I can't has cheezburger

Blast from the past: my pro-Mac flamebait

This old gem is from back in the days when I was passionate enough about stuff to care enough to write blog posts explaining why OS X is the best OS.

I’ve grown up a bit and am now lazy enough that if someone truly believes that their non-OS X operating system is better, then my best retaliation is to let them wallow in their shitty OS.  But let’s have a look at my original Facebook note on this (which garnered a pretty sizable flame war between myself and a die hard Linux fan):

For all those Mac haters out there

February 20, 2007 at 1:04 am

It’s no secret that I am avid user of the Macintosh computer. It’s also no secret that people who use Apple products are extremely loyal to their brand and will often defend it to the death. All cult followings aside, I hear, at least on a weekly basis, people talking about how much Macs suck. This often happens because I bash Windows a lot. Although I will generally be reserved and not say much to that, if I had a lot of time on my hands, here is a general idea of my response:

1. Do you know anything about computers? Are you proficient in using either Mac OS X or Windows? If not, do me a favor and STFU (to those who aren’t 1337 enough to know what that stands for, it stands for ‘shut the fuck up.’ And if you don’t know what 1337 stands for, tough shit). Don’t take a stance [Ed.] on something you don’t know jack shit about. Yes, you may be a CS/MIS major, but I know plenty of CS majors who know nothing about computers, and I see the textbook crap that MIS people learn about computers, and it makes me laugh. If you want to go and learn about the operating system/platform that you are bashing, please feel free to do so. But please, the Mac vs. PC war is for the big boys only. 

2. What is your level of experience with Macs? What’s that you say? None at all? Just a little bit? Well, then how the hell are you in a position to say that Windows is better? Oh, you think that because over 90% of desktop computers run Windows, that automatically makes it better? Well, it doesn’t. That just means that Microsoft is making a hell of a profit, and I respect them for that. The fact still remains that Windows is a really poorly designed operating system. But back to my original point. If you don’t really use a Mac on a daily basis, I’m not sure how you expect to actually get a good sense of whether it’s inferior or not. I use Windows and Mac OS every day, and I was a Windows user for years. Being proficient in both, I can safely say that Mac OS does a better job of pretty much whatever you throw at it. 

A lot of people also like to throw the gaming card at me, thinking that will stop even the most die hard Mac fan (please spare me the word fanboy or fanboi, as it will make me want to shoot either you or myself) dead in their tracks. But again, we go back to the fact that marketshare is not really a feature. Mac OS X is arguably a better operating system for a game developer to write a game on. OS X has the frameworks and technologies that would make game development much easier on it, such as Core Image/Core Animation, OpenGL support, etc. Windows has DirectX, and if a game is going to use a particular version of DirectX, you need to make sure your video card drivers support that same version of DirectX, and even then it’s not a total guarantee that it’s going to be flawless. Then game developers have the whole portability issue, because there is no OS X or Linux port of DirectX (Wine doesn’t count). And now that Macs use Intel chips, you can boot into Windows and play that game if you need to. As time goes on, the variety of games available for OS X will improve as well. But please don’t make the ignorant statement that the Windows operating system is a better gaming platform, because it really isn’t. It just happens that a greater number of games are written for Windows. 

Now, to tie up any loose ends that might be around if you really are a Windows lover. OS X handles multitasking more smoothly than does Windows XP (I have no conclusions with Vista yet, although it is improved. Kudos for that, MS). If I have a mess of windows open, a seasoned user of OS X will have an easier time getting to that window that was open an hour ago than will an equally seasoned Windows user, expecially if they must use the taskbar/Dock to do so. OS X apps are generally a hell of a lot nicer and more fun to use than Windows apps, and they can work together really well. OS X is a technically superior operating system to Windows. There is not one virus that targets OS X and is successfully able to propagate without user interaction. Spyware for the Mac is all but nonexistent. OS X is inherently more secure than Windows, because Apple didn’t create some stupid shit like ActiveX and then turn around and hard wire it into the operating system so much that there were more holes in it than lace. And just to clear this up, Macs aren’t without viruses because ‘nobody uses them and it would be useless to write a virus for the Mac.’ That’s just stupid talk, because there are millions of Macs out there, hundreds of thousands of smug Mac users like myself bragging Macs up. What hacker wouldn’t want to write a nasty little virus to shut them up? Yet nobody has. We don’t even have our market share’s worth of viruses (there should be at least a couple thousand out there to have a few percent of the virus market share). 

Now, to prove that I’m not unfairly biased towards Macs, here are a few of my Mac complaints, because I have some. 
-Macs have a blue screen of death equivalent, and it does happen from time to time.
-Macs are also plagued with a ‘beach ball of death’ which I find quite annoying, but I would probably experience it less often if I was running, say, fewer than 15 programs at any given time
-After a few weeks of uptime, I find that I still have documents open from weeks ago that I forgot to close. 
-Consumer level Mac hardware is often of poor quality, which necessitates AppleCare (especially for portable machines)
-Apple is now using integrated graphics in a few of their machines, which sucks a lot
-When I drag an icon to the Dock, the icons to the left and right scoot away so that there is room for the new icon. But when I am trying to drag an icon to Trash (as I often do), it’s like I’m playing tag with the trash can, and I get mad
-If I forget to unmount a server, and I close my laptop’s lid and open it somewhere else and it has to reconnect to the wireless network, the Finder just sits there clueless and after awhile, I am about to scream at it, it finally decides to ask me if I’d like to disconnect the servers (this, however, is not nearly as annoying as how, when adding a network place in Windows, the dialog goes unresponsive for awhile)

See? Macs have their shortcomings, but they’re often just little things that will either get fixed later or I can deal with.

One of the things I’ve found about people trying to argue against Apple wares lately is that these people are usually taking a side by side comparison of numbers like clock speed, amount of RAM, hard drive size, then they show me a cheap $400 Windows laptop that has similar specs to a $1200 Mac laptop then expect me to believe that the $400 machine is a better value.  These are those I find the most annoying because they have some objective data and they think that automatically makes them right.  It’s difficult to explain to these people that the $400 laptop costs $400 because it’s a cheaply designed Intel-sticker-plastered device in which every possible manufacturing shortcut was taken, from the crappy, small trackpad to the grade-B LCD panel to the cheap plastics to the crap keyboard to the battery that lasts an hour, tops (but at least it’s removable, amirite?).  There’s some quick objective data that can be offered as retaliation here (the Macs are thinner and lighter, the displays are often IPS or otherwise a very high quality display, the glass trackpads are large and easier to use, the keyboards are of great caliber, the body of the machine is Unibody which means the machine is made with relatively few parts and is much less failure prone) but it ultimately boils down to the fact that the Mac offers a better user experience.
Another interesting thing to note is that since I wrote this, Apple has sold a pretty large volume of games in its App Store. Of course, iPhone was but a twinkle in a Mac enthusiast’s eye when I wrote the original blog post, but Apple is selling gaming devices that appeal to a new type of gamer–the kind that don’t make banal comments on the internet about how a game that had thousands of man hours of development is crap because it wasn’t designed to that particular gamer’s specific vision.  And Apple’s making a pretty penny off of these games, too, even though most weren’t developed by Apple. That’s thanks to the 30% cut of every sale that Apple takes.  I’ll definitely say I didn’t know what I was talking about in the original blog post when I said OS X’s technologies would be better to make games on anyway, but I think we have seen now that Apple devices running (some form of) OS X are great gaming devices, what with their hardware acceleration and the good developer tools Apple provides.  I’ve since learned from game developers that people love Microsoft’s development tools when it comes to making games, which is in part why Microsoft has seen such great success as a consumer gaming company.
And on the end of more general OSX-is-better-than-Windowsness, Apple hasn’t really pushed a ton of mindblowing new features to OS X in the past few years. This is in part because OS X is a mature platform and doesn’t need the yearly updates it used to need, and also because Apple’s resources have been focused on the iPhone and iPad flavors of iOS.  I wouldn’t say OS X has stagnated (after all, Snow Leopard was released in 09 and we will have Lion this year) but Microsoft has had a chance to catch up.  Vista has pretty much been swept under the rug as an abysmal failure (it’s right next to Windows ME under that rug) but Windows 7 was released in 09 to great fanfare.  Microsoft made a lot of legitimate improvements to the OS, and it looks as though they’re focused on fixing Windows through gradual iteration now.  It seems to be working for them, but Microsoft is continuing to lose to Apple in the consumer space, whether it’s to OS X or now iOS.  A lot of adults (myself included) are buying iPads for their parents because the iPad can serve as a full blown computer for them, minus the bullshit.
Are there still people out there who think Apple isn’t worthwhile? Of course there are, but I no longer feel like I need to convince them otherwise. Apple has been reporting baller quarters for every quarter I can remember since 2004 and they have plenty of room for growth, which is great because that growth keeps accelerating every quarter. Apple doesn’t really seem concerned about convincing some douche bag that the iPad is better than one of the Android powered iPad knockoffs, and I really don’t want to bother with that either. I’ll just enjoy my iProducts in peace.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *