This is one of those posts that probably will show my non-biasedness. Hopefully it will come off that way, at least, since i really don’t want to be biased in any way.
So i got this mac thing. And honestly? It does do its claim to fame. It works out of the box. You don’t have to fiddle with a whole lot (and looking through the preferences doesn’t even give you a whole lot that you will want). It has one hell of a lot of features out of the box. It saves you the time of installing a lot of software that you might want and can configure things such as samba and the like.
But that doesn’t mean it’s configs are better than windows. On the contrary, they are far inferior. They have more integrated features, but you can’t configure any of those features to the degree you can in windows (note that i’m neglecting bsd, linux, etc. this is because those are not really the “friendly” systems most of the time. SuSE, Fedora and the like help a lot and tend to follow the mac style for configs, but they do allow you to change things in a very minor level usually if you know what you are doing). Hell, a lot of the unix knowledge you might bring will be less useful since a lot has been moved or changed for a mac. (what the mtab file is doing now is beyond me).
So which is better? Generally the mac version works out for most users. Those other options aren’t changed a lot and even i can live without altering them (though i had to be able to set my default ftp program and found a way to do so).
Now how about software? (irrelevant to *nix because they don’t have software out of the box. hell, they usually don’t have a box). Out of the box, the mac wins. I have a free appleworks (comparable to microsoft works) and iLife install (uh… a bunch of media programs… no real equivilant suite from microsoft). Without those, the actual base operating system lacks dvd support and any advanced photo and media editting that make it great, but it does still have TextEdit (like WordPad), Mail (more like the full outlook than just express though the address book is a separate program…. weird), iCal for calendar, iTunes for music and Quicktime for video and then a few others that aren’t useful to most people (like iSync for your pda and such).
Let’s look closer at the software that you have with the operating system. I have to say that iTunes is the best media player available for mac os x (as far as i have found). that doesn’t really mean it’s good though. the other players absolutely suck. they can’t handle large playlists and frequently can’t handle streams. itunes can do streams and doesn’t crap out on large playlists. it just gets horrifically slow. the player is dumb too. it needs all of its music in its own folder, so it will copy any of your music there before you can listen to it. that means you have to have a local copy of it. works grand with a fileserver. damn program. quicktime isn’t very nice without the pro version. it won’t even do full screen and doesn’t support many codecs. windows media player by far wins. Email is always important, so how is Mail? actually quite good. It has basically every feature that you would want in Outlook, but the address book and calendar are different. with them being separate programs, they aren’t as nice to just change a tab, but they do function as well. considering i can sync my addressbook to my phone through integrated bluetooth, i was kinda impressed. apparently you can also get photos off of your phone using this as well.
How about chatting? Windows brings you Windows Messenger out of the box. Mac brings you iChat. Windows messenger isn’t really wonderful. It is nice for a messenger, but limited for what the protocol supports. iChat is similar. It has support for multi protocols and av chat for iChat users only, but it leaves some things to be desired from the protocols. Windows users upgrade to MSN messenger and mac users… either deal or use something like gaim or admium. msn messenger is damn impressive for a messenger for features. admium is cool and gives me everything i want for a multiprotocol messenger, but as always, you don’t get those cool extras. i say mac wins out of the box.
The biggest question always is what can i get for it? Mac is terribly flawed here. There simply are not as many programs. There is no good media player for it yet (though songbird is being developed). Most other software will cost a pretty penny. iLife, iWork, and AppleWorks are $80 each normally or if you want an upgrade. You could run gimp for images, but you can’t get something as free and easy as paint.net. Then even for pay software, you are limited more. this is the most detrimental part of the mac experience, but more users mean more software… eventually.
i think i had something else to build on… but i can’t remember it so i’m done. right now mac has the best potential but doesn’t have the support to make it king.