NEWSFLASH — ARS TECHNICA HAS A MASSIVE REVIEW OF WINDOZE 7 HERE: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2009/10/windows-7-the-review.ars AND THEY HAVE AN OS X 10.6 MASSIVE REVIEW HERE: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

I state in advance that I am fully aware that there are Apple fanboys out there who will defend their beloved cult to the death, and that any criticism of such a divine invention as The Mac is far worse than Muhammad cartoons or burning Richard Dawkins books.  But since I am mostly fearless, except when I’m not, I shall proceed with vigor…

In the following, I am going to jot down some problems and various thoughts that I have had as I play with OS X 10.6 (and perhaps 10.5).  At times I will compare the latest and greatest from Apple with the almost latest and greatest from Mickey$oft.

Btw, I have used XP, Vista (2+ years) and Win 7 for 6+ months but currently have no plans to upgrade to Win 7 final release because the price is just way toooooo high.

Oh, and btw again, I am thinking of moving to a Mac.  Right now as I type this on a white MacBook, I am probably about 70:30 moving toward changing to Mac.  The next week of playing on this MacBook will make all the difference, and of course Mickey$oft’s pricing which could sway me a bit, perhaps.

So here goes…

• Installed 10.6 on a brand new MacBook, which apparently is not possible using an upgrade disk. Wrong, it is possible and very easy and took about 40 minutes.
• Finalizing installation, it asked to take my picture/photo with the built in camera, and froze with the green camera light on. Not a good start — so quit the installer and rebooted — same problem.  Did a Google search and found that the SVRAM(?) needed resetting to fix this bug (reboot, hold down option+command +p+r).  That fixed that problem.  Comment — this sort of problem just never happened to me when using Win 7. So much for the legendary Mac stability, and apparent excellence with their control-freak attitude to their hardware manufacture.  Windows has to work with thousands of different cards and chipsets, yet this sort of problem is of a bygone era in my experience.
• Two finger (no being rude now) scrolling on the MacBook mousepad is awesome.
• Time Machine (TM) it seems cannot even back up to a simple network storage device.  I have a server and The MacBook can see it fine on the network, but no backup to Swerver the server is available.  I guess this is another instance of Apple’s legendary control-freak lock-in as it is in principle possible to do such backups using hacks from cyberspace.  Sorry Apple, but Mickey$oft has no problems doing this and I have no intention of purchasing your extortionate-priced Time Traveler Capsule.
• How do you invoke the ubiquitous Finder with a simple keypress as you can with Explorer in Windoze?  Winkey+E = Explorer. Winkey+F = Find. Winkey+D = Desktop. Mackey+What=Finder???
• Why are so many downloads for Mac 2 to 3 times bigger than the same thing for Windoze?  Skype is like 42MB for Mac and about 8MB on Win IIRC.  iTunes is about 90MB on Mac — WTH — it’s only a music player and a few other things — talk about bloatware.
• Why does Windoze hardware suck so much — why doesn’t HP or Acer make a Mac Mini copy at half the price?
• Sarfari (a real mutt on Windows) looks like it is fixed in 10.6.  Simple switching between tabs worked differently in forward and reverse but 10.6 seems all good!  But, compared to Google’s Chrome, Safari sux.  And in case you think I am showing irrational bias, I reckon IE 8 sux compared to Sarfari.  At least Google’s Chrome is now available for Mac!!!
• Spotlight searching is really great — much better than my 2+ year old Vista install which is really slow now.  But what will Spotlight be like after 2 years of adding and deleting files I do wonder?!
• Open Office on the Mac is surprisingly good. The screenshots on the Open Office website do a great disservice to this office suite.
• VPN and remote desktop work really well. VPN is built into Mac OS and Remote Desktop for Mac is provided by Microsoft. Very nice!
• Skype for the Mac is a bit of a jumble compared to the latest Windoze version. This is probably because it is a couple of versions behind the latest Windows release.  And why the huge-mongous download? If this is due to the dual binaries (x86 and PPC), then why not split them into two separate downloads?
• My spam folder in Gmail has over 6000 spams for the last 30 days, yet Apple Mail (using IMAP) insists on downloading them and keeping the spam up to date.  Come on Apple – how pathetic – did any of you actually use Mail before releasing it?
• Installed some new patches using Apple Update. It installed the patches and rebooted but locked up in the process. Yup, 12 hours later I still had the round spinning thing on the blue screen (of death).

More to come…