Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio...

Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that).

I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers don't magically reboot or bluescreen nearly as much. It might happen every 6 months at the most, where with Windows it probably happens every 2 months.

View on HN

I agree that OS X is more reliable. I have both a Mac and a PC in my office, and my 5K iMac has never crashed. I had some weird issues with Windows 10 after I upgraded my laptop, where it would hang after an update.

I switched from using Windows for 20 years to OS X (excluding Linux for work related stuff.) This is the first time I've been able to work from a laptop with my productivity level as good or better than a desktop. The design and usability surpassed what I expected. I haven't noticed any bugs.

I can't imagine having a different brand of computer, but there are lots of OSX bugs that cause my teeth to grind. The Finder doesn't remember that I only want one layout ever, and it resets to a random alternative setting regularly. There are still progress bars that pop over, and can't be hidden. The data display which shows used disk space and it is nearly all "other" is a bug as far as I'm concerned. My AppleTV(8) has stopped incrementing itself, but its not ideal. And as a genuine question, has anyone not had strange Xcode behaviour or crashes at least once per day? I currently have a slow motion simulator that changes views over 5-10ish seconds.

In terms of laptop OSes, OS X is by far the best. It's stable, usable and 100% desktop-OS focused. I can't stand the touchscreen features that Windows 10 tries to still force on you. Somehow my Windows 10 laptop got put into "tablet mode," and it was pretty unusable. I couldn't access the desktop anymore, it was slow and it took awhile to figure out the issue.

I think it was flipped on after an update, but why would I even want to be able to enable that mode on a laptop without a touchscreen?

If Windows 7 is "magically rebooting and bluescreening" often enough to comment on, then you have a hardware problem.

I don't use Windows very much, because I hate using Windows. But what I will give it is that I haven't seen a blue screen in the past decade for any reason short of bad memory, overheating, dead disk. I suspect that a lot of the Windows image problem is that people are free to buy really cheap hardware and fiddle with things they don't understand.

Apple merging MacOS with NextOS to make a Unix OS was the best move they could make at the time. It happened during the time of the $10,000 Unix workstation and Apple made OSX as an easier to use Unix. It was cheaper to buy a Macintosh than it was to buy a SparcStation or some other Unix workstation.

Because of Apple making OSX Unix based, it cut into sales of other Unix companies like SGI, and also GNU/Linux cut into sales of SGI and others as well.

But making OSX Unix based solved a lot of problems that Classic MacOS had that they couldn't solve.

"...magically reboot or bluescreen nearly as much." Mine never magically reboot. Ever. (OS X)

My Macbook Pro did which reminds me the extended warranty period is ending.

https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/

I regularly get asked to fix someones windows PC, no such problem with people who have Macs. With OS X there are waves of releases(major versions) if I remember correctly - some introduce swaths of new code/features/replacement code. Some other are more of a speedup and bugfix versions. Maybe I'm wrong.

I go places on my Windows pc that I wouldn't dare take my Mac. I expect it to need repair.

My pc is my beater car, and it needs repair--regularly.

My Mac is the classic car in the garage, that only gets used for work, or safe places.

Speak for yourself. I used an old G4 PowerBook for grad school, and it travelled over 100,000 air miles, and into the various labs where I had to work, and also to far-off Asian countries for holiday. Plus, I didn't have to buy a developer kit: it came free with the machine.

I assumed that the travel referred to dangerous parts of the web.

Actually NT 3.51, which I used for dev and was great compared to my colleagues on plain windows.

Actually NT 3.1. 3.5 followed, then 3.51, then 4.0, then 5.0 (2000), and then the NT line ended as it was unified with the non-NT line.

Technically 9x line ended since Windows XP was NT-based and not 9x-based.

Yes, I suppose so. I didn't want to say the 9x line ended, because it's really the line of DOS-based OSes, and while the NT line is ongoing, it's no longer called NT. 2000 was the last version to mention NT, and it wasn't part of the name itself, just a tagline.

One of the things about OS X is that most of the time it's put on high quality, but non-exceptional hardware. So things like bad RAM, flakey power supplies, bad GPU drivers etc are almost never an issue with a stock machine.

Windows, not so much. The only stability issues I've had with windows have been related to poor drivers, almost exclusively from nVidia or ATI/AMD. The equivalent hardware for Apple machines either didn't exist at the time, or was running much less ambitious drivers.

I probably have more issues with my Macbook Air (relating to sleep, hibernate, and wake-up) than I do with my Windows machines these days.

To give you a counter-anecdote, I use macbooks in work. For the last five years, I've had two hardware failures and gray screens maybe once every four months. In addition to that, I have issues maybe once a month where the machine more or less locks up (from the logs it looks like windowserver/loginwindow has crashed and OS X is trying to do spindump to them).

Compare that with the _desktop_ Windows 7 machine. It first crashed intermittently (memory failures), but after I changed the motherboard, it has not crashed at all. But then again, I am not using, for example, the most cutting-edge graphic drivers.

I remember quite some crashes during the Windows XP times, but I've since taken a more conservative approach to hardware and drivers.

Jeez, you're talking about something designed and built in 1982-1983 (over 30 years ago) and meant to run on something with 128KB of RAM with no hard drive and a 400KB floppy disk.

You try fitting all that plus a GUI those constraints.

What's amazing is that it had the features it had and that it worked at all.

You might like to check out MenuetOS/KolibriOS and the old QNX demo disk.

Both provide GUIs and rudimentary Web browsers. QNX was full POSIX, too, although the demo disk didn't include a terminal.

... and there goes my macbook (2008?) where windows 7 runs harder better faster than osx, and pretty much more reliably than the monster imac at the office.

Pity that nobody remembers Windows NT4, it was miles better than OS7. I stopped using mac altogheter after starting to use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com