Originally posted by tsizKEIK
why did microsoft post those useless videos of longhorns impressive graphic capabilities ?
why did apple include the cube effect on the user switching ?
in the end its all just to impress the crowd and show what each system can do with similar hardware.
the fact is that mac os x has had the dock magnification for years. it now has/will soon have a cube effect. it has/will soon have expose which is a very very useful feature. what do windows have ? they have jack shit 
the transparent windows was just a point to show u the capabilities of such a slow and expensive g4 such as mine, in comparison to ur cheap but very fast pc.
but i guess u where too much of a chicken to try all this!!! or maybe is it that u have no transparency capabilities?
And if M$ and Apple devoted that time spent on developing transparent windows, dock magnification, and rotating cubes on creating OS's and apps that were more stable, more secure, more useful, and with a _better_ (not prettier) UI, then we'd ALL be better off. Those effects while "neat" are either A) utterly useless (my opinion) B) useful only in the context of poor ui and/or C) not nearly worth the resources they require (either from the machine or the programmers required to achieve those effects). And for anyone who wishes to pipe in about OSX being secure/stable/useful, I don't see Apple stopping their ui tweaks, bug fixes, security patches, etc. So while it may be good, it's still far from perfect (and in my opinion, not near as great as some others think, but again, that's just my opinion).
As for all this PC vs Mac stuff. I work with both. I type this now on my Pismo. I've used Macs since the original Mac (and Lisa too if you want to count that). I've also used PC's since my original 4.77Mhz clone. My desktop machine is an Athlon 1.4Ghz running Win2k. Fact is they've both come a long way. Anyone who says that M$ doesn't innovate is full of it and doesn't have a clue. Do they copy too, damn right. Does Apple, sure nuff. Does Apple innovate more than M$, maybe. Who cares. Does my Pismo lock up, uh huh. Four times last week. Does my Win2k lock up, depends on what I'm doing to it, but sometimes it does. If I'm not mucking with either one, do they work dependably, yes they do. Any PC owner who suffers "bit rot" is doing something seriously weird or wrong or just has some crap app that their running causing their problems (anyone who's running NT4/Win2K anyway, can't speak for 95/98/ME which I won't touch, or XP, which I don't use very much and I hate the eye candy crap they've added). My Win2K Server desktop has been humming along happily for well over a year now. Back when it was an NT4 box, it ran for 4 years without a re-install. And I mess around A LOT with hardware in my PC boxes (one advantage that Wintel still has in spades over the Mac). One issue that I've never had to deal with though is viri. I know that a lot of other Wintel owners that have had issues either have them because of 16bit Windows (9x/ME) and/or viri.
Anyway, it's late and I'm starting to drift. Earlier in the thread someone mentioned that Mac folk bite back hard when they get the same old lame stereotypes thrown at them. Well, for those of us who are Mac users, but not Mac Zombies, we feel the same way when PC's are stereotyped, as they often are on this board. Some say "leave, this is a Mac board", I say that's a lame excuse. The Mac community wants to _grow_ right? M$/PC folk are often accused of using FUD to keep the Mac down, but yet similar tactics are used right here.
Anyway, I'm really way off now. But to summerize, Apple rocks. Wintel isn't nearly as bad as many Apple folk wish it were. Both have strengths and weaknesses. If you love your Mac, more power to you. If you love your PC, more power to you too. If you love both (and in my case many more, I'm a computer polygamist), then more power to you. You don't like people bashing your platform, well, let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.
