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Fallows Article on Info Managers
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Posted by David Dunham
Nov 17, 2006 at 04:32 PM
I have occasion to use both Mac OS X and Windows on a regular basis, and I wouldn’t characterize either one as faster. *I* am faster on a Mac, partly due to familiarity and partly due to design issues like having a single menu bar (far faster to reach than the small target in Windows).
I do feel OS X is more stable, though XP has made improvements (although my officemate just had a machine fail due to the Registry being corrupted). Currently I have a Mac machine that’s been up for 46 days—it would have been longer except for a security update. (I think I restarted my Windows system yesterday because of a security update—this is another obvious difference between the platforms.)
I can also say that my Opal outliner is probably never going to be available for Windows. I consider that reason enough to use a Mac :-)
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
Posted by Derek Cornish
Nov 18, 2006 at 08:05 PM
Ken -
I don’t use a Mac (yet), but I am impressed with the range of outlining programs available for it. Ted Goranson’s regular column in “About This Particular Outliner (ATPO) contains interesting discussions and evaluations of what’s on offer for the Mac. The archive is at http://www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtml and it is equally interesting for Windows users to read. Indeed the whole magazine, of which the column is just one part, provides a good introduction to the Mac world.
Derek
Posted by Kenneth Rhee
Nov 18, 2006 at 08:18 PM
Derek Cornish wrote:
>Ken -
>
>I don’t use a Mac (yet), but I am impressed with the range of outlining programs
>available for it. Ted Goranson’s regular column in “About This Particular Outliner
>(ATPO) contains interesting discussions and evaluations of what’s on offer for the
>Mac. The archive is at http://www.atpm.com/Back/atpo.shtml and it is equally
>interesting for Windows users to read. Indeed the whole magazine, of which the column
>is just one part, provides a good introduction to the Mac world.
>
>Derek
I personally do not use a Mac on a regular basis, although there are times I wish that I do. I have a graduate student who bought a new Mac based on my recommendation, and I pointed him to a couple of programs (Notetaker, Notebok, Omini Outliner, etc.). He couldn’t be happier with the choice of outlining software in the Mac platform. In my experience, Windows outlining programs cannot touch some of these programs in terms of overall combination of the ease of use, functionality, visual attractiveness, and integration.
Just my 2 cents.
Ken
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Nov 19, 2006 at 09:11 AM
There’s some forthright discussion of speed and reliability issues in Mac OS X at http://www.atpm.com/12.08/paradigm.shtml. There seems to be general agreement that OS X through 10.3 was plagued by stability and speed problems. I pointed out that this had generally not been previously admitted in the Mac literature, as it isn’t recognized in your response here. There seems to have been improvement in 2005 and some regression in 2006. If the consensus represented in that unusually forthright discussion was that OS X just became usable recently, it is unlikely to have become a speed demon or to rival Windows XP in stability in the time since.
When I played with Omni Outliner on a Mac 6 months to a year ago in the Apple Store in LA, it was painfully slow. I don’t think Mac users on the whole are objective observers and commentators on their computers’ performance.
Let
Franz Grieser wrote:
>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