Introduction
In this article, we'll compare the capabilities of Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows XP and Linux. Would-be flamers, please note: yes, I am aware that you can add third-party software or hardware to almost any system to expand its capabilities. To be fair, we are primarily considering "vendor-supplied" capabilities, although we'll also note, where applicable, some freely downloadable utilities that can address or augment built-in capabilities. Any list of downloadable third-party add-ons is, of course, necessarily incomplete and is intended only as a guide to further exploration.

This article has been updated several times since its introduction, and will continue to be revised and improved as operating system features are revised and enhanced. In its first incarnation, we compared the original releases of Mac OS X and Windows XP. These versions are now considered obsolete, and this edition concerns itself only with the most current releases of each system. As such, this article will be updated from time to time. Your contributions and corrections are encouraged, to help make this the most comprehensive and accurate feature comparison available. 

In the Aqua Square....
Apple's Mac OS X was a huge step forward, to be sure and, despite a number of rough edges in its initial release, the 10.2 Jaguar release and subsequent updates have seen OS X living up to Apple's promise of a truly modern operating system. A slick, well-integrated graphical interface hides industrial-strength, BSD-based Unix underpinnings. It also provides compatibility with Mac OS 9.x applications via a "classic" compatibility environment. That's a good thing, as OS X requires all-new applications to take advantage of its memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking features.
 

In the Red/Green/Yellow/Blue Square....
Microsoft Windows XP is by no means as dramatic a change from previous Windows releases as is Mac OS X to previous Mac OS incarnations; still, it represents a major step forward for Microsoft's line of home-oriented operating systems, which have never before been based on the reliable Windows NT/Windows 2000 kernel. The vast majority of existing 32-bit Windows applications take full advantage of Windows XP's memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking features.

Although plagued by a number of security holes in its initial release, a variety of hotfixes and a monolithic service pack released in the second half of 2002 helped shore up XP's reputation as Microsoft's most stable and full-featured OS ever.

In the Yellow-and-black Square....
Mandrake Linux is one of the most feature-rich Linux distributions, while still managing to be one of the easiest to configure. We installed the downloadable version, using a custom installation from CDs 1 and 2, to deliver a mix of multimedia, internet, networking and productivity-oriented features roughly comparable to the Mac and Windows. We subsequently installed other "desktop Linux" distros from Xandros, Lindows, Lycoris, Knoppix and several other vendors, to get a sense of what components might reasonably be considered "best of breed." However, we recognize that there are a great number of Linux distributions ("distros") reflecting varied interests. The Linux section of the chart below, therefore, is necessarily generalized.

Into the Battle Box!
The best-performing solution in each category is labeled in green; the worst is labeled in red. Where there is no clear choice in a categories, no rating is stated.

* = with limitations.

Mac OS X 10.2 is available at retail for US$129. A 5-pack license is US$199. Upgrade pricing is not available.
Microsoft Windows XP Home is US$99.95 (upgrade), US$199.95 (Home) or US$249.95 (Pro). OEM versions sell for less.
Mandrake, Knoppix and Lycoris Linux distributions are freely available for download, as are most other Linux distros.

Key Differentiators
Removing Mac OSX applications
Mac OS X applications are usually installed into a single folder. The way this works is to install all of the components, fonts, libraries, icons, executables etc., into the one folder. But you don't know it is a folder (unless you open up a shell and have a look). This is because when you double click on it, you are running the application. This has two interesting effects, and the reason it was designed that way: 1) It allows you move applications to other hard disks or even other machines with no reinstall; 2) it means to delete an application you just delete that icon, which is the folder and all components.

Other than this feature, Apple remains curiously stubborn about uninstalling programs. Despite the fact that a Mac OS X package may contain thousands of components, Apple does not provide any standardized method for uninstalling applications. Users must drag files and folders (which are usually, but not always, in one place) to the trash manually. Windows XP, by contrast, uses a system-wide add/remove programs control panel to manage application uninstallation. The pros and cons of this are largely subjective, but there's no denying that the Windows method of (properly) installing and uninstalling is more consistent. We've received many complaints from Mac owners about this conclusion, to which we say: try uninstalling the Palm Desktop, or Norton AntiVirus, or Apple X11, or McAfee VirusScan, or other Mac OS X programs that install files into various obscure locations. It's not all that easy.

File Systems Support
Linux supports more file systems than any of the others. There are few, if any, file systems available to Mac OS X or Windows users that are not supported by Linux.

Windows XP does not include support for software RAID 1 or 5. Support for these RAID levels is acquired through additional 3rd party drivers and software (Like Promise, HPT, and 3Ware), and not through native WinXP disk management. Windows 2000 Server also supports mirrored and RAID-5 volumes, as do newer Microsoft server releases.

See our OS Shootout feedback page for more discussion of drives and boot options. This info will be merged into this article in a future update.

DVD Support
Some users report that certain PowerBook models running OSX 10.2.6 seems to have no problems burning DVD+R/RW's in the Finder with a Firewire Ricoh DVD+R/RW drive. The Mac Finder burns them in HFS+. One of these users says he has not had a single problem playing DVDs on his FireWire DVD+R/RW drive. We have not yet verified this report -- the last time we tested an external DVD drive on a Mac, movie playback didn't work well.

Ignore, if you will, the fact that Microsoft says it intends to support DVD+RW natively in the operating system in a future release. Virtually every DVD+RW equipped Windows PC on the market today supports DVD+RW functions transparently at the system level, usually with a packet-writing driver that meshes seamlessly with the standard Windows method of saving files to any available volume. This fact earns our chart the right to list this feature in the Windows column. On the Mac, there are exactly zero shipping products as of Aug. 2003 (and only one announced, non-shipping product) that fall into this category. When this fact changes, so will our column listing, in which we appear to favor Windows and Microsoft's vaporous pronouncement of support in this category.

SCSI Devices on Mac OS X
Mac OS X 10.1.3 and subsequent releases expanded upon the Mac's support for SCSI devices. We've had success in mounting CD-ROMs, CD burners, floptical drives, etc. and, with third-party drivers, some tape drives in Mac OS X. We've also received several reports of the use of USB Imation SuperDisk for accessing floppies under Mac OS X without any problem, and we successfully mounted a floppy on the Mac desktop using a Toshiba USB floppy, for which support is built into Mac OS X.

Support for third-party wireless cards
Third-party drivers provide expanded support for third-party 802.11b cards in Mac OS X. For example, to use a Lucent Tech card in
OS X 10.1, you needed to download the appropriate Lucent drivers. Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar and recent Apple Airport drivers (3.1 or newer) have added support for Broadcom-based cards, and third parties have added further support for other third-party cards, as well. Still, being a newer operating system with a smaller market share, Mac OS X drivers for many devices supported by Windows and Linux remain unavailable.

Scripting
To be fair, notes Scott Penrose, it should be mentioned that Apple and many Linux vendors have financed various scripting languages and other development efforts. Apple's AppleScript is generally considered more advanced than anything available on the Windows platform; however, Microsoft's VBscript and Jscript are supported by many developers and applications.

Graphics
Apple's default graphics drivers provide support for OpenGL. OS X 10.1 sped up OpenGL by about 20 percent over that of the initial release of OS X. OS X 10.2's "Quartz Extreme" feature, which uses OpenGL to to optimize the rendering pipeline and thus accelerate the GUI on Macs with a supported AGP graphics card and 16MB or more video RAM, further enhances graphics performance, particularly in compositing operations.

Microsoft's drivers do not support hardware acceleration of OpenGL at all; however, most third-party XP drivers do. Perhaps more important, however, is Windows XP's driver support of constant alpha blending (this improves the performance of fade effects) and support for per-pixel alpha blending, which is used to speed rendering of  XP's window shadows. This support was absent from Mac OS X releases prior to 10.2, leading to noticeably sluggish performance in the GUI (even so, window resizing in OS X 10.2 is still noticeably slower than in Windows XP).

Another difference is found in support for FSAA (full scene anti-aliasing) modes. FSAA support was unavailable in any Mac driver released prior to July 2002 and is still uncommon; virtually all modern Windows drivers for the same graphics chips support this feature, which tangibly improves 3-D image quality on recent graphics cards from NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx and other manufacturers.

Conversely, the Mac is significantly better at rendering text on screen, thanks to the system's Quartz rendering engine. Text, by default, is rendered with smooth anti-aliasing. Mac OS X 10.2 extends this even further, applying sub-pixel rendering to some of the system's four anti-aliasing modes for even better results on LCD screens. Whether you like this "slightly blurry" look is subjective, of course. In our view, having the option to turn it on or off is best. Interestingly, the forthcoming "Panther" release of Mac OS X appears to have sharpened up the Mac display fonts somewhat. We'll explore this topic in a future update to this article, after the release of OS X 10.3.

Performance
Generally, we're not too concerned with performance in this comparison, as more money will almost always buy a faster computer, and we're not comparing hardware here, except in specialized cases, such as the support of effects produced by a certain class of graphics cards or other devices.

With that said, each system has certain strengths and weaknesses, when it comes to performance. Mac OS X tends to suffer from the "Spinning Beachball of Death" a little more frequently than we'd like, even on the most powerful hardware. Windows XP tends to get a bit sluggish -- and sometimes very sluggish -- from time to time, for reasons that aren't immediately obvious, as background tasks cause the system's responsiveness to decline. Certainly, it's slower than Windows 2000 or Windows 9x on older hardware. It was just barely tolerable on our test system, equipped with a 733 MHz P3 and 384MB of RAM.

There are so many different Linux distros, it's unfair to generalize. But, it's reasonable to say that we found the GUI options -- primarily KDE and Gnome -- on Linux to be less refined than their Windows and Mac counterparts. KDE 3.1, in our opinion, holds more promise than Gnome as a desktop environment standard; however, Gnome is generally considered more adherent to the ergonomic principles espoused in "Fitts' Law," so the "best" choice, as always, remains a matter of preference. In years past, Linux tended to have lower hardware requirements than Windows. Now, the gap has diminished, as both Gnome and KDE have upped the "eye candy" quotient in recent releases.

Although graphics performance is, of course, more strictly related to hardware than software, there is no doubt that the fancy 3-D shadowing and alpha-blended eye candy of Mac OS X (and KDE 3.x, etc.) carries an impact and should be considered in a comparison of graphical user interfaces. In this area, the Mac is clearly a leader -- however, the alpha-blended shadows, menu transparency and other eye candy takes a definite toll on the responsiveness of the UI. Whereas Windows allows you to turn off the eye candy effects and even, if you wish, revert to the "classic" Windows 9x/2000 style interface, Mac OS X offers very few options in this area, although third-party developers have taken steps to deliver the customization options many users demand. Whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective. Again, we think that having the option to turn eye candy on or off at will is best. (Third party utilities for the Mac can help in this regard.)

Still, the standard system's performance is compromised for the vast majority of users who aren't interested in applying some obscure hack. Indeed, an article in Wired News entitled "Why Do New iMacs Surf So Slowly?" notes that the sluggish graphical user interface of OS X makes an $1800 iMac surf the Web more slowly than an older $400 PC running Windows -- and this is tangibly obvious by even the most casual observer. (While the Wired article is not all that recent, the issue persists -- we experienced markedly more sluggish performance in web apps running on a Mac as recently as Aug. 2003, running the 1.0 version of Safari and version 5.2.2 of Internet Explorer for Mac.)

Pages, noted Wired, on average took as least twice as long to be displayed, even on such unmatched platforms. Even using Apple's "Turbo browser," Safari, the Mac surfing experience is frequently inferior to the experience with IE (or, even better, an enhanced shell such as MyIE2) on a Windows PC. Mac OS X is also slower than Linux at most server-related tasks. Acknowledging the problem, an Apple spokesperson euphemistically stated "We are merely at the beginning of the performance opportunities in Mac OS X." And to reiterate: these problems can usually be solved by adding more memory, a better graphics card, faster CPU, a faster hard drive and so on. The point is not that Macs are slow -- it's that OS X tends to slow them down. Ask any Mac user whether OS 9 feels faster, and you'll hear an emphatic confirmation of the downside of all that gorgeous eye candy in OS X.

Most modern graphics cards support 2D and 3D acceleration via X windows drivers under Linux.

Although Microsoft and Apple both attempt to limit the amount of revisions possible to their respective graphical user interfaces, third-party hacks are available for both platforms. XP is considerably ahead here, with an extensive array of options, including StarDock's WindowBlinds, TGTSoft's Styles XP, and several others, including a free utility from the maker of Styles XP that modifies the built-in Theme manager of Windows XP to accept third-party skins, for maximum performance and compatibility. But, when it comes to UI customization, both systems pale next to Linux, which offers what could be argued are way too many options in this regard. If you like GUI options, Linux is nirvana.

However, for users for whom productivity is measured in "getting the job done," the more limited range of choices in Mac OS X can be a blessing. If user re-training is an issue, the evolutionary nature of the Windows XP GUI -- especially in "classic" interface mode -- may be the easiest to learn. In short, usability is difficult to quantify. You may find Windows' use of the Enter key to enter a folder or open a file preferable to the Mac's choice of the Command-O key combination, or you may prefer the command line for absolute control. Generally, we think it's apparent that both Apple and Microsoft have invested heavily in usability studies for their respective user interfaces; UIs for Linux tend to be a little less refined, overall.

Networking
Although Mac OS X fares well in terms of network protocols supported, thanks to its Unix heritage, support for TCP/IP networking over the FireWire ports built into every recent Mac remains experimental at best. Non-developers are likely to achieve the best results via a third-party product such as Unibrain's FireNet. Windows XP (along with other recent Windows releases) fully supports IP over 1394.

Mac OS X 10.2.x includes support for automatic (serverless) network configuration via a technology Apple calls Rendezvous. with it, Macs and other ZeroConf-compatible devices on a local area network can automatically discover and configure themselves. Apple has released the spec to the community as an open standard; we expect to see ZeroConf catch on as an important standard in the years ahead.

Installation
This is a difficult area to quantify without consideration of the hardware on which an operating system runs. Since Apple's operating system runs only on Apple hardware, the installation tends to be more predictable and usually trouble-free. Most PCs, of course, come with Windows pre-installed, and almost every Linux installation has to be done from scratch. A discussion at Slashdot entitled Is Linux or Windows Easier To Install? tackles that question (bear in mind, however, that Slashdot, like the Linuxworld article it quotes, definitely leans in the pro-Linux direction), but we'd have to give the nod to Apple's OS for overall ease of installation and device management. In short, none of the operating systems are particularly hard to install.

System Restore
The lack of some essential services such as a system-wide restore function (aside from the fairly oblique "ditto" command) is, at this writing, a serious limitation in Mac OS X. Dantz is one of several companies addressing this limitation with its Retrospect backup program(s) for OS X. Jaguar improves greatly upon the options available in previous OS X releases. For example, a FAQ posted on the Dantz website in Nov. 2001 stated: "While Mac OS X v10.1 does include the level of device access and arbitration that Retrospect requires, it does not solve several issues that prevent Retrospect from successfully restoring a complete Mac OS X system to a functioning state." (The company subsequently released a version of Retrospect for OS X, anyway.) Some Mac users are using the comparatively rudimentary FWB Backup Toolkit for OS X or our recommended solution, Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner, as an alternative. (Read more on the topic of backing up/cloning a Mac OS X disk here.)

Windows XP provides a System Restore feature designed to undo harmful changes, while preserving the users' documents, email messages and other important data. It also provides a relatively rudimentary backup utility and a "driver rollback" function.

Security
In Apple's favour, security continues to be a sore spot for Microsoft. Michael G. Schabert, on the X EvangeList, observes that on OS X, the box is practically impervious to all attacks, as of a stock installation... as all Macs have always been. All services/ports are turned off by default, unless and until you specifically enable them. There have, however, been numerous security updates released for Mac OS X that address various vulnerabilities, the most serious of which exploits Apple's automatic software update system, potentially allowing hackers running any type of computer to impersonate the Apple servers and install unauthorized software.

Windows 95/98/NT/W2K and XP are all vulnerable out of the box. Indeed, within three weeks of the launch of Windows XP, at least three high risk security flaws were found, including one that allowed  hackers to circumvent Microsoft's Passport system in order to be able to steal anyone's ID. (Read more on this particular security breach @ Wired.com, and see our Alerts page for information on other Windows vulnerabilities. - Ed.)

Additionally, Schabert notes that the "credential management" capability noted in our chart was invented by Microsoft, and is not yet a standard.

Compatibility
It's easy to take exception to the CNet "Death Match," which found OS X to offer superior software compatibility to that of Windows XP. In earlier OS X releases, this was pure malarkey. OS X 10.0 didn't support ANY third-party CD authoring software out of the box, didn't support the vast majority of scanner drivers, Photoshop plug-ins or VST plug-in filters already developed for Macintosh and supported NO DVD players until 10.1 (and still supports very few external third-party units). These are just a few obvious examples of the inescapable fact that OS X requires all-new apps and all-new device drivers to take advantage of its memory protection and user-interface features. Fortunately, the necessary drivers and updates have, for the most part, been issued and OS X 10.2 is now well-equipped with software and hardware options. Nevertheless, Windows XP natively supports the vast majority of existing 16- and 32-bit Windows and DOS applications, plus most plug-ins and drivers previously released for the Windows 2000 platform. It delivers full memory protection and feature support for virtually ALL legacy apps. OS X, despite its many merits, does not.

CNet's conclusion that both OSes are equal in Internet support appears equally absurd, when one considers the Internet-related features shipped with each platform. Try playing a Windows Media audio or video stream delivered using the MMS protocol on a Mac, for a glaring example. Although Windows Media Player is not shipped as a standard feature of the Mac, it is a far more prevalent format on the Web than Apple's own QuickTime (which suffers from its own compatibility issues under Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 and 6.0).

Windows supports better instant messaging, remote assistance, remote control (built into Windows XP Pro), extensive graphical control over web server settings, and many other features missing from -- or excruciatingly difficult to achieve via the arcane Unix command line -- in OS X. Remote assistance and control are available from Apple only via the Unix telnet application, or via Apple's US$495 Remote Desktop application.

Firewall configuration is comparably easy under both OS X 10.2 and Windows XP. Both are easier to configure than most firewalls for Linux. On the other hand, as reader Scott Genevish note, machines running Mac OS or Linux are historically much more secure from Internet attacks than Windows PCs and thus need such services less, anyway.

There are a number of other areas in which Apple's and Microsoft's operating systems have subtle advantages over Linux, such as streaming video -- an area in which the MPEG4 codec in Apple's QuickTime excels -- and codec support. However, the Mac's lack of standard support for full-screen movie playback and limited looping functions in its default media player are serious limitations not shared by Windows. The updated version of Windows Media 9, code-named Corona, further strengthens Microsoft's growing dominance in the streaming media playing field, primarily due to the digital rights management features built into Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media codecs  --- features currently missing from the ISO-standard MPEG-4 used by QuickTime 6. Refer to our feature on Net Video Trends for details.

Development Tools
A full discussion of the pros and cons of each platform as a development environment is far beyond the scope of this document (and, indeed, of our own programming experiences -- we can count the number of commercially released software titles we have programmed on a pair of hands!). However, a few examples may serve useful here. We recently went looking for a good quality FTP client for Mac OS X. We tested more than a dozen, and all were lacking in one form or another. Some suffered from serious bugs (iFTP deleted files on the server without warning!), others had annoying interface quirks (the free app CaptainFTP 1.4 repeatedly selected a file two items higher in the remote files list than the one we wanted); RBrowser, the most promising title overall, was encumbered by mandatory registration and a US$29 fee, and it couldn't even preview a downloaded HTML file while editing in BBedit, our helper application of choice.  Fetch, Vicomsoft FTP client, Interarchy, Transmit and the built-in FTP function in the OS lacked features we wanted. Others, including Fugi, Gideon and osXigen and were just dog slow or unacceptably clumsy. And Mac OS X 10.2's built-in FTP support produced mysterious error messages whenever we attempted to upload.

By comparison, WS_FTP on the Windows platform, and any one of several FTP clients on the Linux side worked exactly as we expected them to -- fast and efficient. Mac users frequently downplay the limited selection of software on their platform of choice, pointing out that the Mac is well equipped with more than enough "killer apps" for the average person. This is true; however, your needs may vary. As always, the best platform is the one that most effectively meets your needs.

A similar story plays out elsewhere in the realm of development tools. There are, it seems, simply fewer good tools available for the Mac. Says former Mac OS X user and programmer Maarten Hekkelman, "Windows is like heaven to a programmer. There are so many tools to chose from and the documentation is wonderful." Says Hekkelman, "Microsoft delivers a very, very good set of documentation and tools for developers. For free. It was a real eye opener to have such great documentation so easily available."

The opposing view is that open source equals good; closed source equals bad. In this regard, Linux becomes the preferred development environment. Here, too, there is an amazingly rich set of documentation and tools. And, of course, Mac OS X can take advantage of much of the richness of the largely Unix-centric pool of open source software. With a little interface tweaking and recompiling, many of these tools have already been ported to Mac OS X. More will follow. Conversely, the Mac is home to Konfabulator, the most promising "non expert" development environment we've seen. It is, in our view, a breakthrough app worthy of much more attention than it has so far received.

Conclusion
The features-oriented chart above does not take into account the ease of use of a particular solution. As Bruce Tognazzini notes in his discussion of Fitts's Law, it is important to look at the user's productivity, not the computer's. Generally, Mac OS X and Windows XP are far easier to configure than Linux-based systems. And, despite its limitations in a few areas, Mac OS X is arguably the most elegantly implemented and fundamentally usable operating system currently available, despite occasional user interface gaffes. See our Mac System Software Section for a closer look at Mac OS X 10.2.

Certainly, our assertion that OS X's adherence to "Fitts' Law is "poor" has been the line item that has generated the most controversy. Perhaps the words "Fitts' Law" ought to be deleted entirely, but the point is this: the ergonomics of each of the systems have their good and bad points. The weakest aspect of OS X is the Dock's lack of support for the corner clicking -- the easiest area in which to aim. And, when the Dock's magnification mode is turned on, items move around -- challenging motor memory recognition. Furthermore, the inability to effectively manage multiple hidden windows (a problem fixed in an extremely elegant fashion by the Exposé feature in Mac OS X 10.3), makes window management tasks far less intuitive than they are in Windows XP. And Apple's idea of having different, non-identical folders having identical, unlabeled icons by default... What were they thinking? Right now, I have several identical icons in my Mac's Dock -- I have no idea which one is which, until I run the mouse over top of the icon to see the normally hidden label text. Can the icons be customized? Sure - but the default behavior is downright counter-intuitive. Compare the Windows taskbar's behavior, for an example of a more user-friendly document manager.

Those challenging our assertion that XP is superior in this area point out that the Mac's "Apple menu" is in the corner and that its file, edit and other system-level menus are always found at the top of the screen -- easier to reliably seek to and hit than the ever-moving window-based File menus of Windows. That may be true but, at least in our experience, the Windows model improves in usability on large screens; the intuitive nature of the connectedness of the top bar and some window elsewhere on the Mac screen decreases as the screen size increases. It's easier to see which windows and documents belong to their respective applications on Windows. And, besides, when a Windows windows is maximized, the menus are in highly predictable locations, anyway. More to the point, the Windows Start menu provides more complete access to files and functions than Mac's Apple menu.

It's also worth noting that, in the above chart, the comparison is primarily concerned with services provided by and supported by the primary OS provider. This situation is complicated a little by the fact that Apple makes a large number of files available to users via its iDisk section of mac.com. Thus, you can get a non-Apple instant messaging or enhanced third-party firewall solution from Apple, indirectly, but it is not integrated into the OS the way that, say, Windows Messenger is. Whether such integration is even desirable is also a topic best left to a different discussion.

 

Nevertheless, we've noted a few third-party system enhancements in our listings in the chart above. Typically, these provide a GUI alternative to  a more complicated command-line-based procedure supplied at the OS level. But, we feel, the mention of these items does not significantly add to -- and, it can be argued, detracts from -- the value of an integral feature comparison.

In many cases, we also provide links to third party sites, where you can find further information about these and other downloadable options for each of the platforms. See our OS X comparison chart for further details on the new features added in OS X 10.2.

Thanks to Scott Penrose of Digital Dimensions, M. Flinn, Jacqueline Landman Gay and Michael G. Schabert for contributions to this report.

For Further Reading
(external links are beyond our control)
MacWindows: Mac OS X Public Beta Cross-Platform Issues
NK Guy: Mac OS X issues
MacInTouch.com: Mac OS X reader reports
Geeks R Us: Mac OS X Q & A
CNet: Face-off: Mac OS X vs. Windows XP
TechTV: Inside Windows XP- Visualizing XP's Interface
Wired News: Why Do New iMacs Surf So Slowly?
Byte: Comparing Apples and Penguins
Apple: Switch to Mac OS X - A guide to key user experience differences between Windows and Mac OS X.
Mac Buyer's Guide: OS X comparison chart
OSNews.com: The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison

Editor's note: Large sections of this article were stolen verbatim by internet.com and used without permission in its Mar. 27, 2002 article entitled "Mac OS X vs. Windows XP." Unauthorized mirrors of this article may be posted at various locations. This page is always the most up-to-date version.

© 2001  -  2003  Bennett Arts Ltd.

Return