<p>On any PC I have used, you will inevitably run into a program that goes on the fritz. Ctrl-Alt-Del it is. Wait a minute or two, and the task manager finally pops up. You select the non-responsive program, hit end now, wait a minute, do it again, aqnd again, and again.... Eventually, the program will close.</p>
<p>On a Mac, in the case of a non-responsive program, you hit Cmd-Opt-Esc, the Force Quit immediately appears, you select a program to quit, and it is instantly gone.</p>
<p>
Can you be more specific? I have lots of add-on customizations on my Macs. E.g., in the menu bar I can see the cpu load, network and disk activity, memory usage. I get an alert when my Mac tries to send a network packet to an outside address where permission hasn't yet been granted (to try to thwart hackers). Things like this.</p>
<p>Or do you mean another kind of customization?
You cannot have the menu bar for each app in the same window as the app itself. You cannot have the menu bar autohide so as to save screen real estate. You cannot change the shell theme. You cannot change the cursor theme. You cannot change the effect of right/middle/left click on the window bar, and you cannot move the buttons on the window around. You cannot remap the keys (I tried 2 or 3 applications and none got it completely right). You cannot set up keyboard shortcuts for many aspects of window management.</p>
<p>You need CandyBar to change the icon theme. Using keyboard shortcuts for launching applications, running scripts, etc. requires Quicksilver when that functionality should obviously be built into the OS.</p>
<p>For many other modifications you need Haxies. But if you have APE installed, Apple support won't help you! I even needed an application to change something as simple as the mouse acceleration curve!</p>
<p>But I have not used OS X extensively since last summer (when I was forced to use it 10 hours/day), so don't jump on me if things have changed since then.</p>
<p>
On any PC I have used, you will inevitably run into a program that goes on the fritz. Ctrl-Alt-Del it is. Wait a minute or two, and the task manager finally pops up. You select the non-responsive program, hit end now, wait a minute, do it again, aqnd again, and again.... Eventually, the program will close.
That's because you were using Windows. I don't use Windows, so I never encounter those problems.</p>
<p>
On a Mac, in the case of a non-responsive program, you hit Cmd-Opt-Esc, the Force Quit immediately appears, you select a program to quit, and it is instantly gone.
That's not entirely true. I have had the OS hardlock, and even got a kernel panic once. And Force Quit doesn't always work even when you have full input control, and I've had to track down the process and manually kill it more times than I can count. And this was not on an old Mac. This was on a top-of-line Mac Pro with 4 GB RAM and dual Xeon processsors.</p>
<p>Higher end Macs are way too overpriced...IMO the only one that's worth the price is the white Macbook because it was recently updated</p>
<p>Edit: I felt the need to respond to this post...
"On any PC I have used, you will inevitably run into a program that goes on the fritz. Ctrl-Alt-Del it is. Wait a minute or two, and the task manager finally pops up. You select the non-responsive program, hit end now, wait a minute, do it again, aqnd again, and again.... Eventually, the program will close."</p>
<p>Instead of ending the program, kill the process and it'll close immediately. Or maybe that's too complicated for a Mac user <em>shrug</em></p>
<p>srunni, I guessed right, I never missed any of those things. Macs stay easy to use and reliable because they can't be so easily messed up for no good reason. It's a big advantage for new users when apps work mostly the same way.</p>
<p>pyroza, for some reason, Mac market share is increasing. Mac marketing is convincing (or fooling!) us into thinking we get what we pay for.</p>
<p>
srunni, I guessed right, I never missed any of those things. Macs stay easy to use and reliable because they can't be so easily messed up for no good reason. It's a big advantage for new users when apps work mostly the same way.
I never said that the apps should work differently. I just said that those options are not available, and I don't see how they could ``mess up'' the computer. I have never seen too many options mess up a KDE setup.</p>
<p>
pyroza, for some reason, Mac market share is increasing. Mac marketing is convincing (or fooling!) us into thinking we get what we pay for.
The Mac is trendy, so a lot of young people are buying it. That's why their market share is increasing.</p>
<p>Plus the marketing campaign is very deceptive.</p>
<p>
[QUOTE]
Instead of ending the program, kill the process and it'll close immediately. Or maybe that's too complicated for a Mac user <em>shrug</em>
[/QUOTE]
</p>
<p>So being easier to use is a bad thing now....?</p>
<p>I've had more problems with closing programs on macs than I've had with windows.</p>
<p>how come? i have been using a mac for 5 months, and i didn't experience any problems with closing programs. i probably used forcequit 5 times at most, and it works smoothly, unlike the task manager of windows. not trying to state that an os is better than another, but i think your point is wrong.</p>
<p>Mac family here. We have 3 laptops and an old desktop that Highland Dad uses when he's home.</p>
<p>Our old PC (Gateway) crashed a lot. If you have PC problems, you have to pack it up and ship off for who knows how long. Our desktop had a problem and we took it to the Mac store and had it back in 3 days.</p>
<p>If you do get a Mac, be sure to use their education discount (10%). If you buy in the summer, you will get a free Ipod but I'm not sure which kind - it may be a shuffle.</p>
<p>
[quote]
how come? i have been using a mac for 5 months, and i didn't experience any problems with closing programs. i probably used forcequit 5 times at most, and it works smoothly, unlike the task manager of windows. not trying to state that an os is better than another, but i think your point is wrong.
[/quote]
end the process in windows, not the program. also I've had several times where force quit didn't work on a mac.</p>
<p>and lastly, my personal experience is wrong?</p>
<p>Hey, be happy we can kill errant processes on Win and Mac. Used to be that a bad program would bring down the whole OS. This is not a significant issue for either OS.</p>
<p>Chipmonkey - your generalization is wrong, not your personal experience. and vossron i agree, when it comes to ending tasks/quitting an errant program, both os' are pretty much the same. what counts is that you don't get an errant process, and i would say a mac is much more powerful for that.</p>
<p>Since the latest Mac OSX versions are X86-based, it''s now possible to run MacOS on PCs without too much of a hassle. I'm running Mac OSX along with Windows 7 on my (Dell) laptop at the moment, and both work perfectly.</p>
<p>By the way, Windows 7 has proven itself to be very functional, and rather well-designed as far as aesthetics go.</p>
<p>actually, my family has always owned pcs but my brother got a mac..i personally love his computer more..in the time since he got his mac, my dad has had to change our desktops like five times. it stucks b/c we know the pc's gonna crash really soon so we can never do anything on the net or anything. i personally want a mac air...but one pro to pcs is the newer versions of microsoft office. they're really helpful for creating really professional documents and presentations.</p>
<p>Yes you can run OSX on a PC texas, because who cares about ULAs anyway?</p>