I'm sure I'll be accused of drinking the Apple Kool-Aid (or is it Apple juice?), but I have to say that Microsoft is so ridiculously far behind in making a meaningful gee-whiz operating system that it weighs heavy on me. The company that has brought to me amazing development tools and a superior Web platform has utterly embarrassed me on the OS front.
Apple showed off some of the new features in Leopard, the next OS X version, at their developer conference today. Can you believe this Time Machine application? It represents everything that's wrong with Vista. Time Machine was clearly thought of by coming up with a user interface that normal people would understand, and then the technical details were figured out. Where is the new file system and related tech in Vista?
And Steve Jobs demonstrated part of the reason that OS X has evolved so well: Iterative development. Five versions in five years, and people actually pay for the upgrades! Would people have upgraded Windows XP in this fashion? I doubt it, but making those incremental steps sure would have made a lot of sense to me.
It's hard for me to admit as a Windows developer, but every day I become more of a "Mac person" as I run Visual Studio in Parallels and do my day-to-day computing in OS X. With those amazing new Mac Pro machines, I can see getting one of those and being even less Windows oriented.
Microsoft has really blown it.
I find myself saying, I don't want or need a new operating system. I will probably upgrade to Vista for arrow and the built in search though.
Time machine is pretty cool, but its not anything new right? Its just built into an OS now.