“‘I would give a lot to have Steve’s taste.’ Bill Gates said that of Steve Jobs at the D5 conference two years ago, and we knew exactly what he meant,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt blogs for Fortune.
Elmer-DeWitt offers up the two images that are “samples of the new desktop images offered by this fall’s big operating system updates: Microsoft’s Windows 7, scheduled for release in October, and Apple’s Snow Leopard, due in September.”
We won’t spoil Elmer-DeWitt’s surprise. Check out the images in the full article here.
That one made me laugh. Truly it shows the difference in style between Apple and MS.
MS retarded
I still like the Mac wallpapers compared to MS…very subtle as compared to MS’s “in your face” bg.
when you look at it further, some of MS bg are reminiscent of the iTunes commercials, you know, the one in multi-colored silhouettes?
I guess wallpaper has to be tacky to stay up?
The MS desktop is incredibly bad. Art is in the eye of the beholder, but the desktop also has to be functional. I think trying to use icons on top of that would be a nightmare. Sidebar will be even worse to use than already is. Thankfully that is an option. However it will be fun to change the desktop picture (wallpaper) at computer stores to that. Can you see the faces of customers, especially old people, when they see that. I will be hard to keep a straight face.
Wow, Apple actually has real art on there… that’s amazing!
Just downloaded the snow covered leopard to the desktop of my G4 Cube. Oh well, one can always dream.
What the frak is that!?!?
Dear Microsoft: Please tell Ballmer to come off the roof and put the magic feathers down. His incredible buoyancy only works in water.
Hey MDN,
I just want to say that those little pop up boxes that come on on your pages are infinitely annoying. I don’t need no stinking little box to pop up telling me stuff.
Other than that, this is an awesome site!
I went to the site and I like many from both sets. I agree with the comments of two posters. One said they would be purchasing OS X for the software and not the desktop, and the other one said some of the M$ were quite good, which I agree with. The one MDN has chosen to show above is one of the worst of the M$ examples in my opinion.
Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. From the examples shown on the original site, there were as many Apple desktops as M$ desktops that will never see the light of day on either of my Apples next month.
Check out the entire gallery, LSD must be standard issue at $soft.
I agree with one or two of you that there is good and bad in both.
The MS ones, the majority look too much like a cartoon to me, which is fine because, in my opinion, Windows is nothing more than a gaming platform.
Apple, Inc and the classics, is as you’d expect from a platform that has always been the choice of creatives and artistic types long before the rest of the computer using fraternity realized, as many are coming to do so now, just how good Mac OSX really is.
I do like the mountain scenes, which both OS’s offer in their own way. Waterfalls aren’t bad to help through a mundane day.
Not forgetting that in OSX, don’t know about Vista, that in OSX you can set your wallpapers to change in a slideshow.
for examples of lipstick for pigs, look no further than MS wallpaper.
I dunno, but its been a long while since I depended on either Apple or Microshit to provide me with an interesting wallpaper – I generally use an image of my own or one downloaded from the net somewhere.
Windows weenies seem to prefer the MS Wallpaper.
Just goes to show you Microsoft really does know what their customers want, those tasteless bastards.
Is this really a big deal? Both sets have their winners and losers, but for stock backgrounds they’re good sets overall.
are there a lot of psychedelics in the Northwest?
The Windows 7 desktop pictures near the top of the list truly reek, but some of the later ones are OK. There are quite a few on both lists that would not be good for a background image, in my opinion.
I tend to use images of space (nebulas, galaxies, planets, moons) and nature (mountains, lakes, deserts, forests, waterfalls, oceans) that offer good contrast for icons and text.
Wow! Some of those Windows 7 wallpapers are creepy. Others are too cute. People who want creepy or too cute can go download their own desktop backgrounds.
The Mac OS X choices are classy, like the OS itself.
The thing to remember is the MS wallpapers are not created by MS. They are bought by them. Looks like they just went and grabbed a selection from a few art sites and some are a little childish, some are unsuitable as wallpapers and the rest are pretty decent. They are all better than the usual Windoze selection. As far as I am concerned I might just grab a few of them for myself to add to the selection of Snow Leopard desktop pics that will come with the next OS X upgrade.
Let’s not disrespect the artists that sold MS the pics. As one poster said on the site “I bet most of the pics were done on Macs”.
The Win7 pics made my eyes bleed.
“Can you guess which is which?”
Well Elmer, you waskley wabbit you
Put the name of each one under each of the photos
I don’t read very well, but …
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BC
I liked the first one shown of the ones by Microsoft, but overall, Apple’s much better. Van Gogh! I’ll take it..
7ista Desktop Pictures: Bad trip man. The first set remind me of a nightmare I once had while suffering from the flu. What is in the water over there in Redmond?