“I never worry about drivers on my other computer, the Mac. And that computer hardly ever crashes. While it’s true the Unix underpinnings of OS X are part of the reason for this, it’s also true that even pre-OS X Macs were less crashy than their Windows cousins,” writes Executive Editor, David Coursey for ZDNet.
Coursey continues, “Why? Partly because of one of the chief differences between Apple and Microsoft: Apple is a monopoly. Sure, I know a court says Microsoft is one, too. But in this case, I’m talking about Apple having control over the operating system, many of the applications, all the hardware, and some of the peripherals, of which there aren’t so many in the first place. This gives Apple such tight control of its platform that, in some ways, it’s hard to believe it could ever crash at all (and it hardly ever does). For Microsoft, creating a bomb-proof OS is much more difficult, simply because Microsoft doesn’t control as much of the platform as Apple does.”
Full article here.
Will Windows ever be as stable as the Mac?
No.
Microsoft will control the hardware. XBOX never crashes, for example. Microsoft certified PCs are coming.
PCs will crash less, however that would not solve the problem of crashing/freezing individual applications, usabiliy problems, bad UI design and so on.
Xbox never crashes? Mine crashes all of the time when playing Morrowind, doesn’t seem to be a problem with other games…just figured it was the Windows OS it uses.
The best thing Microsoft could do for the consumer is throw out the OS and start over from scratch. That isn’t going to happen, so keep those three fingers at the ready, ’cause Windoze is here to stay.
The article makes a valid point. davgreg: they did throw out the OS for win2k/XP (yeah, I know, it was based on the NT kernel — but NT was stable enough for that to not be a bad idea).
I don’t use Macs that regularly anymore, but back in school when I did they crashed on me plenty. All this MS bashing… sheesh. Yeah yeah yeah, they do terrible business things, but win2k and XP are both good operating systems. Let’s just all own up to the fact that OS X, win2k and winXP are all plenty stable (I’d say rebooting once every few weeks should count as “stable enough”) and admit how silly all this party-line crap is.