A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective

Stability

Now, it's time for the hot button issue, the one issue that Mac users use against PC users (and vice versa) all the time: stability. To put a few misconceptions to rest, I will resort to the timely bulleted list. I hope by this point, I've shown that I can definitely appreciate both a Mac and a PC platform, and thus, readers will view the following statements as pretty darn impartial:

• OS X crashes
• Windows XP crashes
• My G5 machine crashes a bit less than any of my Windows XP machines

Now, let me qualify those three statements - I'll start at the bottom. Apple has it very easy. They have complete control over the hardware and drivers that go into every machine they build, they don't have to deal with multiple chipsets for a particular platform, and they don't even have to deal with multiple video card vendors. Apple controls every aspect of the hardware and software that goes into their computers. There are no strange driver or BIOS revisions out of Taiwan that don't play well with some configurations, and there are no worries about memory timings set too aggressively causing even the slightest bit of instability (without the appropriate timings, DDR400 will not boot in a G5). The PC world is much, much different; everything that Apple doesn't have to worry about or deal with, PC users may not worry about, but they definitely do have to deal with. How many times have you bought a cheaper piece of hardware from a no-name manufacturer because it fit your budget? It's not as common now because prices have gone down so much, but a few years ago, it was definitely very popular - I know. I did it. Sometimes you'd luck out, and other times, you'd have one component in your system that would always cause compatibility problems or stability issues. For me, it was an old Opti sound card; then, it was a no-name 430VX motherboard. And tracking down those kinds of problems can be very difficult because the symptoms don't always point to the culprit. I've always said that if you use the right hardware, a Windows box can be just as stable as any other machine out there - and my systems have supported that. I wouldn't reboot my system for months if it didn't have any problems. It was always a bad driver install, power outage or a program gone awry that forced a restart. People used to complain about Windows NT/2000 as a server platform because of stability; we've actually had more outages on our Linux servers than on our Windows servers. Not saying that Linux is a bad OS, but we know our Windows servers, and we know what hardware works best under them, and thus, once assembled and properly maintained, we had no real issues with them. >br?
OS X is built on a very solid core and it does handle individual applications crashing much better than Windows does. I've never had to reboot the entire system because one application crashed. It's also much better about restarting Finder (the equivalent of Explorer) if it crashes. It is things like these that make OS X a bit more "stable" of a platform than Windows, but also, remember that the tight quality control that Apple has over the components that go into their systems does also play a very large part in assuring stability.

The end result is that my Mac is a bit more stable than my PCs. It's not night and day, and the Mac does crash, just like my PCs do - it just crashes a little less frequently.

As far as hardware stability and failures go, I've heard horror stories about dead/dying G5s on Apple's support boards. I was honestly worried when I started reading through the threads; thankfully, I have yet to encounter any hardware issues with the G5, but I do recognize that there are users out there that have had serious issues with their systems. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) without much experience in this regard, there's not much I can say to Apple's hardware quality control, but I view Apple just like any other hardware vendor - there's no way that everything to come out of a company is going to be perfect. It's how they minimize the imperfections and deal with them when they occur that matter the most.