have been reading this thread for a while and these are my observations of being a windows 7 [ i3 2100,4 gig ram,ati6850,zebby fantasy and 1 tb hdd] and mac osx [macbook pro] user.i cannot give my views as a developer or someone who does heavy productive stuff,i can only give as per general usage on both machines.
Win 7 - i do not have any experience with vista since i jumped from xp straight to win 7.to be honest, its wonderful and does the job 9 times out of 10.the failure rate has been next to none for me on my general purpose rig ,[ofcourse there will always be some buggy apps] and overall it felt a great leap from windows xp.
Mac os X - One of the things that made me switch to OSX partially was the high fault rate of my viao with windows 7.It was a powerful machine with an ace graphics card but portable gaming was never my forte.in the end, when i used my friend's mbp for a month i felt very impressed.it was quick and fantastically responsive,loved safari [trust me, the gestures worked like magic]and quicktime and strangely windows applications which i mainly needed word,powerpoint and excel worked fantastically well.Lemme tell you something which i did with my friend's mabook pro;one day i just kept it on standby for 4 days after doing some heavy ass work and when i came back i just opened the flap and it was ready to work with the same speed and responsiveness,i felt the power management on that thing was fantastic.My vaio could never have done this and this made me switch to a mac,abeit only with a portable.
One of the things i think apple have done right with the portable market[macs and ios devices] is that every year the gap is becoming smaller in terms of user interface.They are taking the good things of the ipad and putting it into the mac and viceversa.And since they control both the software and the hardware, they manage to deliver fantastic battery life and regular updates which complements both the software and hardware again.The ipad and macbook air/pro are coming closer in terms of software and ease of use and that is helping them set the benchmark for notebooks.
Conclusion- I feel that both o.s are very strong but the mac edges for me because its got fantastic software and is optimized better which gives portables good power management,instant on and generally gives macbooks a long life since future versions of the o.s can run on pretty old machines due to fantastic software optimization.Win 7 for me,if you are a general user does the job pretty well and i honestly cannot say much foul about it.its pretty stable and i have recently started to prefer the mp classic to quicktime.
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technobot said:
Maybe apple started some segments... but its not about which company gets there first but rather which one is better
But the problem is their tablets,notebooks and phones are among the best in the market - edited since you didnt mention the word shitty