Jason wrote:Well, that wasn't my question. You haven't listed anything that can't also be done on a PC, even if you can't do it out of the box.
i agree. Personally I find that it's easier on the mac... for new users, or for those who regard computers as something that helps them do what they want to do and don't want to care about how it does it.
And I've been responsible for about 6 laptops and a desktop running XP over the last few years. Total system crashes (Blue Screens of Death) have been very rare except when I screwed stuff up myself. Program crashes are occasional, but not all that common. Not one of them has been infected by viruses or spyware once since my family and I have had them. They're not that hard to avoid. You just have to be aware and compute smartly. And I've personally seen Macs, newer Macs, lock up. So the "Mac never crashes" line doesn't work on me. I've been in computer science long enough to be skeptical when someone says of an OS or program "It never crashes!"
I know, i HATE THE beachball Macs have and the system hangs ALL the time on my 300mhz G4. I know it's old, and maybe it's a hardware problem (probably) but the ANNOYING thing about the mac is that it doesn't give me any error messages so i can't diagnose the problem.
But don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to badmouth Macs or anything. In fact, you may have seen my thread here about me being in the process of buying one of the new Macbook Pros now that they can also run XP. Ultimately I had 2 points:
1) I resent the ads' sophmoric approach of "use us! We're cool! They're lame!" rather than "use us! We're better suited for your needs."
2) People use computers and certain OSes for whatever reasons they have. Some OSes are better suited to some things than for others. But there is little you can do in one that you couldn't potentially do in the others. So saying one is superior or better than the other is meaningless. Each person should decide if a computer/OS is superior for them. Thus the whole Windows vs Mac vs Linux vs Whatever thing is just silly OS snobbery. A Mac may be superior for you, but may be a horrible choice for someone else. So compute and let compute.
I think each OS is superior to the other in certain ways. and like you said, depends on the user.
I usually recommend Macs to non-savvy people or those that are 40+ or those who want multilingual support. My Japanese wife loves the Japanese language support... from menus to dialog boxes to everything else multilingual... it's superior, imho.