Reasons to avoid an Apple Mac

[Waccoon]

"Then you push the power button and it won't turn off..."

Hehe, I've had that happen a lot.  The only way to turn it off is to pull out the power cord and watch a spark.  Software power switches suck.  At least an ATX power supply will shut off if you hold the button for 4 seconds.

Seriously, this only applies to the old MacOS, which everyone KNOWS is crap.  You haven't seen Mac Hell until you've tried using Quark Express on MacOS 8.1, even if it's the only app on the machine.  :-)

I'd like a full demo of MacOS X, but the demos they run in the stores are utter garbage that make the machines look slow as dirt.

Seriously though, every computer crashes once in a while

I've seen Linux crash a few times, and I even got QNX to crash.  My A1000/A1200 crashed all the time.  A particular favorite was the neverending requester, which you got with corrupted disks and hard drives, or if your printer wouldn't respond.  I actually tried canceling a print job 100+ times until I fially rebooted.  :-)

Few people know how many crashes are due to bad drivers, rather than the OS.  On a real, memory-protected OS, only the kernel and drivers will cause a full system crash, like the BSOD.  The Windows kernel is actully quite stable; drivers, GDI, and DirectX cause all the real trouble.

[Waccoon]

OSX... MacOS

They're both the best?  :-?

Sorry, I was the sysadmin for a room full of "classic" Macs, and EVERYONE IN THE OFFICE DESPISED THEM.  The only reason we used them is because the university only allowed Macs in South campus offices.  All the "real" computers went to the computer scientists on North campus.

MacOS could fake multitasking, if you had enough memory to run more than one app at a time.  :-)

LINUX = too complex, not friendly enough. No professional software available. No standard hardware platform.

Agreed.  Few people still realize that Linux is not a complete OS, it's a kernel designed to be the foundation for an OS.  It was designed to be a low-cost UN*X clone geeks.  It succeeded.  End of story.

As a result, Linux will never be a real contender in the desktop market until GNU/XWindows is thrown out and replaced with something better designed for normal people.  Which will never happen.

WINDOWS = buggy, prone to viruses, M$, monopoly

Buggy: no way.  Get some good drivers and you'll never seen Win2000 crash.  With older nVidia drivers, my dad's XP box runs for weeks without crashing.  Just like MacOS, the stability of the system depends on what software you install.  Install AIM, MemTurbo, and any of the millions of IE toolbar extensions, and of course you system will collapse.  I repair other people's computers frequently, and if they're running XP, 99% of their problems are caused by things THEY installed on the machine, not the OS.

IE and DirectX... well, that's another story.  But, you can always just download Mozilla and run games built with OpenGL.  Problems solved.

Prone to viruses:  ActiveX and install on demand are rediculous technologies, but you still have to LET the virus on your computer.  Pay attention to pop-ups, and you'll rarely have a problem.

As for the monopoly, you've got me.  M$ has exclusivity contracts with the big vendors.  But, small vendors can certainly choose their OS, so long as they believe they can make money selling computers without a "big name" OS.

If Apple can sell non-Windows computers, anyone can.  The real problem is that PC vendors have no originality (just like Linux vendors).

AMIGAOS = not here yet! (OS4).

No, but OS3.1 was good enough for the hardware on which it ran.  68K didn't offer memory protection except in the high-end, so it's basicly the same as MacOS with multitasking.