As for Office, Microsoft makes Office for OS X, so in that respect it's basically identical to the PC.
Here's an excellent comparison of the systems, from a longtime Windows user who recently purchased a Mac as a second computer:
"What I have ascertained is not that PCs as we know them lack good design, but that PCs as we know them have hardly any design to speak of. I'm not trying to be insulting. Use a Mac for a week, and we'll talk again.
I have edited autoexec.bat files in order to optimize the amount of available conventional memory, and I liked doing it, liked being the sort of person who could. As a PC user, enduring the grotesqueries of that experience is something that we are actually proud of. It's come a long way since then, jokes about "blue screens" and what not ring like tired vaudeville acts. But those struggles were certainly real, the battle wounds considerable, and now the skin has grown over it and to a certain extent we think this is just how it is.
I didn't even understand that's what was going on until I started to write this. Like men who love the wilderness for its savage and untamed qualities, I believe many of us are drawn to this stark brutality. That frontier living, the self reliance, the adversity. The Mac, like The Alliance in World of Warcraft, was easy mode.
I don't think that the Macintosh was inspired by ancient holy scrolls, found in a sea cave and excised from the original bible by a convocation of priests and wise men. But I do like it very much. It is extremely good at what it does, which is to say, exposing functionality."
Bottom line is that OS X really does make using the computer somewhat more straightforward and intuitive, but if you want to play games, it makes way more sense to just stick with Windows than try to use both OS X and Windows.
And as for those commercials, they are very misleading, but there is some truth to them. You'll notice the commercials never talk about games. They focus mostly on how easy it is to create movies, slideshows, podcasts, etc. Content creation has always been a strong point on the Mac. The Apple applications really make it extremely straightforward to make this kind of stuff. Many PC applications are at least as good, and sometimes more powerful, but iLife makes recording music, creating DVDs, s*** like that, easy.
The whole hook of the Macintosh platform is "easy, intuitive, straightforward, and powerful." The entire design goal behind the entire system is to expose functionality as clearly as possible to the user. It works to some extent, but there are certain things (like games) that you have to simply give up to move to the platform.
Feb 07, 2007 @ 16:04:49
