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After reading yet another article praising Leopard and punishing Vista I am going to offer a rather unique parallel.This post is in response to an article written by PC World.

Leopard Beats Vista for Corporate Satisfaction

People need to understand that Mac’s are much like people of the Jewish faith. Being Jewish, in most cases, means both an ethnic heritage and a religion. One can be Jewish in faith and not in ancestry and vice-versa, however, for the sake of this example we are going to say that being Jewish is both an ethnicity and a religion. If we compare the ethnicity to hardware and the religion to software then we can see how the Mac computer fits into the technological world.

During the onset of the common era the people of Israel saw two types of people, Jews and Gentiles or Jews and everyone else. Gentiles parallel PC computers. No two PC’s are alike.

If we want to properly compare a Windows and an OSX we need to limit the field to only laptops. Both PC laptops and Mac laptops have the most in common and the same set of challenges which makes them the ideal candidates for comparisons. For OSX we have the MacBook Pro and about a billion other PC laptops to choose from. Laptops in PC land vary quite a bit. My work offered me a PC laptop made by IBM or a MacBook Pro. After looking at the specifications and design the MacBook Pro was the obvious choice. My little sister’s place of work gave her an HP laptop which was stellar in design and is quite a bit faster than the MacBook pro. However, I found the MacBook Pro’s layout far better for left-handers than the HP laptop. With laptops we look at the display, keyboard layout, and performance.

I admit that I installed Vista on my MacBook Pro and eventually removed it. Despite what has been said, a Mac does not run Vista very well. People might point out a MacBook Pro will out-peform a PC laptop when running Vista. For that argument please see all the above paragraphs. A huge point was the fact that the MacBook maps the delete key to the backspace and has no specific delete key of its own. For what I do, this makes running Vista very difficult. Since I needed to flop between Vista and OSX I found the mapping of the apple key and the control key to be too confusing so I needed to pick one operating system. Apple still has not been able to have their video cards work well with Vista or XP. Despite it being better with the newer hardware it still sinks my Vista ranking which causes me some headaches. The MacBook’s wireless under Vista is constantly disconnecting, which is a showstopper. Really, any of the above issues would have called for a removal of Vista.

Even when running the same hardware you are still trapped between apples and oranges. Comparing satisfaction between Leopard and Vista as far too many variable to make a viable tests. The examples given by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld in his article were embarassingly poor. With this kind of shoddy technology journalism undergoes the cloak of an independent look to a flat out bias article which serves more as an advertisment for OSX than anything else.