twice, by totally changing the internal architecture of their computers.

But it looks like MS is going to have to do the same. Vista is being bitched about all over the marketplace, and OS X is not, simply because of the difference in speed. As I mentioned earlier, I have both OS’s installed on my hardware, and I have to say that there are big benefits to both ways of doing things.

I’m finding that in general I stick to the Mac side of things mainly for security. It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again - Windows isn’t insecure inherently. It’s insecure because there’s a far bigger user base (and therefore a much bigger interest in writing viruses and malware) for Windows. If you swapped the 2 company’s histories around, and made Apple the one that took off, while MS fired all their best staff and sat in a pit for 15 years designing stupid shit like the Newton, then you’d see all of the viruses and malware on a Mac. In fact, I’m almost inclined to discourage people from switching to Mac so that our nice cosy, secure interface stays that way.

In an ideal world (and some of you are going to yell “heresy” at me), Apple and Microsoft would get together, and work on a brand new operating system built from the ground up, that incorporates the best aspects of both worlds. Hardware wise, there’s no reason they couldn’t.

Anyway. All this is by way of my introduction to a great article in Popular Mechanics May edition, where they do the hard work of benchmarking a Mac and a ‘PC’ so that I don’t have to.

Here’s the link.

Linux? What about Linux, you say? What the fuck is Linux?