I've been using Macs since 1993. Very minimal problems. With such a huge OS market share, the majority of my friends uses a PC while I use it at work which is of no surprised. They are the ones who I've always heard having problems I've never occurred with the Macs I've used over the years. But like I said, I've barely experience problems for the past 16 years. Sadly, they are usually the ones throwing the first stones probably out of fear or something I guess. It's either a double standard or it was just plain ignorance such as the "lack of software" myth. There have always been more PC software for the obvious reason, but there have always been more than enough software for most Mac users. It's kind of like PS fanboys saying the only good game on the 360 is Halo3 which isn't true due to ignorance. And the price "issue" of Macs. A friend has an Acer laptop that runs off of 4 GB of ram while my iMac has only 2 and I paid more. BUT his Windows OS eats up 2 GB of his ram while the Mac OS eat up around 512MB, a quarter of my resources compared to a half of his. So the price issue from the surface is very misleading from the uninformed masses. Pretty common and easy to spot from my vantage point since the market is saturated with PC's. So it's easier to be familiar with it while my long term hands on Mac experience allows me to see Macs more accurately. You really are comparing apple to oranges, but the masses normally doesn't know these things.

Just got my new laptop on Black Friday, and it's AMD Dual Core with Windows 7...it's a little beast. I love the new OS, and can honestly say this is the most user friendly, and best experience i've had so far on a OS. I tranferred all my data over from my Windows XP, and so far every program is working great, and installs are fast, and unhitched. Had experience with Windows 7 before, but you just have to get it yourself to really appreciate it. Mac's are great, but just like the iPhone, i go with what's proven to be the most supported, and overall the best.

Ah... Is that the reason why the United States Department of Defense chooses to use Windows at all of their locations, not Mac? ;p

I figure if the US is spending a combined $650 billion in 2009 on defense they can afford the very best, so by your logic Windows is much better.

I want to correct this: if OS-X ever gains a significant market share, it will surely become target of much more malware. The difference being that a good security infrastructure enables a piece of software to be robust against attacks, and not automatically a victim. Or when it comes to the worst, it ensures that the damage malware can cause is limited.

Example: servers based on LAMP infrastructure and in particular the Apache webserver were victims of much less serious exploits than Microsoft's IIS server, though being much more widely employed worldwide.

That is not to say that I have blind faith in OS-X security, mind you. Hackers meetings centered on security demonstrated that it is not at all that impervious. But on the other hand serious faults were pointed out by experts in Windows 7 at beta-time that were never corrected, and that might open a privilege escalation.

Bottom line: I refuse to accept "marketshare brings vulnerability", I only accept that marketshare brings exposition. Software quality can de-couple the two, and we should push, as consumers, for higher quality.

What a load of horseshit. I have worked in IT for just over 20 years, particularly around security, so let me just correct some of your horseshit.

the LAMP stack over the past 5 years has been the target of signifiantly more vulnerabilities than the equivalent windows stack with IIS, and combined with the garbage php apps is one of the most hacked server side platforms around at the moment. Not since IIS5 (windows 2000) has MS had any significant security issues in there web stack (check it for yourself on something like secunia).

secondly the biggest attack vector has NEVER been the OS and neither windows nor OSX or for that matter linux provides any protection from the vast majority of malware and trojans which are transmitted through user stupidity, downloading and running stuff they shouldn't.

^Cool your jets, and read my post again.

I'm stating that we can not accept a "bigger marketshare means more vulnerabilities" implication as if it was a fact of life.
Even for social malware (the "silly user downloads and tries to install anything" case), MAC and correct default policies for installation and system maintenance can mitigate the damage and I give credit to MS to have started to move in the right direction since Vista with UAC, sandboxing, etc.

I'm very well aware that IIS and MS SQL Server have greatly improved since the sad times of CodeRed and Slammer, but this doesn't invalidate my statement at all, ie that Apache was at the same time marketshare leader and more robust, again as a counterexample to the previous poster's reasoning.

I used Macs when they actually had different hardware, the ppc, and have some experience with friends' Mac pcs'. I am familiar with both Win and Mac, but use Win because I can choose my own hardware, and build it at a fraction of the cost. Like you, I have barely experienced any problems over the past 20 years and I know I have saved a ton of cash because I don't go with a Mac pc. As for Win OS eating 2gb of ram... I'm writing this on a thinkpad with 4gb of ram, and system resources are using less than 400mb. I don't know what you're friends are doing, but all their problems are probably created by themselves, so the price issue is not misleading. And it is not an apples to oranges comparison, they both run on the same hardware, can do the exact same things, but one costs alot more.

And to put my two cents in, the last two Macs my wife has been issued from work have had lots of problems.  Her brand new one has optical drive problems and doesn't seem to want to run iTunes correctly.  The one before that had lots of errors and compatibility issues with the music software she was running that was SUPPOSED to run on Macs.  But the nail in the coffin with Macs for me was in college when I spent an entire week on a project for a class (a project that could only be done in one of the Mac labs on campus because only the ones in that lab had the software I needed) and after the last night of work on this thing, the computer pretty much ate the whole thing.  I didn't do anything to spark this.  The project was just gone.  Unrecoverable.  I have never had anything like that happen on a PC.  I literally had to go in the next day with a "dog ate my homework" excuse. 

Macs have screwed me over on more than one occasion.  Yes, I've had problems with PCs, but I think the file system in Mac OSX lends itself to more problems than Windows.  A stupid person can mess up Windows pretty bad, but I feel it's nothing compared to how bad a stupid person could mess up an OSX install.

Wow, i used to complain about PS3 fans, but after this thread, i'd say mac fanatics are the worst.



Windows 7 has it all. Suck it up.

All fanatics are the same dude, none are better than other.

There are MS fans that will just as willingly give up their lives for the cause.

Just because you you probably support MS (based on what I've read) you are obviously blinkered so can't see the "just as bad" MS fanatics

around you.

Take note of your own sig. That's a fact.

OT: Why this is news is amazing. With Windows 95% or whatever marketshare anyone with half a brain could have figure this out.