OS X: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

By Moshe Bar

February 24, 2003

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Some people have a weakness for fast cars, others for great wines or antiquities. I have a fondness for good computers. Since my early teens I have always wanted better, faster, sleeker, smaller or more powerful computers, either on the desktop, in my server room, or on my lap.

Unfortunately, there is little that stimulates a gadget addict's appetite in the traditional PC industry these days. Sure, the recent tablet PCs do have sex appeal, but they only run on Microsoft Windows, and as a Linux aficionado there is little I can do with such a tablet PC. Next to the relative novelty of tablet PCs, there is really nothing new out there.

In view of this, the slew of activity around Apple's products is even more refreshing. Not only is Apple's Mac OS X on the way to becoming the most widely used UNIX dialect, but it also sets new standards for computing hardware with its eye-catching and exceptionally functional PowerBook laptops. Apple knows how sexy its products are and is spending millions in advertisement to lure Windows and Linux users to switch to OS X.

Should You Switch?

As someone who for years has used Linux on laptops, I have come to expect little from a graphical user interface or from software support of laptop hardware features. As I have written previously, amazing as the progress is in the look and feel of Linux desktops, there is no way they can even get close to the elegant, sleek, instinctively easy-to-use GUI of OS X. Add to that the stability of the UNIX core powering OS X, and its natural suitability as a development workstation, and the only advantage Linux is left with is that Linux remains completely open source while OS X is only partially released into the free software world. Well, actually Linux has another advantage: It's much faster than OS X, as I showed in my December 2002 column.

I love the Apple laptop/OS X combination so much that I have fully switched my working environment to a couple of PowerBooks and iMacs.

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