Bloatware? My HP shipped with a Norton trial and MS Office trial. My first two MacBooks had iWork and MS Office trials. Norton and Office take seconds to remove. What about iLife? iWeb, Garageband, iMovie, and iDVD. iLife is the ultimate in bloatware.
Wow, you must know how to pick HP laptops! My sister in law bought a Toshiba which came, from the factory, with 13 separate items in the "system notifications" area and over 20 unecessary applications running in the background after startup.
That's bloatware. Crap on the disk that's not running is a secondary concern. What I care about is that the PC I get isn't spending half its CPU cycles figuring out how to most annoyingly throw the next piece of advertising in my face.
At least Microsoft offers security. Gotta love how FileVault stores the password for the encrypted volume in an unecrypted manner. I also like how Windows has a built-in 2 way firewall. Something you can only get with paid software on a Mac.
Source?
I'm no FileVault expert, but I do know that the Fortune 500 company I work for trusts FileVault on its laptops and requires a $300-per-seat encryption equivalent on its Windows laptops.
No different than a Mac. Last OS X reinstall I did required about 4 runnings of software update and 4 restarts before it was finished.
Really? Last time I installed Tiger (10.4) there were two SU runs and a single restart to get it all the way from 10.4.0 to 10.4.11 (I think that is the latest in 10.4). Reinstalling Leopard required a single SU run and a single restart.
You, sir, are full of ****.
False. Printers, digital cameras, scanners, even TV tuners, don't require additional drivers with Vista and none of them require reinstalls. With my two printers in Leopard, I need 1GB worth of drivers installed. And the all-in-one still won't be fully functional. In Vista I just plug them in and its ready to go. No additional software needed. With my TV tuner I plugged it in, Windows installed the drivers and it was ready to go.
All this depends on the specific mix of hardware. I have to say this used to be a big deal (a lot of peripherals were simple plug-and-play on OS X while the Windows drivers needed updating before plugging the device in and if you plugged in before the driver was installed you had to Regedit dive, etc). Haven't had any Windows driver issues that I can recall in the past year.
Can I uninstall iLife fully without having to reinstall or search down all of the hundreds of plist and other files left behind? Whats that? No? Thats what I thought.
"hundreds" of plist files? Prefs files are a few bytes, and there are a hand full of them in iLife. The hard disk clogging bits are easily removed by deleting the iLife apps from your Applications folder. Unlike Windows apps, iLife doesn't install DLLs in shared folders throughout the OS, so you don't have the "tendrils" of those applications buried throughout.
Only Apple's Windows software requires Windows restarts.
Apple can't make fun of Windows when its Apple's own shortcomings and poor programming skills that make it happen
WHAT??? Windows restarts by itself at least three times a week, and just about
every piece of Windows software I've installed in the past year has required a restart (because it puts things into the DLL shared space and needs to make sure no one else is using the libs it is blowing away ...)
Less likely than having to repair disk permissions in OS X.
Repairing disk permissions in OS X is almost never actually necessary. It's a placebo handed out at the start of most fix-it instructions. Fortunately even if you do it every time it's recommended it takes about 5 seconds from start to finish, unlike the similar Windows placebo (reboot the computer).
Somehow Mac OS is immune to HDD failures? Let's not forget that OS X's file system is famous for needing "disk permissions" repaired as well.
See above. The file system is not famous for "needing" any such things. It's actually famous for being remarkably self-correcting.
Edit: I really do think its hilarious how Apple pokes fun of Windows need for drivers. Driver updates bring new features, enhance performance, and take care of any issues. With OS X, you're stuck with what Apple provides. You're entirely dependent on what they want you to have or not have. And we all know how Apple is about bringing new features to the table for free. I had a TV tuner for my desktop PCs. Thanks to driver updates, they added in MPEG-2 encoding and even progressive scan encoding. All for free. Driver updates in Windows have also dramatically increased performance on my GPUs throughout the years, and added features to the soundcards I have owned.
You are missing the point. The point is that, at least 2 years ago,
you needed to update your drivers for almost every piece of Windows hardware prior to running the device. There were often "gotchas" with device driver installation which could cost you a lot of time if you went in without reading the instructions carefully.
Driver updates? I have updated drivers on hardware on my Mac several times, when a new feature comes available in the "driver" (really, almost always in the surrounding software, not the driver itself). While these drivers have often been more often updated on Windows, that's improving as Mac home marketshare has been improving.
It's also incredibly funny how Apple uses it as a downside, because of the fact that I can go buy a $400 desktop PC and throw any third party hardware I want in it and have it work. When was the last time I could buy an Apple desktop under $2,000 that had that sort of expandability? The current Mac Pro doesn't even offer that sort of expandability, seeing as how its limited to a very small number of PCIe slots, when most hardware is still PCI. And look at the notebooks! A limited number of ports, as well as only including a half-width ExpressCard slot and no docking station connector.
Only Apple would use their systems lack of features and expandability as a selling point.
To each his own. I personally don't miss the PS/2 and VGA and Parallel and Serial port connectors sticking out the back of my laptop (yes, even that Toshiba my sister in law bought less than six months ago sports those ports that were all the rage in 1991!)
Expandability? What kind of hardware are you seeing which is only available in PCI and not PCIe-compatible? I don't have a latest-model tower (my tower is a G5), but even then I had no trouble finding decent RAID and eSATA card for the specs.
