Mac v. Windows-Based PCs

[scripter73]

Hi,

I have a general question. As a web developer I have primarily worked on PCs my entire life. While in school and on a few job assignments, I've had the opportunity to work on Macs - albeit too briefly. The last time I worked with a Mac was in 2000 and have always had a favorable experience.

My machines at home are all Windows-based, and I'm beginning to grow increasingly frustrated with the never-ending ad pop-ups, viruses, service pack downloads, downloads fixes, patches, spyware!, etc, etc. I'm looking for an alternative.

My question is although I realize I could never eradicate Windows from my life, does owning a Mac reduce these issues? Since I haven't been on a Mac in the past 4 years, I'd like to poll the current Mac users out there.

I hope I'm not opening up floodgates, but your opinion of working on a Mac versus a Window-based machine would really help me in determining whether I'd like to invest in a Mac and possibly replace my Windows machines at home in the future.

Thanks for any feedback.

scripter73


Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.

 

[jimbopalmer]

There are two effects here, folks will disagree on the relatve 'importance' of each.

1) Apple and the open source movement (OSX is based on a open source BSD kernal) tend to fix bugs more rapidly and openly than Closed Source Projects.

2) Small market penetration tends to reduce the 'payback' and spreadability of malware.

Note that many MS Office Macro viruses are cross platform and will run inside ANY version of Office, even on a Mac. I am not counting these in the figures below.

At this point, the MacOSs from 1984 to 1999 have 58 known viruses, but as Apple fixed each OS version not to get known viruses, not all of them will run on any Mac.

Neither the Classic MacOS or OSX is delivered with any ports open by default. (OSX server does, however, default to open ports) OSX runs it's firewall by default.

There are no sucsessfull viruses for MacOSX. A 'proof of concept' virus was attempted, it still replies on the user to decompress it and start it on each mac. Mac trojans do exist, hoping to fool you into running them.

There ARE 'root kits' available for the MacOSX, should you get physically on a mac.

The Mac Browser market, small as it is, is not dominated by any one browser, so no Mac based spyware has been written.

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[GrayShades]

Although I use Windows at my day job, I use Mac only at home (14 years) and for preparing college teaching material. I have never had a problem with cross-platform work. I have exchanged Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files with those using Office 2002 and Office 2000 on Windows and run them on Office 2001 on Mac OS 9 and Office 2004 on OS X. The major lack is that MS has crippled VBA on the Mac side so that you have to be careful about what and how you write code. Also, ActiveX is not supported on the Mac side.

For browsers, Safari (from Apple), Mozilla, FireFox, OmniWeb all have followings. I use Safari and FireFox (and occasionally Netscape 7.2).

Also, in that time I have never had a virus, trojan horse, worm... Right now I'm using an Apple eMac with OS X 10.3.6. It is rock solid.

Software: XL2002 on Win2K
Humanware: Older than dirt

 

[jimoblak]

The key word that you used is replace. I would not entirely give up Windows. You can get an eMac for under $800 and live happily in both worlds. As a web developer, it is good to be able to test your work on both platforms. Then as you tinker with both platforms, you can personally decide which one you prefer to do the majority of your work on.

- - picklefish - -
Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[ObviousTroll]

scripter,

First, you should know that the security update dance also affects OS X - we usually get at least one security update a month these days.

That said, surfing the web with Safari and/or FireFox is pure bliss on the Mac. I'm always floored when I use my PC to surf to some website I visit all the tim on the Mac and I get saturated with pop-ups and attempts to install "helpful" software.

The only real downside is there is always a small percentage of web sites that absolutely will not work with any browser but the newest version of IE. I ended up putting VirtualPC on my wife's iBook just so she visit a "newly-enhanced" b2b website that uses a god-awful blend of XML and HTML that doesn't render on anything except IE 6.

 

[pixl8r]

I use both machines side by side. The Mac requires far less maintenance than the PC (the Mac does still require maintenance).

Also for web development you can't beat that the Mac OS comes with Apache and PHP pre-installed. You can turn any OSX machine into a web accessible development box fairly easily.

Hope it helps.

Wow JT that almost looked like you knew what you were doing!