Apple vs. Windows

Apple vs. Windows, The age old battle.

For years, there has been a computer war going on between Mac OS and Windows. For a while windows and Mac were neck and neck until apple started to lose ground until over 90% of the market was owned by Windows. However, recently apple has begun a comeback which was sparked by the iPod. Now the two companies are once again fighting it out for the top spot in computers. I have researched the two products and I have come up with a guide to the pluses and minuses to the two systems.

Price: With little accessories, windows computers are usually cheapest. However once you get into mid and high-range computers, Apple takes over with an average of $200 less spent on the computer.

Hardware: Windows is the most widely used OS therefore, has the most hardware made for it, but not that much more than you think. Also, Most cheap windows computers start out with a single core processor, small amounts of memory, and a small hard drive. Apple makes their own computers, which start out with industry leading dual core processors. Their most popular computer, the iMac starts with a large 160 GB hard drive and can be upgraded to a 250 GB hard drive for 75 dollars. The upper level computers, the MacPros, have great multimedia capabilities. They can be upgraded to have 16 GB of fully buffered memory, 2TB of hard drive space, 2 Dual core 3Ghz processors, 2 Displays, 2 16x superdrives, and up to four graphics cards.

Operating System: Windows users, for years have had to worry about viruses and upgrade their os constantly because widows software offers little backwards compatibility. However, Mac OS users have had little virus problems and other problems due to the quality writing of the operating system. Mac OS is constantly checked for bugs and is not released until the problems are found and fixed. However, Windows does little alpha testing and sends it to you with as many problems as a beta version. Also windows vista plans to check software for pirating, and if you have registered your software improperly you may have to pay up or lose your precious computer.

Software: Windows for a long time has had the better software. It had Microsoft office and much more games than the Macs, however recently games have been written for Mac and windows and also companies like aspyr are translating windows to Mac code so apple users can play windows games. Also Microsoft office is now one of the many programs that are used on Macs.