Vista versus Leopard
Leopard is the New Vista, and It's Pissing Me Off - Columns by PC Magazine
I enjoyed reading this blog post. I'm amused by people going all Jerry Seinfeld over technology.
There is one reason however why one should never compare Windows to MacOS like this: MacOS runs on closed hardware. Any technical person and any person with some common sense would agree that it's infinitely more difficult to run your software without glitches on an infinite number of hardware configurations compared to running it on just a small set of configs.
Here's some more information:
- at launch 1.4 million devices were supported, whilst today that figure has grown to 2.2 million devices
- at launch 23,000 hardware products were supported and this has now reached 41,000; whilst over 900 hardware partners are certifying thousands of components.
- according to Download.com, 98 out of the top 100 best selling Windows applications are all compatible. To date, over 2,000 applications have passed Vista compatibility tests.
My point? Leopard will never be the new Windows. It will always be the OS that runs well (at least in most cases) on a handful of configurations with a limited set of applications to run. Still, it proves to be a good model for Apple and they get and deserve also praise for that from some who are happy to live with these constraints. And that's fine by me.
PS: I'm getting Leopard myself next week whilst in the US. It's a Euro vs. Dollar thing.
