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The other day, someone asked me what I thought about the Mac running Vista faster than a PC. My head immediately began to spin looking for a place to begin explaining why that was a ridiculous statement / question. I then found an analogy that had nothing to do with technology, but with cancer. A lot of people think that cancer is a disease, it isn’t, it is a description of a type of disease. Cancer should only be capitalized when it begins a sentence. Even within breast cancer there are multiple different types of carcinomas. Chemotherapy is not the same for all cancer treatments either. Chemotherapy is short for chemical therapy, and there are many different types of chemical therapy. The same holds true with PC’s, or rather, pc’s. PC stands for “personal computer” The computers almost always run Windows, however, most are equipped to run other operating systems like Linux, and within Linux there is a wide range of distributions. Personal computers, by nature , are far more versatile than their Mac counter parts. Drawing another parallel outside of technology, Macs are a lot like the Jewish people. Jewish, for most people, is both an ethnic and religious description. Mac computers are the same way. Mac is both hardware and software.

When someone mentions this common argument, nine times out of ten they are reading a headline and did not dive too deep into the article. Upon hearing this argument immediately ask, which PC? Are they talking about laptops or desktops, if so, what kind of desktop, is it a home made computer or is it from Dell or HP. If they answer “HP” then what kind of HP? You would need one with a similar processor chip and video card. There is no use comparing an HP model with an Athlon processor and a shared video card, you would look for a similar core 2 duo chip and an Nvida graphics card similar to the Mac that you are testing.

You most likely will never get that far into the argument, the person citing this misunderstood fact will most likely point out how expensive Vista is and how there are all these different versions. First of all, they were forced to come out with different versions in accordance with the monopoly claims, brought forth in large part my the Mac front. However, you don’t need to wage that point, simply point out the fact that there have been 5 upgrades to OSX. If you estimate 100 bucks per upgrade you put the price above Windows Vista Ultimate. When Apple ran the ad about the PC upgrading his components to be Vista compatible failed to point out that a computer that can run OS 10.0 will not run OS 10.5 and OS 10.5 will not run OS 10.0. Where was Internet Explorer 8 will run on XP machines, Safari 3.0 will not run on non-intel machines, or on 10.3 or below. If you want the latest Safari browser you will need to run 10.4 or 10.5.

Make no mistake, I enjoy working with Macs and I really like Window’s Vista. I think a lot of people that  slam Vista has spent as much time working with Vista as people who slam Mac have worked with Macs. Instead they recycle poorly thought out arguments. Transitioning between operating systems takes some time especially when there are fundamental changes. Going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 took some time, since 98 was not much different, that transition was easier. I heard the same poor arguments as a challenge to the now glorified XP. The main difference between XP and Vista is that there is a real challenge to Vista; there wasn’t one for XP. The same people that argue that XP is far better than Vista are normally the same people that argue that Star Wars episode one was terrible, the worst, and think that the original films were far better. This is an obvious case of group think, and I can prove it.