Windows 7 will not help apple sell more Macs. This time around, the public have tested Windows en masse and said they like it. So, it's what people are used to, but working better. It will sell more PCs.

I have had RC1 on my desktop for a few months and am waiting for 2 copies of the OS through the post (time to refresh the laptop too)

OSX is cheaper than Windows 7. But I can't afford the hardware upgrade The thing that would sell more Macs would be everyone being given about £1000...

I'm inclined to agree, although our reasons differ.


1) They tested Vista 'en masse' too.
2) Whether the public likes it or not is largely irrelevant to sales numbers. The number of 'elective' purchases of any version of Windows is dwarfed by the numbers of copies sold with new PCs - when people are buying the PC rather than the OS, and they often don't have any choice of what OS to buy with it - and by the numbers of corporate licence purchases, when it's not the bloke on the shop floor who sets the policy of which OS gets installed on his PC.


Been using it since RC1 myself. It's a very good OS; genuinely the best one MS has written in, well, at least a decade. Not without flaws still and frankly the system requirements for an OS are pretty extreme but it's a very polished piece of work.


Um. You can get a mac with the same spec as most of the PCs that will be bought this year for half that but that's not the point. You're almost there, but not quite. What few people seem to realise is that, increasingly, Microsoft and Apple are not in competition with each other. Odd idea I admit but stick with me. The numbers over the past few years suggest Apple's global market share is essentially static, at somewhere around 5%. But Apple's market share in what you might call the premium market - desktop and laptops that cost over $1000 (which is what about £850) has been growing steadily. The market is essentially 'splitting'; everything at the low end - netbooks, plain office PCs, home media boxes and what have you - is either staying with Windows or moving to it. At the top end, it seems to be the case people are buying Macbook pros in preference to top end Sony Vaios for example.

I generally shy away from using car analogies but this one kind of holds - on a very broad scale you can say Ford and Ferrari are in competition with each other; they're both selling cars. However in the real world, they're generally catering for totally different groups of customers and the opportunity for one of them to steal customers from the other is actually quite rare. I think it's now largely the case that the same thing applies to MS and Apple; they may make boxes that do essentially the same job but they're actually selling to different groups of people who have pretty much nothing in common with each other.
NOTE: I am not at any point saying a Mac OS X computer is 'better' than a Windows computer or vice versa. Again, that is actually pretty irrelevant - the people buying one are largely not even going to look at the other, so the actual comparative value doesn't really come into it.

Jon

Having invested a lot of time and money in macs I doubt that I will switch back, and that would also apply to Windows users considering switching to macs. Unless they get wiped out by a virus or software failure they will probably stick with Windows. Switching involves quite an upheaval so will be slow. Though it is happening.

Windows 7 is as secure as OSX so should not have that problem, though if budgets are not a problem then macs will win. Maybe constrained economies will help Microsoft rather than Apple?

Yes but the current version of Windows 7 is considerably better than its predecessors. It may not be as good as Linux and is probably pretty close to OSX. These are all way better than older OSes. At the last competition the ratings of all were pretty close.

I know people hark on that OS X would have malware about if Apple had a larger market share - fair enough. But this still does not negate the fact that UNIX and UNIX-like OSes are inherently more secure by design.

The only Windows OS I would even consider attaching a 'secure' label to would be NT. Vista was a vast improvement in terms of security, but still not good enough.

Yes Linux is very secure, as is OSX, I can not be 100% certain about Windows 7 or Vista but I do not know of any Vista viruses yet. Macs are more vulnerable to errors in Java or Flash. Trojans bypasses security for all the OSes. Though I suspect that Windows will be the prime target for a while yet.

There are plenty of Windows viruses about that affect both Vista and 7.

Security when it comes to third-party applications is going to be the bane of any OS or platform. You can make your OS as secure as you like but all it takes it one poorly coded plugin/app. (I'm looking at you, Adobe) and all that hard work unravels.

Google claim Chrome will be virus-free and bulletproof, I fear that Flash and Java will be its undoing.

I avoid Windows now so was not sure of the current state of play.


Well that was how all the machines were compromised at the last security contest.


I agree. Adobe really need improve their apps.

I'd say Windows 7 is potentially less secure than Vista since they have dumbed-down UAC for the luddites.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/opinion-ms-should-kill-win7-uac.ars

Ars technica agree.

So, in summary...it is less secure and does nothing without downloading extra stuff from the internet. No wonder the XP users like it.

Hmmm, you speak sense. Also, there are a few high-budget computer shoppers that stick to Windows; those who have it almost exclusively for PC games, although I accept this market is suffering from the growth of consoles. But there are quite a few people out there buying SLI or Crossfire-capable graphics cards, or at least I assume so because NVidia and ATI are spending a fortune on developing new ones.