| > people are making judgements about an OS that aren't really caused by the OS That's why I add the word "ecosystem." I'm sure that most of the big problems I complained about can be traced to a 3rd party, but the fact that something isn't really Microsoft's fault doesn't mean it isn't their responsibility in the sense that it would be different in the mac ecosystem and therefore should affect my purchasing decisions. * Broken activation: maybe a 3rd party program overwrote a registry key, maybe I reinstalled the damn OS too many times and their servers locked me out. Either way it's not Microsoft's "fault" per se, but Mac OS X doesn't have an activation mechanism to break, so it's a win for the Mac ecosystem. * Broken fsck: there was really no excuse for this, it falls squarely in the MS's-fault bin. * Broken major updates: I didn't mention the broken 8.0->8.1 update because it's evidently common knowledge in the Windows ecosystem that updating without doing a clean install approximately never works and it was therefore "my fault" that I tried it. Guess what? It approximately always works in the mac ecosystem, and that's a win for the mac ecosystem. * Broken linker: Undetected virus? Registry overwrite? Clearly it didn't affect everyone, so it must have been something specific to my computer, and therefore probably wasn't MS's fault per-se. Still, during that install I had been extremely careful about being gentle by not installing non-default drivers, system tools, etc, so it must have been the fault of an app, possibly one I downloaded by fumbling while running the download-button gauntlet. Guess what? That kind of BS simply doesn't exist in the Mac ecosystem, at least not nearly at the levels that it exists in the Windows ecosystem. Microsoft's fault? Not really, but I'm not a charity or a judge, so I don't really care. If things are better on the mac side of the fence, that's reason enough for me to return. > Comparing the cheap hardware put in the budget-line laptops to the (mostly) decent hardware put in the line of portable Macs is pretty foolish Fair enough, but once you're buying the expensive PC hardware the Microsoft ecosystem no longer wins by default on price so it comes down to personal preference and things that are Microsoft's fault. > 99% of the problems that people actually report as 'problems with Windows', aren't. True but irrelevant. |