As most of you already know already, Apple has officially announced Leopard’s shipping date, and Apple has re-lit it’s advertising campaign for the eagerly awaited 64bit Operating System. They were even kind enough to place most of those 300+ new features on a single page.
Besides all of the invisible work done to the OS, like making it 64bit, and increase it’s security. There is a list of over 300 new “palpable” features in it that you can actually see and use. So I asked a friend of mine who has been using Vista for a couple of months now what new things is he able to do with it.
After thinking a bit, he remembered a few of them: the search in the start menu, the improved start menu, the “widgets” bar, the transparent interface. After mentioning those he started stuttering so I helped him out a little and mentioned one or two that I remembered like the improved “bread crumb” icons that help you navigate to your parent folder’s content, and the improved parental controls.
But then I thought to myself “there must be more to Vista than this”, so I hoped over to Microsoft’s Vista website and managed to find a link which should have had the answers for all my questions, Microsoft’s 100 Reasons you’ll be speechless.
After reading most of those reasons, I have to say I was speechless. Not because I was wow’ed by the list, but because there just wasn’t much to say about them. Most of the features, or reasons as they call it, aren’t really reasons, but just clever marketing phrases such as:
You choose the fun—TV, games, music, movies, home videos, or photo slide shows—Windows Vista has all of your entertainment in one convenient place. Enjoy it on your PC, or gather friends and family around your home entertainment center, and let the good times roll!
Name one thing from the phrase above that you can’t already do with your 6 year old Windows XP.
I’m not saying that there wasn’t a lot of work put behind Vista, but nothing can explain or justify why it’s such an underachiever compared to Apple’s own OS, or even some of the more popular Linux distros which have features that we probably won’t see until the next iteration of Windows like: multiple virtual desktops.
Everyone knows how many resources Vista consumes while doing basically nothing, but apart from consuming more resources, there aren’t that many new things that you can do with Vista. Which leads me to the question:
Are Windows users simply satisfied with a nice-looking skin and a relatively stable OS?
And I don’t know about you readers, but since I usually take a whole day to format my computer and install all of the applications I want (some of them mimicking Mac OS X features) I have to say that having stability and a new skin aren’t reasons enough for me to consider purchasing their latest Operating System, specially when it costs a lot more than Leopard.
I could actually “see and use” features like:
Descriptive Error Messages
Japanese Language Support
Parental Control
Folder Sharing
New Fonts
Movie Previews
Turn Off All Alarms
Hide Local Video
More Smileys
Polish Localization
Archive Mailbox
Wikipedia Content Filter
Preview Controls for PDFs
Clock Overlay on any Screen Saver
Empty Trash Button
Wow, Apple certaintly isn’t reaching to come up with this list of awesome features like Microsoft doess.
Way to go through the list and find that one, Griffith. Of course there are some purely sales-pitched ‘features’. They’re selling the OS.
Some of Apple’s ’300′ features include 6 font features. yes, fonts. You know, how we spend hours worrying about and installing fonts. Thank God Apple has done all the tedious font work for us.
and you didn’t have invisibility in iChat? almost EVERY video chat program has invisibility. But that’s a feature of the OS? and clearing your chat is another feature? and more smileys? You can get to 300 quick by counting all these ‘features’.
The sales pitch rages throughout both of these OS feature guides. Leopard is going to be a killer OS, for sure, but don’t pick off a single ‘feature’ and infer that all the features in Vista are available in XP, because I assure you, they are not. Your friend simply isn’t using the new features, he’s using it like he used XP. Very scientific poll, though, thanks.
I do completely agree on Vista hogging resources. I’ve tweaked mine down to a reasonable level, but it is crazy.
A feature of Vista I absolutely /love/ is the ability to set volume levels on a per-application basis. What an amazing feature. I love that I can set the volume of my IM app (Trillian) to 10% of the volume I listen to music at, and turn the volume for Firefox /off/ so that unwanted sounds/music from Flash don’t intrude on my ears.
What would be a better list, I think, would be new features that are in Leopard that /aren’t/ in Vista, and vice-versa. Localizations? Application based firewall? Signed applications? IM app invisibility? Set default IM application? Printer support? New look? None of those would make such a list.
Most of the features introduced by Apple has already been introduced by Microsoft previously. (ie: Thumbnails of pictures as a file’s icon in finder. Explorer has done that for quite some time. And “time machine” — Windows has had an in-house backup solution for forever and a day.)
Honestly i’m tired of this mac shill. You’ve lost a long term reader with the recent downfall in quality of post, especially with all the microsoft bashing, which I am not here to read about, there’s enough of that elsewhere on the ‘net. Plus I agree with the others above, after browsing that list your argument is completely moot, most of those features either have been in windows for yonks or are such tiny little “features” that they aren’t worth mentioning and I’m not sure why they have been so.
re: Bob; I didn’t find this microsoft bashing; I think you may have been a touch sensitive on this one. Looking at the Mac OS X features; the layout and description of the features is very easy to read and understand. Can’t say much for Vista from what i’ve heard and read, its resource intensive and doesn’t seem to be so state of the art.
But still Apple prices just put it too expensive at moment…
[...] point from Griffith (at this point, it’s almost cliche for me to say how much I love Forever Geek and [...]