Can anybody give an example of something that makes Mac OS X better than Vista?
It's Unix. That's the big one. Unix isn't necessarily the Platonic ideal of an operating system, but it is the standard. Learn it, and you know an OS that runs on almost all the hardware in the world and that powers the majority of the web.
No more Cygwin. No struggling with bizarrely different Windows semantics. No falling behind the open-source development curve -- git works better, ruby works better. Any software which is developed on Mac or Linux works better on Macs or Linux boxes -- that's where the bugs get fixed first.
Obvious other reasons to love the Mac include really not worrying about malware, and the Mac software community and its well-designed Mac-only apps. I'm not a heavy user of such things, yet even I have a few that I would be loath to give up: 1Password, Quicksilver, Textmate [1], Pixelmator, xScope, iWork, HandBrake, VisualHub.
A final obvious reason: Mac users have Windows around if we want it. [2] I've got two Windows VMs on this machine right now, which I use for the dreaded Quickbooks (argh), the occasional game, and (of course) cross-browser testing of web page rendering.
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[1] Though I use emacs most of the time.
[2] Windows users can apparently also have the Mac around... but it's not supported, and they have to solve a lot of those pesky driver issues.
"It’s really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don’t do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don’t have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you’d find in Windows."
It's Unix. That's the big one. Unix isn't necessarily the Platonic ideal of an operating system, but it is the standard. Learn it, and you know an OS that runs on almost all the hardware in the world and that powers the majority of the web.
No more Cygwin. No struggling with bizarrely different Windows semantics. No falling behind the open-source development curve -- git works better, ruby works better. Any software which is developed on Mac or Linux works better on Macs or Linux boxes -- that's where the bugs get fixed first.
Obvious other reasons to love the Mac include really not worrying about malware, and the Mac software community and its well-designed Mac-only apps. I'm not a heavy user of such things, yet even I have a few that I would be loath to give up: 1Password, Quicksilver, Textmate [1], Pixelmator, xScope, iWork, HandBrake, VisualHub.
A final obvious reason: Mac users have Windows around if we want it. [2] I've got two Windows VMs on this machine right now, which I use for the dreaded Quickbooks (argh), the occasional game, and (of course) cross-browser testing of web page rendering.
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[1] Though I use emacs most of the time.
[2] Windows users can apparently also have the Mac around... but it's not supported, and they have to solve a lot of those pesky driver issues.