Fallows Article on Info Managers

Posted by Franz Grieser
Nov 17, 2006 at 04:37 PM

Stephen

>and no one, including James,
>mentions that OS X is painfully slow and not terribly stable, traits which
>considerably diminishing any application it runs.

Beg your pardon. That’s nonsense.

Over the last 2 years, we had 3 Macintosh machines (OS X 10.3 and 10.4) and 6 Windows XP machines here. Some of the machines were new when we bought them, some notebooks were second-hand. We use them mainly for writing, translating, email, web (browsing and design), info storage, desktop publishing, image editing and graphics (diagrams, flowcharts, sometimes illustration). All the tasks are done both on Windows and Macs (except for illustration as we only have Corel Draw).

And our Macs are more reliable than the Windows machines. We had only 2 crashes on the Macs - both on a Powerbook that was - I think - 4 years old. 2 of your Windows machines crash regularly, one at least once a week. The other PCs are fairly stable (but they restarted every morning, the Macs usually are not turned off at night).

In our experience OS X is only slow on machines it was not designed for or that are faulty.

We ran OS X 10.4 on the used Powerbook (800 MHz, 512 MByte RAM) and could not complain about speed. Ulysses, Tinderbox, Devonthink and Scrivener are about as fast or slow as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org on a 800 MHz Thinkpad running Windows XP.

And that’s not only my personal experience. That’s the experience of a couple of Mac and Windows users I know.

Franz