Perhaps one of the oldest flame wars in bulletin board history, but I figured I might as well take a stab at it – the rest of the internet is quiet at this time of the day anyway.

Since Apple moved away from their older proprietary hardware processor to Intel powered Apples, there has been a real shift in the capabilities of the Mac. With Boot camp, running Windows on a Mac is entirely feasible. No longer can Windows fan boys claim that their platform is exclusive for running software on. With emulation having been around for a considerable time. July 19th, 1994 marked the beginning of the Usenet group for the Wine platform on Linux based environments.

Apple uses a Linux based operating system with their own graphical user interface on top to provide for a rather unique interface. But this is also backed by the power of open source technology and specifically the very reliable Linux technology underneath to make it do what it needs to do.

With this in mind, it is clear that at a technological point of view, the Apple is superior to a windows machine. Features ranging from built in shell scripting to compilers out of the box make it an attractive desktop for development firms. Indeed a large proportion of the Web and Design industries harness the power of Apple.

But what about my applications, They run on windows?

I am sure that you use a great number of applications that run on Windows but what you need to consider is how much do you really need that specific application. I use Open Office on both Windows and Linux  which replaces Microsoft Office (which is also on mac btw) easily. I also use Zend Studio or Eclipse on both Windows or Linux, actually I don’t think there is even an equivalent of that on Windows. Perhaps Visual Studio but that’s just a huge resource hog. Photoshop is already out on mac, and through wine can even run happily on pure Linux.

Security is king.

Given that the Apple operating system is based on Linux, it is entirely understandable that out of the box a Mac  comes with a higher standard of security than a Windows machine. Linux encourages good policies, instead of granting administration rights to users by default, a user needs to elevate to a higher level to do a task. This can easily be done whereas in windows, you’ll quickly find you get annoyed by popups every second asking if your sure to the level that you disable all security just to be able to open a file. This is when the security problems start to occur. There are almost no Virus effect non windows platforms.

Conclusion

Simply put Windows is old, slow and not a good contender for an operating system for a desktop or laptop computer. The security and design flaws that plague Microsoft still have not went away with Windows 7. Mac and Linux are the future, Development and Design can be done much quicker perhaps even with more reliable results on those two than they can be done on a Windows machine.