Odnetnin said:
a question for the mac people then... checking out the apple site.
a) why are the OSs named after animals
b) what's with the constant upgrade and what's so special about the upcoming tiger? Is it like their version of XP SP2? I think you actually have to buy it?
a) Marketing. They found that both Mac users and Winsloths liked using the development codenames, so they started using them on the actual product.
b) No, it's not like XP SP2. It is not a service pack. OS X.4 has many, many new features: Spotlight (complete desktop search, with the ability to search WITHIN files - something Google Desktop cannot do, and you'll have to wait for that on Windows until 2007), Core Image and other desktop rendering enhancements (Longhorn's nifty 3D desktop stuff, already implemented on the Mac), Automator (event automation/scripting for the masses), Dashboard (desktop widgets), enhanced Mail client, enhanced Safari (RSS feeds in your browser, no need to visit each site to see the headlines), plus tons of fixes and speed enhancements.
The deal with Apple's speedy OS updating is they really seemed to want to take the edge away from MS in the OS market. They did this with Panther - OS X.3 pretty much matched WinXP in terms of productivity and enhanced the Mac's stability and interaction with Windows networks. OS X.4 is a pretty big feature update, so you do get what you're paying for. They're slowing down the updates - X.5 will not be coming out for quite a while. They know they've already got Longhorn's feature set, so there's no need to push things quicker than necessary.
Just as a note, consider the server market. Apple has positioned OS X.4 Server to be an almost complete replacement for Windows Server 2003. It is now mostly (if not fully) compatable with MS's Active Directory, it comes with goodies like iChat server, Windows-compatible ACLs, 64-bit support, ethernet bridging, Quicktime server, etc., and is cheaper than Win2003 (hardware not withstanding... but you'll have a hard time finding a premium PC 1U server that matches the Xserve's feature set and design for less).
Oh, and in response to your earlier question about networking: Yes, Macs and PCs play nice on the network - even if it is the Mac that is doing most of the nice playing. Macs can act like PCs on a network, even to the extent of taking a Windows network name (actually, more like Samba), appearing on workgroups, and logging into an Active Directory network. I routinely scuttle files back and forth from the Macs to the PC on my network.
Fear not, switching is easy.
