Leopard and Vista – is a peaceful coexistence even possible?

For the last thirty minutes or so I have been trying to come up with a witty and entirely original title for this article. “Crouching Leopard, hidden Vista” and “Throwing apples at windows” are the best I have come up with so far. To avoid spending the next three hours hunched behind my Macbook hoping for a stroke of genius I’ll just slap a generic title to this whole thing and move on to more important things. (If you thought writing reviews and editorials was an easy job, think again)

Now, as the title suggests this article is meant to compare the two latest offsprings from Apple and Microsoft. Notice how I did not call either of them the best or most popular Operating System. This is simply because using those simple words would require me to throw Windows XP as well as at least two flavours of Linux into the fray to avoid being called narrow-minded.

The main purpose of this article is not to determine which system is better, since that is clearly a very subjective matter. I’ll leave performance benchmarks out of the way for that and many other reasons. Instead, I’ll try to showcase the strengths of the individual systems, as well as point out any major shortcomings. An occasional joke might be found here and there, to make reading this a tad easier – die hard computer enthusiasts, you have been warned.

In order to be one hundred percent honest with you I feel a short disclaimer is in order right about now: Although I consider myself a very knowledgeable and experienced computer user, I am only human and as such my knowledge of the two operating systems is not perfect. Also worth noting is that although I use both systems extensively in my day-to-day tasks, OSX is serving as my OS of choice at the moment. Just thought you should know. With that out of the way, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

A short history lesson: How Microsoft and Apple took entirely different approaches

The groundwork for the current situation in the operating system market was laid down way back in 2001, when Windows XP and the first official Mac OS X (version 10.0) were released. What happened before that is of no major consequence right now, since OS X was build from the ground up and incorporated little to no code from its predecessor, while Windows XP were the first consumer oriented version of the NT series.

To say Apple and Microsoft had a good start would be lying. Both new systems were plagued with issues that caused many a headache. On the Apple side of the fence, loyal customers felt threatened by the new system that disregarded many of the conventions OS 9 and its predecessors established, such as offering a spatial file manager, not to mention the entirely new look and feel called Aqua. To top it off, the foundation of OS X was a flavour of UNIX, which meant all of the old applications couldn’t be run natively on the newcomer. This, coupled with a long list of bugs ensured that OS X pickup was slow and quite painful.

Windows XP didn’t have it as bad at first. Except for missing drivers for some devices the new OS had had a pretty decent test run in the form of Windows 2000, so most of the launch troubles got taken care of in advance. Granted, this didn’t allow Microsoft to rest on their laurels, since the wide array of hardware Windows is supposed to run with ensured they had to fix more and more bugs as the masses picked up Windows XP.

Despite working full time on security fixes and new anti-piracy measures Microsoft found the time to publish two Service Packs (Not counting the third since it was released after the Vista launch) which brought a couple of new features and countless bug fixes. All the while a new version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn was being developed in relative secrecy. After what has to be one of the bumpiest roads in the history of OS development Longhorn finally saw the light of day two years ago in guise of Windows Vista.

Meanwhile, Apple was taking a different approach. Shortly (about six months) after the release of OS X 10.0 version 10.1 was released. It fixed many of the bugs the previous version had. 2002 was the year of the Puma, OS X version 10.2. As well as bringing more fixes the new version delivered a sleeker look, improved desktop graphics support, new applications such as iChat and Address Book and further improved the performance of the system. Unlike 10.1, which was a free upgrade for 10.0 owners, Puma was considered a standalone release and as such required all to pay the full price. 10.3 came out in 2003 and offered even more new applications, a very extensive overhaul of the user interface and big performance increases. Codenamed Panther, it was the last PowerPC only Mac OS X release.

10.4 saw the light of day in 2005. It delivered the biggest slew of new applications to date. It was also the first OSX to include Spotlight, a built in indexing tool that allowed users to search their entire file system in mere seconds. With 10.4.4 (the fourth update to the OS – think service pack) Tiger introduced support for Intel based Macs (commonly known as InteliMacs). Which brings us to almost a year ago, when Leopard was released. Bringing the OS X version up to 10.5, the latest member of the feline family brought many improvements (Apple claims over 300 new features were introduced) over its predecessor. I will not go into them here, since many of them will get a mention further on. Suffice it to say the two years of downtime between Tiger and Leopard were well worth it. (article : peter gracar)