Given the reaction I described last week to my recent enthusiasm for the Mac, I sort of wish Chad Dickerson hadn’t used that word in this week’s column. However, he again points out some real positives the platform has that are of increasing importance to enterprise IT.

His story of the FireWire hard disk that konked out on two PCs but continued to work flawlessly on Macs would be a useless anecdote if it weren’t supported by countless other such accounts. If anecdotal arguments are to be of any use, surely the Mac can be regarded as a more stable platform than Windows.

He also deserves credit for not going mindlessly along with the “Mac Is Easier” line. Once upon a time it was much easier for new computer users, but this argument is probably overstated now. Windows users who switch will require retraining, and will probably not regard OS X as particularly easy as they work to learn new ways of doing things.

One brief quibble: in supporting his contention that OS X makes for a more stable desktop, he describes his experience in fixing a frozen Internet Explorer instance. Granted that the Unix foundation of OS X made this problem as fixable as it was (I normally have to reboot when things go that far south on my PC, which is quite often these days), but he did have to rely on fairly sophisticated skills to fix the problem. If running top and kill don’t sound hard to you, you need to understand that they’re way too much to expect of most desktop users. Better not to justify your claim to stability by not having things hang at all.

This quibble is ameliorated both by the realization that it was IE (a Microsoft product!) that crashed, and also by the fact that the level expertise required by a Unix/Linux/OS X user to do what Chad did is much lower than the equivalent skills required to fix a crashing Windows system. The Windows stability problem has gotten much better in the past few years, but when things go bad, you still usually need just to bounce the box.

I’d still get fired for buying Mac, but in a year or so that may be less true. I look forward with interest to the continued development of this trend.

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• Posted by Tim on Monday, September 15, 2003 at 10:06:50 am PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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