A little over a year and a half ago, I picked up a Macbook, first generation. I immediately fell in love with it, for a few reasons:

It was easy to use.

I found it incredibly easy to jump into OS X, even from the point of someone who had never used it before. Everything was logically laid out, and all the system preferences were very easy to find. 99% of the options you use on a regular basis are not buried, like they can be on Windows.

As well, the dock makes it very easy to see what you are currently working on, or what applications are open. A simple glowing dot (or triangle, on Tiger), appears under any app that is open. To find out what apps are running on windows, you need to go into the Task Manager, and then look at the processes, which isn’t nearly as easy, or as streamlined.

It looked good.

I positively cannot stand the default Windows XP theme. As many have said, it looks like Microsoft hired someone from Fisher Price to design the GUI… Really, what were they thinking?

This is another area where OS X got me. It actually looked good. Every item in the OS had a unified look. Heck, even 3rd party applications followed the same theme. This cannot be said for Windows applications, where the designers (of 3rd party apps) seem to have married Photoshop’s “bevel & emboss” option.

Overall, the Mac developer community just seems to pay more attention to the polish on their apps. They work well, and they look good. This is a +1 for OS X.

No viruses/spyware

This is one the best benefits of going to a Mac (or Linux). No viruses or spyware. Sure, no OS is bulletproof, but going to a non-windows OS reduces your problems by 99% or higher.

It’s so nice to be able to browse the web, knowing that you can’t be silently infected by a JS exploit in an ad on a page, or if you let someone use your computer. This is yet another +1 for OS X.

Bundled Applications

OS X comes with quite a few awesome bundled applications, like Garage Band, iMovie, iTunes, Time Machine, iDVD, and many more. To get the equivalent of these apps on Windows, you’d need to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

I also really like Time Machine. It backs up everything silently, and you rarely ever know it’s there. Time Machine became extremely important to me when the Macbook’s HDD failed just a couple months ago.

Things I’ll miss about Windows.

Obviously, going to OS X won’t be all pluses, there will be things missing that I wish OS X had.

  • A Taskbar - I really like the taskbar. It makes windows so easy to use, and in my opinion, it looks a bit cleaner then the dock.
  • Hide-able tray icons - I like how you can high non-used tray icons in Windows. On OS X, you can’t do this, so if you have 7 things running, the “tray” in the menu bar looks a bit busy.

What I plan to upgrade to

Hopefully by mid July or early August, I’ll have a Mac Pro, octo core with 4gb of RAM. I’ve used one of these before, and it was damn snappy. The dual core Macbook feels quick now, It’s hard to imagine how fast 8 cores will be.

Final Thoughts

I do like both operating systems, they both have their flaws, and their advantages. Hopefully OS X will prove to be as good as a primary OS as windows, if not better.

-Kyle VE