Why Apple is a better company than Microsoft

[Mr. Harley]

Uh - Asher, while Microsoft definitely does not charge for the most recent service packs, and is doing a better job of supporting their obsolete OS's - their service packs don't make other people's programs not work. Do I need to post the most recent link, from the MS's own site, about the number of programs XP sp2 nukes?

[Asher]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
Uh - Asher, while Microsoft definitely does not charge for the most recent service packs, and is doing a better job of supporting their obsolete OS's - their service packs don't make other people's programs not work. Do I need to post the most recent link, from the MS's own site, about the number of programs XP sp2 nukes?

It's surprisingly minimal, compared to Apple's, and MS' was unavoidable. They needed to rearchitect components of the OS for security reasons, and programs who usually did not adhere to MS' Windows design guidelines occasionally run into incompatibilities.

Apple changes **** just for the hell of it.

[Gatekeeper]

Just for the hell of it? Um ... right. Look, I don't particularly have a dog in this fight, but in my experience, a company doesn't just change things "just for the hell of it."

A company's logic might be twisted, but it's there. Somewhere.

Gatekeeper

[Asher]

My interpretation is there's no point in most of the stuff they change, they just like to be edgy and fresh. Their engineers also clearly don't give a rats ass about backwards compatibility like MS' did -- which is one reason Apple is a niche market today.

[Gatekeeper]

Well, I have to be honest: The seemingly continual updates to X is annoying, and is one reason I haven't upgraded my existing iMac or bought a new iMac. For a while there, it seemed like Apple was releasing an OS update every four to six months.

Hell, I'm still using 8.6 and it's been a good workhorse.

Gatekeeper

[chequita guevara]

Windows XP was a service update to Windows 2000.

Win2K = WinNT 5.0
WinXP = WinNT 5.1

It's true that Apple charges an arm and a leg for it's incrimental fixes, but so does MS.

This says nothing about whether or not Apple sucks in general though. Apple is a great concept twenty years ago, which has been poorly handled, surpassed, and kept alive only by a rabid fan base.

MS, on the other hand, stole its technology when it could get away with it, bought it when it got caught, and used an illegal business practices to create a monopoly which it has used to extend monopolies over other spheres of software.

LINUX doesn't work well yet, and may never.

BSD is too nerdy.

BeOS went out of business.

[Asher]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Windows XP was a service update to Windows 2000.

Win2K = WinNT 5.0
WinXP = WinNT 5.1

It's true that Apple charges an arm and a leg for it's incrimental fixes, but so does MS.

This says nothing about whether or not Apple sucks in general though. Apple is a great concept twenty years ago, which has been poorly handled, surpassed, and kept alive only by a rabid fan base.

MS, on the other hand, stole its technology when it could get away with it, bought it when it got caught, and used an illegal business practices to create a monopoly which it has used to extend monopolies over other spheres of software.

LINUX doesn't work well yet, and may never.

BSD is too nerdy.

BeOS went out of business.

XP wasn't a "service update" to 2K. MS and Apple use different meanings for their versioning schemes. The "5.1/5.0" versioning refers to the kernel only.

[Mr. Harley]

Umm, Asher, I believe many of your criticisms of Linux concern changes to "just the kernel." Methinks your protesting too much - and I must grant Che a very nice and succinct summarization, without name calling, of the currect state of OS's.

[Atahualpa]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Windows XP was a service update to Windows 2000.

Win2K = WinNT 5.0
WinXP = WinNT 5.1

It's true that Apple charges an arm and a leg for it's incrimental fixes, but so does MS.

This says nothing about whether or not Apple sucks in general though. Apple is a great concept twenty years ago, which has been poorly handled, surpassed, and kept alive only by a rabid fan base.

MS, on the other hand, stole its technology when it could get away with it, bought it when it got caught, and used an illegal business practices to create a monopoly which it has used to extend monopolies over other spheres of software.

LINUX doesn't work well yet, and may never.

BSD is too nerdy.

BeOS went out of business.

Not quite... There's more to Apple than mindless fans. Apple still has a strong feet in the DTP market. Unfortunately they seem more interested in consumer devices.

[Sikander]

Apple sux.

[Agathon]

For one they have to upgrade because of the unpatched security vulnerabilities as Asher has pointed out. Failing to fix security problems in Apple's products is not Apple's business?

Apple's security updates are not limited to the latest version of the OS.

In any case, security is not really a problem on the virus and spyware free mac platform.

Windows is a poorly thought out joke that doesn't work properly. Try to do anything that requires multiple languages or rare non-roman characters on Windows... what a ****ing joke that is. I suppose that one could refuse to think that eating **** was a horrible thing, or at least maintain so in print. But the facts speak otherwise. Same goes for Windows. It's just silly.

As it stands, apart from the 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.2 updates (the central one of which was free to all users) Apple has been going along at an update every two years. The next one will be about 2 1/2 years after the intro of the current system.

Microsoft used to do that before they **** their pants and made a mess of Longshot or whatever it is called.

[Drake Tungsten]

Apple sux.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
Just for the hell of it? Um ... right. Look, I don't particularly have a dog in this fight, but in my experience, a company doesn't just change things "just for the hell of it."

A company's logic might be twisted, but it's there. Somewhere.

Actually, I don't think Apple's interface design studios have any rhyme or reason, just ADD. That's why they went from pinstripe to brushed metal to plastic to greyplastic in four years, and now have applications that don't have the same thematic consistency.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Windows XP was a service update to Windows 2000.

Win2K = WinNT 5.0
WinXP = WinNT 5.1

It's true that Apple charges an arm and a leg for it's incrimental fixes, but so does MS.

Yes and no. 5.0/5.1 is just the kernel; however, 2k/XP actually has at lot more than just the kernel. For instance, 2k was just another addition and improvement to the NT core; XP, however, merged a lot of the NT core with a lot of the 9x core, which is how you got the stability of NT with the compatibility of 9x.

It's a much larger change than the OS X updates; indeed, it's as much of a leap as OS 9 was to OS X. On the other hand, the incremental updates (SP1, SP2), which are tantamount to OS X 10.1, OS X 10.2, and so on, are free.

BeOS went out of business.

Zeta's supposed to be carrying on the BeOS torch.

[Atahualpa]

Originally posted by Agathon

For one they have to upgrade because of the unpatched security vulnerabilities as Asher has pointed out. Failing to fix security problems in Apple's products is not Apple's business?

Apple's security updates are not limited to the latest version of the OS.

In any case, security is not really a problem on the virus and spyware free mac platform.

I don't think I have to address this point.... It's the same as security through obscurity, it's nice when it works, but once discovered you're screwed. And the day this happens is doomed to come.. Murphy's Law or Apple goes out of business, but I don't want to be responsible for yet another notch in the ADKC

Windows is a poorly thought out joke that doesn't work properly. Try to do anything that requires multiple languages or rare non-roman characters on Windows... what a ****ing joke that is. I suppose that one could refuse to think that eating **** was a horrible thing, or at least maintain so in print. But the facts speak otherwise. Same goes for Windows. It's just silly.

That's strange, because I maintain a website in 5 languages - german, english, russian, spanish and chinese (I think it's the simplified one) - completely with Windows. SciTE (open source) is my editor of choice and it can do UTF-8 nicely. I also received a word doc containing english-chinese translations from china and could open it without problems.
OTOH, my parents had problems on the classic OS and MS Outlook Express receiving emails containing spanish text (I don't know the coding)... all the accentuated characters got lost, so I made the very opposite experience than you described. Most probably the truth is somewhere in between.