Why I've dropped MS Windows for the Apple Mac

YOU'D THINK that The INQUIRER staff were dyed-in-the-wool x86 lovers, and you'd be partly right. After all, the vast majority of the world's personal computers run Windows on x86 technology. Mention the INQ to Intel or AMD staff, and there's a subtle twitch in their eyes (and perhaps other places).

But there's another number of worlds out there. Twenty-two years of personal experience with the Windows/x86 platform made me want to get out from its legacy, security weaknesses, and its gotchas. There are plenty of gotchas but like becoming a vegetarian, you don't really see the differences until you get away from the Windows business model.

In Apple's early days, I wrote apps for Apple IIs, IIIs, and eventually the Mac. But there was a decision point that said, I could learn DOS/Windows programming, or Mac programming-- but not both. I chose Windows, and the Vole presented various developer programmes (stealing the concept from Novell and Oracle), and eventually I was hooked.

This addiction is not unlike nicotine. When you're a smoker, various life events are framed by when you're going to light up, and increasingly - where. New releases of Microsoft apps are like that. You want the fixes, the speed, and increased reliability. This rarely comes, however - it's just part of the Windows revenue model. Not being part of the Microsoft Developer's Network is unthinkable for most programmers. Microsoft took plenty of time to develop its database software, its multimedia API sets, and of course, its all-powerful 'office suite' of apps.

They were deliberate: everything had to kind of work together. There was a fork in the road when Microsoft developed COM, COM+ DCOM, and so on-- away from the other object-oriented programming models. They knew that it would force programmers to make a choice about which development model was going to pay-- COM or CORBA. In retrospect, CORBA was doomed just as POSIX has been doomed by sheer marketing/developer musculature of Microsoft. Microsoft if anything, is tenacious.

Windows is badly designed. It's bloated and put together by committee. It's highly vulnerable to a myriad of problems. So can Linux, xBSD, Mac OS/X, but somehow they have an odd karmic immunity from the tenacity of evil people. Some of these architectural problems and anarchy are being dealt with by a gottdamerung of fixes in XP SP2. When XP SP2 comes, Microsoft will have taken one of the most major steps in ten years to address the inherent Windows architectural deficiencies.

I'm not going to wait around. XP SP2 changes RPC handling, mandates an ominous personal firewall installation, and will break dozens of household name apps. Programmers in these well-known organisations are scrambling. They're developing registry hives, work-arounds, and they're re-compiling like mad. Three months after the proposed summer release of XP SP2, Microsoft will once again dominate the headlines with fixes. I, for one, support the architectural baling wire-- and the nominal re-write of Windows into Longhorn. It'll be different enough from Windows as we know it that it might not even be called Windows, some speculate.

It's still possible to run Windows on a PowerBook or other OS/X-based G4+ CPUs. Even XP works, although not with the speed that INQ readers are used to. Microsoft controls, this, too-- they purchased the keys from Connectix-- the maker of the Virtual PC product that permits running Windows on OS/X and even (gasp!) Linux and BSD.

It's been sixty days today since I left Windows. I feel much better now. There are certainly OS/X foibles that I have to deal with, and the one-button mouse setup had to go. There is an equivalent to the hourglass in OS/X-- it's called the spinning ball of death (SPOD). It's a busy signal. For the most part, it goes away randomly just as it arrived. The PowerBook that I'm using has WiFi built-in (ExtremeG as it's called). There's a nice display. Underneath is BSD, although I can also use 'fink' to download then recompile most of the library of Linux and BSD software that lazes on a thousand servers across the world.

The most important item to note is that computers are tools - we control them. I can do most all of the work done before on a litany of breathtaking (for the first month that it's in release) hardware. I have no desire to overclock the G4 in this machine or the G5 on my desktop. It runs very well, thanks. Squeezing the next hyperthreaded over-coded game has no interest for me. In the corner is a machine - a newly purchased HP Pavilion that'll do the majority of the Windows compiling and testing that I need. It's imaged, and wakes up freshly like JayBee Corbell in Larry Niven's World Out of Time.

But my personal rat race with bugs, fixes, exceptions, gotchas, driver madness, synchronization bipolar disease, and the sheer Prozac of it all, is over.

And I care not one whit whether your PC is running an overclocked, freon-cooled, ultra-finned CPU. Your machine might be faster than my G5. Oh well. It's not how fast it is, but what you can do with it that counts. In two years, Apple has gone from a closed architecture with moldy applications to an open hardware and software model that's still too expensive. But that's the sacrifice - it's like ten boxes of nicotine patches. µ