I hopped on my road to geekdom in the 80’s when my family purchased a Commodore 64. In Elementary School I attended BASIC programming classes using Apple IIEs. In the 90’s I got my first PC, a 386SX running MSDOS 5 and Windows 3.1. For many years, I was a “Windows guy.” I bought more computers, built some of my own, and always upgraded to the newest Microsoft operating system. From Windows 3.1 I upgraded to Windows for Workgroups. From there I upgraded to Windows NT 4.0. Then came Windows 95, and Windows 98. My Windows journey finally stopped at Windows 2000. (I hopped on the LINUX train, but that’s a different story.)
Thinking back to all these Windows upgrades one thing stood out. Whenever a new Windows OS was released, I had to upgrade my hardware. Yes, hardware upgrades are necessary to take advantage of new OS features, but for the most part, the upgrades were needed because the OS itself became more bloated, and therefore needed more powerful hardware to run it. I never remember performing a Windows upgrade because the newer version used less RAM, or had been tweaked to run better on less powerful processors. It was always the opposite. The reason being is that Windows helps PC sales, and PC sales helps Windows.
Why do I bring this up? Because unlike Windows, Mac OS X actually gets tuned in each release in an attempt to shrink its footprint and allow Mac users with older hardware to utilize the newest OS version. The next version of Mac OS, code-named “Snow Leopard” :
dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos
AND
takes full advantage [of multi-core processing] by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors
Have you ever seen a Windows ad claiming that the newest version will take up less space and perform better on your current hardware? I haven’t. This is just one more reason why Mac OS X is > Windows.
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