Why is the Mac Better than the PC?

By the way, to anyone who thinks that Macs are "immune" from crashes, hangs, freezing up, losing data, etc: you are wrong. It is a more stable OS than Windows, but it does have its bugs and glitches which can end up in a complete reinstall situation...

Well, yes of course, anything designed by imperfect man will be imperfect. Macs aren't immune to viruses or crashes, but they're much more rare than on any Windows platform. There have been and are viruses for the Mac, but I've been using Macs for at least 10 years and have never had a single virus. I haven't heard of many situations that call for complete reinstalls either. OS X is solid as a rock. Since I've been using OS X (the last 3 years or so) I can't remember many instances at all where I've had to restart due to some sort of system failure. The only time I ever restart is after installing something that requires a restart. Windows to me has always been way too unstable and unsecure, that a Mac (or Linux for that matter) is the way to go. Basically anything except Windows.

Another point is that POSIX, BSD and LINUX are all very close to open source (certainly open specification) - i.e. the way in which I/O is handled is free for everyone to see, it's laid down in a detailed specification.
The number of people, who have access to that spec. is huge - any weaknesses are going to be found in a fairly short space of time. Reports will be written, meetings will be held and a new spec. agreed.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tries to keep everything secret, right down to the file format of Office documents (which is downright ludicrous). Any potential security leaks are, first and foremost, going to be found by hackers, closely followed by security organisations, followed by Microsoft denying that any such thing exists, followed several months later by a "security update" for something that never existed.

The point about the number of useless processes, that Windows has running is very good. Any calculation-intensive operation is going to be heavily affected by extraneous "services" taking a load of processing power, just to prove to themselves that they are still running.

Yes, of course, a Windows system will do the job. I just know that if I was doing audio or graphics processing professionally, I would not even consider anything that ran a Microsoft product.

I'm not a second hand car salesman - I'm a computer professional with 35 years experience in IT. I'm currently working on a project to protect the software loaded into a future generation of luxury car (2-3 years to market). I'm probably far more critical of IT products than the average user - it doesn't mean that I see things that aren't there, I just moan about wha tis there - loudly.

The thread from Hell.