The graphic above is linked to a much more in-depth comparison of the two; I’m writing today to report my own real-world observations after four weeks of immersion in Windows XP (and a decade of using Macs). Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Looking into a Mac display is undeniably a beautiful thing. Even with ClearType enabled in Windows XP, Mac OS X does a better job at making dots on a screen look like ink on paper.
2. Web surfing on Windows is faster. A lot faster. I don’t currently have the means to measure this, but I would say from visiting the same pages on Mac and Windows that Windows is at least twice as fast at loading up a page in any browser than a Mac.
3. There’s a ton of fantastic software available for both platforms, some commercial, a lot of it free. The best free apps, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, are available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
4. Stupid people can break a Mac just as easily as a Windows computer. I have personally witnessed someone on a Mac surrender their browser to a screenful of pop-up ads, even with the pop-up blocker turned on! As for me on Windows, so far so good—four weeks in and no malware on my Lenovo laptop… Yet.
5. Apple Computer does make nice-looking machines, but as I’ve written before on the subject I can’t exactly call them reliable.
6. (The tipping point for me) Windows computers and accessories are cheaper, as in orders of magnitude cheaper. Case in point: Apple’s WiFi Base Station currently sells for $249 CAD. By comparison there’s a LinkSys wireless router on sale right now at CompuSmart for forty bucks!
7. The whole Mac vs. PC argument is ultimately for naught, as the web has all but replaced the desktop operating system, especially with this web 2.0 stuff. But if you really want to be a computer zealot you should know that all the cool kids are using Linux—I would be too if only Ubuntu would recognize my damn wireless card!

Anyway, desktop computers are sooo late twentieth-century… Smartphones are where it’s really at!

As someone who’s in the preliminary throes of the exact same switch I sat back with a designer mug-full of Fair Trade coffee and watched with great interest as Pilgrim’s post was dissected, defended and finally contextualized in the broader realm of what uber-blogger (and possibly middle-aged guy) Nicolas Carr refers to as The PC Elite.

PC Elite, eh? Hmm… I resemble that. And to you, Mr. Carr may I say that I’m flattered and almost a hundred percent in agreement with you, except for one little detail—We longtime Mac folks aren’t so much elite as we are self-loathing masochists.

(Brilliant. Thought-provoking. Genius. I don’t get it…)

Come on, admit it; deep down inside we hard-core Mac users secretly love to be left out in the cold. Back in days of old we’d gather and boast about the text adventure games we created in HyperCard, while secretly lamenting that we couldn’t open Excel spreadsheets with either Claris or AppleWorks. We’d justify this with the proclamation that Mac was the one and only choice for bohemian creative-types like us, while knowing that Windows versions of Photoshop and the like were pretty much identical was eating us up inside.

Later, we’d collectively duck for cover behind our under-performing G4 and G5 chips, as Apple would momentarily confuse our Intel enemies with some arcane floating-point processor comparison. Deep down we knew it didn’t matter, but it helped ease our buyers’ remorse from that expensive new Mac tower with the cooling fans that wouldn’t shut up.

Sadly, those days are no more. With Apple’s latest and greatest now sporting Intel chips and this whole Web 2.0 deal the harsh reality of 21st-century personal computing is now staring us square in the face—that computers are a commodity item, and most of the stuff you use them for can be done on the web, nowadays.

So what’s a self-hating computer snob to do? Enter Ubuntu. It’s promise is Linux for Human Beings, failing to realize that most human beings are too busy working, raising kids or otherwise living out their busy lives to learn the ins and outs of a brand-new operating system that doesn’t ultimately have much to offer beyond what Mac and Windows have already got.

Yet this matters not; for while the rest of you PC peons busy yourselves with your pedestrian communications and productivity, we the Linux elite will gather in darkened corners to boast of how we got our laptop’s wireless card to work with NdisWrapper, while secretly lamenting that we can’t reliably open Excel spreadsheets with Gnumeric.

(Wait a minute, you people aren’t the elite… You’re just people!)

And with this, we turn our backs on Apple. A real Mac-head couldn’t bear to spend even a few minutes in a shiny, new Apple store anyway; who are all these people, and don’t they know that the Intel MacBooks they’re lining up to buy can only run Photoshop under emulation? And if they do know, why don’t they care more about it?!

We Mac refugees must carry an additional burden—with the great unwashed switching to Mac in ever-higher numbers we’re going to get hit up a lot more for casual tech support. And while I would gladly share my custom export settings for Final Cut Pro with those who I deem worthy, I most certainly do not want to be the go-to guy when you can’t export your crap iMovie to your damn .Mac page to show off to your friends—I mean, my grad-school film theory professor would surely recoil in horror if he saw your blatant over-use of the Ken Burns effect!

Nope, the only way we can truly protect ourselves from the non-elite is to hide behind the shroud of mystery that is Linux—that way, when you ask us how to burn your iTunes music to a CD we can scare you off by suggesting you open up a Terminal window and execute a couple of command-line prompts from there!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to re-compiling my custom Linux printer driver. I’ve been working on it for over a week, and I’m due for a breakthrough anytime now…

So the new MacBooks were released today, and if that matte black finish is as rubbery as it looks it’ll surely be the object of every Apple fanboy’s desire.

Just maybe not me.

You see, this new MacBook is missing an onboard fax/modem, a startling omission for a something that’s supposed to be connectable to the internet from anywhere in the world, including my brother’s place in Bermuda.

Now listen up, Apple: I’m totally with you on the fax thing—what a colossal pain in the arse that fifteen years or so was—but some of your customers still dial in to the internet directly through their phone lines from time to time, including yours truly! Isn’t it perhaps a little premature to leave us out in the cold?

It’s bad enough that YouTube is fast becoming the VCR for the MySpace set; now people are uploading crap without first getting their facts straight…

My weekend newsfeeds were all abuzz with the story of how the BBC mistakenly interviewed a London cabbie about a legal decision in the case between The Beatles’ Apple Corps and Apple Computer.

While the Cock-up did indeed take place, the gentlemen in front of the cameras was not a cab driver but instead an IT professional applying for a job at the Beeb. Watch the video for yourself and you’ll hopefully agree that all things considered the poor guy ended up doing an okay job!

It took literally all day for me to add a logo and render out the best quality video I possibly could, yet YouTube still makes it look like crap. There are other, much better video sharing sites out there, but none has the mindshare of YouTube. So the mob has spoken—here is the internet’s next superstar, courtesy of (blech) YouTube and (hooray) iLaugh.com…

Have yourself a look at this video of yesterday’s Apple Store opening at the Toronto Eaton Centre; at the end of it you may recognize the guy in the orange shirt.

Full story tomorrow!

It seems that my last post about the beginning of the end for the Mac OS struck a definite chord with Apple fanatics. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I had some help in getting word out…

The Slashdot effect, also known as being Slashdotted or Dugg, refers simply to a smaller website like mine being linked to by a much bigger one. The huge surge in hits can put a strain on the servers hosting the smaller site, and in some cases can actually bring it down!

Thankfully that didn’t happen here, but after posting my Mac doomsday scenario yesterday I decided on a whim to cut and paste a link with text into an email and send it to the weekday editor at MacSurfer, a popular portal for Mac-related news. And lo and behold a half-hour later I was listed and the comments started flooding in.

Along with the feedback there’s also been a healthy does of comment spam. My personal favourite so far has been from Frank McDermott, whose entire comment was this:

“Have you seen Chicken Little?”

I’ve got a real bad feeling about this…

A couple of weeks ago the Mac community was all abuzz over news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had unloaded almost half of his stock in the company. While the consensus eventually came to be that he did it only for tax purposes, this morning the other shoe dropped—a public beta of Boot Camp, an official software product from Apple that will let owners of Intel-powered Macs dual-boot into either OS X or (gasp) Windows!

In the short term this is great news; Apple’s stock price will surely surge, and Macs will likely make that big dent into the enterprise market that everyone’s been talking about for so long.

But further down the road I see dark clouds gathering. With Adobe and Microsoft still holding out on Intel-compatible versions of their critical Macintosh software, they now have every reason to shrug off development and say: “What’s the point? Macs are gonna run Windows anyway…”

In time, I see the library of Macintosh software steadily shrinking while the Windows partitions on our Macs get bigger and bigger. Eventually, maybe five years from now or whenever Jobs finally retires to run Disney full-time, the Linux-based, crash and virus-proof operating system that we’ve grown to know and love will be reduced to a single Windows app—something like iLife with Apple Mail and maybe Safari thrown in for good measure.

Mark my words: This is the beginning of the end for the Mac OS…

(Read this Wikipedia entry or load up this very long FARK.com page if you are confused by the above…)

Just like last December I’ve had to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook, and its battery—which currently holds about a 7-minute charge—is probably due for a replacement as well. Anybody who knows me has had to endure my Macintosh zealotry on at least one occasion, yet if you peruse the Mac-related posts on this humble site you’ll see that I’ve had more than my share of issues with the platform.

In my decade of Mac experience the software has gotten better and better, but the hardware has gotten steadily worse.

Consider my recent history with Mac computers:

• October, 1999 – iMac DVSE: FireWire not working out of the box.
• January, 2001 – Power Mac G4: Unable to sleep out of the box.
• May, 2001 – iBook: Built-in speakers busted out of the box.
• December, 2003 – Powerbook: Dead pixels out of the box.
• April, 2004 – Power Mac G5: Logic board not working out of the box.

Not a great track record if you ask me…

And yet, my few shares of Apple stock are still skyrocketing while folks everywhere are touting the touting the superiority of the Mac platform.

My dream come true would be a release of Mac OS X that I could run on any machine I want. Sadly, even though Apple is switching to the Intel chip-set, we’ll likely not see a generic OS release until Steve Jobs finally decides to retire on a big bed of money from faithful fan-boys like myself.

I’m waiting to see what gets announced at the MacWorld keynote in January. If it’s not a generic release of OS X for Intel or at least an iBook that can run Windows, I’m buying me a notebook with XP Pro. Give me some time with it, and I’ll be able to say with at least some certainty which platform, if any, is ultimately better, and for what. Oh, and if I have enough hard drive space left over I may even install Linux on a separate partition, just for kicks!

Thanks to faithful reader and commenter Ed Miller for hipping me to video activist Ben Simpson’s Smash My iPod site. The premise is simple, young Ben solicits donations which he puts towards everyone’s favourite Apple product, then proceeds to stomp on it in-store and videotape the results.

Now despite being an unabashed Apple fanboy and all, I’m heartened by the fact that our younger generations aren’t necessarily buying into that whole gadget fetish scene, especially around this time of year. Other sites in the “SmashMy” portal include SmashMyXbox and SmashMyPS3.

Kudos, Ben Simpson!