Vista versus Apple
Staff writers
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Sep 12, 2006 12:24 PM
We provide the commentary on a bruising eight-round battle between Vista and Tiger.
There’s never been a better time to switch to the Mac. Apple has seen sense and moved to Intel processors and now, in a move that nobody could have predicted, it lets us boot Windows as a native operating system. Yet its own OS, Tiger, is stronger than ever. Happy to run on low-spec kit, it’s quick and easy to learn, and at just $200 it’s nothing short of a bargain.
Yet there’s never been a better time to stick with Windows either. It’s well supported, it plays host to the widest range of software and peripherals, it’s well understood, it’s the industry standard, and it’s fast approaching its first major upgrade in years. With Windows Vista slated for an early 2007 shrinkwrap release, the future has never looked brighter for the OS that already dominates our desktops.
So which is right for you? If you find yourself in the enviable position of having cash for a new computer, we could easily forgive any confusion you may feel over which platform to choose. Macs and PCs are more closely matched than ever before, and while Mac sales have never been stronger, boosted by the so-called iPod halo effect, Windows’ future is both exciting and bright.
With this in mind, we’ve set out to directly compare the two operating systems - Windows Vista Beta 2 and Mac OS X 10.4.6 Tiger - to see how their relative pros and cons stack up. We’ve scrutinised the eight key considerations of a new computer buyer, taking in everything from gaming to security and entertainment to cross-platform use in the business world. Lastly, we take a look at the total cost of ownership and the kind of hardware you’ll need to run each one, and it’s here we make some truly surprising discoveries.
Where possible, we’ve pitted directly comparable features against one another, but we’ve also tried to pick out those aspects unique to each OS, whether they’re part of the interface, the bundled utilities and applications, or the underlying code and protocols that make it all hang together.
To make this possible, we ran Vista and Tiger side by side throughout our tests, but if you’re wondering which one we used to write the words themselves… well, that too will be revealed in due course.
The battle for your desktop is over. Microsoft won. The next front in the war of home computing is taking place in your lounge, where Vista and Tiger are vying to replace your TV with Media Center and Front Row, the most impressive cannons in their arsenal.
Front Row is Tiger’s entertainment hub - a separate interface layer that slides in over the top of Tiger to play music, videos and DVDs, and display photos from an iPhoto library. It’s smart, easy to use, can access shared libraries across a network and is controlled by a remote with just six buttons. But there’s one big setback: it only comes with new Macs. If you’ve had an Apple for more than 12 months, Front Row is out of bounds. This seems to be an artificial restriction put in place to sell more Macs, as there are plenty of websites showing how to hack it to run on older machines. At the same time, although QuickTime won’t play movies full-screen unless you pay for an upgrade, there’s a workaround by playing them out through iTunes and setting that to take over your whole display.
That’s not the only criticism, either - iPhoto, Apple’s photo-editing and sharing application, isn’t bundled with Tiger, but sold as part of the iLife suite at an extra $120. It’s pre-installed on new Macs, but we’d still like to see it in the core OS files to balance out the features in Vista.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is more generous. Media Center has now been optimised for use on widescreen TVs and can share media with other PCs or a networked Xbox 360. Even Windows Media Player lets you share your photos, music and recorded TV, and filter out what’s shared on the basis of personal ratings.
Vista Media Center also ties in with TV tuner hardware - another area in which it trumps Front Row. There are still no machines in Apple’s line-up that include a TV tuner and no Front Row options to hook into a third-party option. The best it can do is play back TV you’ve recorded using third-party tools. In Media Center, these features take centre stage and are glossed over if you don’t have the right tuner.
In a nod to Hollywood, Vista will play only high-definition content using an encrypted HDCP connection rather than plain DVI, and neither system makes it easy for you to encode your own DVDs without downloading third-party tools. Online video stores will therefore grow in importance, and this is an area in which Apple could leap ahead. The iTunes Music Store already claims 70 percent of all legal music downloads as its own and could soon do the same for downloaded films and TV.
For the moment though, anyone with an older Mac upgrading to Tiger has little to keep them entertained. Microsoft, on the other hand, has once again thrown in every feature it can imagine and, while its implementation may require the use of a far more complicated remote, it’s a well-integrated, smooth and pleasant system to use - just what you need for the lounge.
Vista
A comprehensive entertainment system that makes it easy to share media with an Xbox 360 means Vista is the best choice for a living room PC. Vista’s support for TV tuners via Media Center gives it the edge.
9
Apple
An iMac running Front Row is fine if there’s no room for a separate TV, but no integrated live TV playback means we’ll have to wait for IP-based broadcasting before considering it a true entertainment centre.
7
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| Apple's Front Row puts all of your videos, photos, movies and music in one place, held together by a simple interface. Unfortunately, it's only available on new Macs. |
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| Windows Media Player makes it possible to share your music, pictures, videos and recorded TV with other users on your local network. |
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| Media Center’s interface is optimised for use on a TV screen rather than a PC, making it easy to access your media by remote control. |
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| Although Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger doesn’t include Front Row unless you’re buying a new Mac, you can play videos through iTunes. |
Mac OS X arrived in 2001 and to date has enjoyed a virus-free existence. Even recent scares haven’t been real viruses, but exploits that rely on user authorisation to infect the system. This is largely thanks to OS X’s Unix core, which restricts applications’ access to system files until you re-enter a login password.
It’s a similar story with Vista: User Account Protection means users and applications run with the least possible privileges. As soon as either needs access to core system files, they must be authorised, which makes it obvious if malware is trying to run an unexpected routine. So, while Word will launch without a fuss, Control Panel applets need confirmation before they can launch.
But security isn’t just about a virus or trojan attack; it also means keeping your data safe from prying eyes. Tiger integrates FileVault, which transparently encrypts and decrypts the contents of your home folder on-the-fly. It uses 128-bit AES encryption and, once set up, requires no further user intervention since merely logging in grants access. In Apple’s own words, ‘assuming one could build a machine that could recover a DES key in a second, it would take that machine approximately 149 trillion years to crack a 128-bit AES key’.
Microsoft goes one step further, taking advantage of TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chips on a PC’s motherboard as a place to store cryptographic keys, which Vista’s BitLocker can use to encrypt whole volumes. Storing the keys within the hardware is doubly secure, allowing your PC to verify the conditions under which Windows is running before unlocking them to decrypt the drive. This would stop anyone from reading your data after booting from an external drive.
Tiger features a secure wallet called Keychain, used for storing passwords - much like a local version of Microsoft Passport - while Safari, its bundled browser, has a private browsing mode in which it will never use its cache, allowing you to log on to a bank or webmail service without leaving a trace. Vista users can blitz IE 7’s cache with a single click, while similar privilege controls to those in UAP restrict a website’s ability to change your homepage or set a new bookmark.
For the truly paranoid, Tiger’s secure erasure options overwrite deleted data up to 35 times to ensure it really has disappeared, in line with the US Department of Defense standard for the sanitisation of magnetic media.
On a large disk, this can take hours to complete. Both Tiger and Vista have an integrated firewall, but neither has built-in anti-virus tools. Only Vista includes an anti-malware scanner, and only IE makes an effort to detect phishing sites.
So, both systems are well armed to provide a secure computing environment, but even the seemingly impregnable OS X will face renewed threats in the future. ‘Since February, a small number of new pieces of malware for Mac OS X have been written,’ Sophos’ Graham Cluley told us. ‘However, none of them are spreading in the wild, and the numbers are tiny compared to the threats written specifically for Windows each month.’
As such, the two options are neck and neck, but it remains to be seen how well Tiger will be able to stave off threats introduced by users running Windows and Boot Camp on the same drive as Mac OS X.
Vista
Improved security features and implementation of TPM make this release feel
a lot safer than XP ever did. We’d still like to see Microsoft bundle a virus checker, though.
8
Apple
Built-in security tools can see off today’s threats, but it’s only the relative obscurity of the platform that’s kept OS X off hackers’ radars to date. Apple users still can’t afford to be complacent.
8
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| Mac OS X’s built-in software firewall is easy to configure using a series of checkboxes, while Keychain keeps track of your passwords, both for the internet and local applications. |
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| FileVault encrypts your drive on-the-fly using 128-bit encryption that meets US government standards for security. |
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| With security in mind, Vista makes it easy to obliterate your browser history. |
Business
Tiger will happily work with Exchange Server and now supports Active Directory with Kerberos single sign-on, as well as SFP, SMB, WebDAV and NFS file services running on its own server operating system, Unix, Linux and Novell NetWare. A Mac can also be configured using WINS (Windows Internet Naming Service), so it will appear in a particular domain on a Windows-based network. Security is ably handled by the Unix underpinnings and the open standards-based CDSA (Common Data Security Architecture).
Windows servers appear in the OS X Finder, just as they do in Windows’ Network Neighbourhood, allowing you to navigate by workgroup to the particular share you need. Shared folders on a Windows machine are visible to Mac users, while those on a Mac can be viewed from Vista, and a free download for Windows lets both Mac and Windows users communicate using OS X’s configuration-free Bonjour networking protocol.
Vista and Tiger both have the means to connect to a VPN across a regular broadband link, and both platforms play host to a wide range of business apps. Microsoft Office runs on each, although Access and Visio aren’t Mac-compatible. Fortunately, FileMaker and OmniGraffle plugs these holes. When it comes to disk formats, the Mac can read from and write to FAT32 drives, and can read only from NTFS. Windows machines though, are blind to HFS and HFS+.
It’s traditionally been the case that Apple hardware has a longer usable life than the average PC, despite the initial high cost of hardware. Also, the oldest recommended Mac for running Tiger is now seven years old while a seven year-old PC wouldn’t be able to run Vista. Consequently, no particular OS has the edge on the hardware price point.
System administrators are well served by deployment tools on both platforms. For Tiger users, this is the paid-for Apple Remote Desktop 3, and for Vista-based businesses, it’s Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment) 2. PE 2 will be available to all Vista corporate customers.
Vista
Vista remains as business-savvy as XP and, although large enterprise users may wait to see how it proves itself, there can be little doubt that Windows will remain the business platform of choice.
9
Apple
Tiger is a stable, secure and sensible choice for use in a business environment and should present no worries for sysadmins or end users where cross-platform compatibility is concerned.
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Ecosystem
The most common reason for not switching to the Mac is lack of choice when it comes to software and peripherals. This is largely a fallacy.
This whole feature was written, designed and printed using a Mac. It was proofed on paper, printed on a variety of HP and Canon printers, from both Macs and PCs. The whole thing was helped along by an extensive library of MP3s, played out on a Mac.
Yet not everything works on a Mac. Skype will happily let you chat to your friends using Tiger, but you’ll have trouble finding a compatible VoIP handset. This is a common complaint that derives from the Mac having less than 5 percent market share: for manufacturers working with slim profit margins, the cost of porting products to the Mac can’t be justified.
Apple’s switch to Intel processors has further muddied the waters, with developers now having to recode their apps as Universal Binaries - Mac apps that work on both the new architecture and with older PowerPC chips used in every Mac for the last 10 years. Some are rethinking their support for the older platform.
Mac users must jump through hoops if they want to use a USB webcam in place of FireWire. And how many FireWire webcams have you seen lately? It’s fortunate that the Intel iMac and MacBook Pro (although not the Mac mini) have cameras built in.
Adobe won’t be recoding its existing products for Intel Macs. Instead, early adopters will have to run Photoshop, InDesign and co in an emulation layer called Rosetta until the next version.
Yet it’s not all bad news. Use a card reader to download your photos and it doesn’t matter which camera you have, as drivers are irrelevant. Most printer manufacturers now provide Mac drivers, and some of these exceed the abilities of their Windows-based equivalents. Lexmark’s sub-$300 lasers feature PostScript on the Mac, but not on the PC.
But things could still take a nasty turn for Mac users with Boot Camp. If manufacturers now see OS X as a tenant rather than landlord on Apple’s own computers, support for the platform could decline still further.
Vista
As the default OS for 95 percent of all computer users, Windows has enviable industry support. We’ll see some glitches in Vista’s early days, but manufacturers should quickly iron these out.
10
Apple
Anything you want to do on a PC, you can do on a Mac, although you may have to find alternative routes. The argument that Macs are poorly supported is a fallacy.
9
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| Macs can do anything PCs can do… with a little bit of help. |
Gaming
Vista marks Microsoft’s biggest investment in desktop gaming since the introduction of DirectX 10, and the new Direct3D 10 framework should deliver graphics that are as much as eight times faster than DirectX 9. Furthermore, the Windows System Assessment Tool will provide developers with an API for optimising performance, hopefully alleviating any bottlenecks before your frame rate drops so low that Quake looks like a Lumière brothers film.
Also, for the first time ever, Vista should give games ratings some teeth, allowing adults to restrict what their kids can play through the Parental Controls settings in Control Panel, supporting six international rating standards. Around 2500 legacy titles already contain the necessary Game Definition File to allow for this kind of filtering.
Apple, meanwhile, pushes all of its desktop and portable machines as being suitable for gaming, but if you want to play the latest games, Apple recommends a Power Mac G5 Quad, which starts at $3199.
The Mac’s biggest gaming triumph remains Myst. Until the release of The Sims, it was the best-selling Mac game of all time, shipping more than six million copies since its first appearance in 1993. Today though, it’s a very different story. Few big games are developed solely, or even initially, on the Mac, and most must prove their worth on the PC before being ported to Mac OS X. This leads to long delays in production, such that while Halo was available on the original Xbox in 2001 and soon after that on the PC, it wasn’t until early 2004 that it made it to the Mac.
Mac games houses have been dealt a further blow with the release of Boot Camp, which makes it p ossible to run Windows natively on newer Mac systems. This should make it possible to run most, if not all, Windows games directly without having to wait for them to be ported across. This is clearly great news for Mac-based gamers, but not so good for the Mac-based games developer community.
Vista
If you prefer to play games from the comfort of a swivel chair, Vista retains the upper hand thanks to the PC’s wider choice of titles and support for the Universal Controller.
8
Apple
Always the poor relation of the games world, the Mac will likely be further marginalised now Apple hardware can run a native Windows environment. We can’t see OS X keeping even its current portion of
the market.
5
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| Macs can run the latest games, but they'll come out on Vista first, if at all. |
Bundled applications
Both Tiger and Vista ship with a useful range of bundled applications, many of which are directly comparable. Tiger’s TextEdit is as much a fully featured word processor as Vista’s WordPad. Apple Mail and Windows Mail (the successor to Outlook Express) both handle communications while stripping out junk, and it’s impossible to judge either Apple iCal or Windows Calendar as better than the other.
Others are easier to separate: Internet Explorer 7 is more accomplished - and more widely accepted - than Safari; Vista’s backup service is more comprehensive than Apple’s alternative, which is free only if you pay an extra $140 a year for its online .Mac service; and, while Windows Messenger lets you chat with other people over MSN, Tiger’s iChat piggybacks AOL’s AIM service. Even QuickTime, Apple’s own media player, is supplied as a limited edition that won’t play movies full-screen without a paid-for upgrade.
In all, it’s a fairly poor showing for the Mac, despite the inclusion of the ageing AppleWorks. Fortunately, the Mac is as well served as Windows PCs when it comes to free alternatives. Firefox and Thunderbird both run as well under Tiger as they do on Vista, and the X11 windowing environment, means open-source suites such as OpenOffice and The GIMP can plug some gaps.
Less obvious stars of OS X are AppleScript, a true plain-English and widely used programming language, and Automator, a drag-and-drop routine generator that hooks into a wide range of mainstream applications.
Yet Vista still fares better. Its range of bundled games is more extensive, and Windows Mail can handle Usenet as well as plain email. It’s bundled with Media Center for playing DVDs, music, videos and photos, while the equivalent on a Mac - Front Row - is available only on new hardware. It also bundles a range of apps that you’d have to pay for on the Mac - Windows Photo Gallery and Movie Maker are free, but the Mac equivalents, iPhoto and iMovie, are part of the $120 iLife suite.
Vista
Media Center, Movie Maker and Photo Gallery are superb additions to the core installation and add to the value of the Windows platform, while fully featured tools such as Backup make for a considerable saving.
8
Apple
A poor showing when it comes to bundled apps. Fortunately, Tiger’s low asking price goes some way to making up the difference, but even then the hobbled QuickTime and Backup tools are
a slap in the face.
5
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| Macs can run the latest games, but they'll come out on Vista first, if at all. |
Usability
Fundamentally different approaches set Vista and OS X apart. Take Vista’s Sidebar, for example, which runs up one edge of the screen, and is home to a series of Gadgets. Tiger’s equivalent is the Dashboard, a separate layer that slides in full-screen on a hotkey press. With Vista you have permanent
access to the Gadgets, but with Tiger you’re not losing any Desktop real-estate, which could be an important consideration.
There’s an overlap in navigation too, which in Vista has been overhauled. Location bars now feature breadcrumb trails, with menus that drop down from
each divider so, when you’re changing your locale, clicking the > between Control panel and Regional Settings slides out a menu showing every other applet in the Panel.
Tiger is similar yet screen-greedy and less elegant, with a column-based view for sliding horizontally through your folders. However, it falls way behind Vista when it comes to tweaking the layout. Vista’s file browser is modeless - a Views slider lets you slip from tiles or details through four sizes of icon without taking your finger off the mouse. It’s a lot smoother than in XP and beats Tiger’s clunky two-phase approach.
Both Tiger and Vista hang their file systems off the back of a search engine, and both are improved if you add keyword metadata to your files. Both also cater well for physical and visual impairments. Tiger integrates VoiceOver to read out screen prompts, a hardware zoom that enlarges and scrolls the whole screen, and flashing dialogs to supplement audible warnings. All good stuff, but you have to understand your needs before you begin.
Vista, on the other hand, has Ease of Access tools that walk you through a series of questions and then draws up a list of suggested tweaks you should make to your system.
Vista
Speedy navigation and sensible use of limited screen space make Explorer a more effective file browser than Tiger’s Finder, but the Sidebar remains a space hogger.
8
Apple
A clunky set of folder preferences and the inability to search the Web from your Desktop means Apple is slipping behind in the interface race, but some will prefer Dashboard to Vista’s Sidebar.
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Mobility
Security is a top priority for Apple, with FileVault encrypting the data on your drive. Vista has a similar feature in the shape of BitLocker, which takes advantage of a Trusted Platform Module on the notebook’s motherboard to store your encryption keys.
With the hardware and OS developed in tandem, Apple can ensure that every element in its platform works in harmony. As such, Tiger will learn your computing habits and use this information to tweak power consumption and maximise your battery life.
This is simple and effective, but PC notebook makers can take advantage of Vista SideShow to build small screens into the back of a notebook to display critical information such as battery power and status messages.
Vista groups all your location variables in the Mobility Center, so you can switch display brightness, power management and other settings in a single hit. In Tiger, most settings are detected automatically - plug in a DVI monitor, for example, and it will remember whether the last time you did that you were spanning or mirroring your desktop. Likewise, you can keep all your network connections active all the time, so that when you roam from one environment to another your laptop will automatically use the most appropriate set.
To get the best advantage from mobile Mac use, though, you should sign up to Apple’s $140-a-year .Mac service, which synchronises your address book, calendar, email and web bookmarks across multiple machines. It’s tied into Tiger’s iSync utility, which will simultaneously manage data on handheld devices.
Vista’s Windows Collaboration enables you to create a secure ad hoc network of up to 10 people, who can see each other’s screens and share common files. Bonjour, a zero-configuration networking protocol built into all versions of Mac OS X, works in a similar fashion, automatically sensing other machines on a network.
Finally, Apple retains control of perhaps the world’s most important portable computing device: the iPod. On the flip-side, there’s no Mac equivalent of a Tablet PC, which will be integrated into various versions of Vista.
Vista
An ambitious roll-out builds on the success of Tablet PC, allowing hardware manufacturers to build mobility features into future designs, while ad hoc networking should let us collaborate wherever we want.
8
Apple
iSync was degraded in the move to Tiger as Apple tried to push us towards paying for .Mac, thus clouding the once simple task of keeping multiple mobile devices in line. Bonjour, however, is both useful and
idiot-proof.
6
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| The .Mac service is neat, but Vista still takes the mobility crown. |
Both Vista and Tiger are massive upgrades on each system’s previous incarnation. For the most part, the changes are for the better, but the fact remains that in day-to-day use, most people will find that there’s little
to choose between them. While Vista may boast many features that simply don’t appear in Tiger, Apple’s operating system performs admirably in both the business and home environments.
Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, the 80:20 rule applies: 80 percent of us will only ever use 20 percent of the total number of features an OS could deliver. As such, 80 percent or more would find Tiger suits them down to the ground. It falls behind in terms of bundled applications, but at $200 it’s keenly priced, and it runs on what many Windows users would consider ancient kit: try running Vista on a five-year-old PC and you won’t get great results.
That could be a problem for Microsoft. Vista is likely to be priced higher and doesn’t have the benefit of a rampant iPod market to push its brand. Apple is stronger now than it ever has been and, although we couldn’t get hold of Leopard - the next version of Mac OS X - for a direct comparison with Vista, the two are expected to launch at the same time. And, if the rumours are to be given any credence, Leopard will give Vista a serious run for its money.
But, on the basis of what we know now, Vista has the edge. With its revamped navigation, Vista pulls Windows ahead of Mac OS X at the most fundamental level and, although the search technologies work in broadly similar ways, we feel that Tiger’s Spotlight still needs some work and should certainly follow Vista’s lead in incorporating Web search. That said, Tiger’s Dashboard is a more elegant solution to the problem of keeping information at your fingertips than Vista’s extravagant Desktop Sidebar, particularly if you’re running on a smaller screen.
If you want a machine for play as much as for work, it’s Vista all the way. Its superior games support and Media Center’s live TV integration mean it’s better placed for the current leisure landscape than Tiger is with Front Row, not least because the latter comes only with new Apple hardware and isn’t available as a software upgrade.
The business benefits of the two platforms provides a tricky dilemma.
IT buyers shouldn’t shy away from the Mac: its lower cost of entry and the fact that it will run on older machines should mean a lower total cost of ownership in the mid to long-term. It’s also stable, secure and runs industry-standard applications, such as Photoshop, InDesign and Microsoft Office, plus it’s exceptionally quick to learn and so shouldn’t pose any serious problems where staff retraining is concerned. And yet Windows is the widely accepted business platform, and it takes a brave IT buyer to move away from the industry standard.
With Apple hardware now supporting Boot Camp, a utility that allows you to run both Mac OS X and Windows as native operating systems, the best solution for many could even be a mixed-platform environment, with hardware from Apple and software from Microsoft. If compatibilities with Vista and Apple’s EFI are sorted out, this isn’t as implausible as it may sound right now.
What’s with the big cats?
Tiger is the fourth iteration of Apple’s desktop operating system, Mac OS X. Its predecessors were Panther (OS X 10.3), Jaguar (OS X 10.2), Puma (OS X 10.1) and Cheetah (OS X 10.0). The next release will be Leopard (OS X 10.5). Throughout this feature, we’ve used the term Tiger when talking specifically about features found in Mac OS X 10.4, and Mac OS X when discussing features generic to the line-up as a whole.
Will you be able to run Vista?
Hardware manufacturers are already gearing up for the eventual roll-out of Windows Vista. Before buying a new PC, check it will meet the system requirements for running Microsoft’s next operating system when it’s available, using these links to CPU and GPU manufacturers’ Vista-specific pages:
CPUs
Intel
AMD
Via
GPUs
ATI
NVIDIA
S3
Via
Score summary
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Vista |
Apple |
|---|
Usability | 8 | 7 |
Security | 8 | 8 |
Entertainment | 9 | 7 |
Bundled apps | 8 | 5 |
Ecosystem | 10 | 9 |
Mobility | 8 | 6 |
Gaming | 8 | 5 |
Business | 9 | 8 |
This article appeared in the
August 2006 issue of PC Authority.