Comparing OS X to Windows Vista is a correlation fraught with peril. There is so much to like in each operating system that picking a winner in each category was difficult and bound to get me flamed. What follows is a non-exhaustive examination of OS X Tiger and Vista. Clearly, Leopard is on its way and will change the game considerably, but since Steve hasn’t called to tell us when or where that’s happening, we’re going to work with what we have.
So, without further ado, let the OS X vs. Vista bumfight begin.

UI – This is one we can really sink our teeth into. As we said before, Vista is very attractive and easy to grasp. Whereas OS X still has a number of strangeMac-isms stuck in its craw (red, yellow, and green window buttons, anyone?), Windows is extremely straightforward.
First, I rarely use Finder and instead have taken to using Path Finder, a richer and more information-packed shell. If Vista wins in this case it is in the preview functions available at the bottom of the window. While both operating systems have strikingly similar shells, this simple bar at the bottom saves hours of frustration. Clearly, this can be modified in both OSes, but out of the box this is a big plus for Vista.

Otherwise, the rest of Vista’s improvements are purely aesthetic. I consider Vista “better looking” than OS X at this point, but only in the Aero UI and only at a cosmetic level. Not surprisingly, many of the improvements stop at the application level and it is quite disconcerting to see old applications like Paint show up inside Aero’s fancy glass UI. OS X is an older UI and it now shows. It’s hard to fault Apple’s older standards, but they do have a lot of catching up to do in terms of visual presentation of data.

Winner: VISTA

Security – Here’s a tough one. Which is more secure? The operating system with no known viruses or an operating system built on a platform that, at last count, had five bajillion (this number is based on strict statistics) security holes? That said, Vista is a definitely a step in the right direction. You cannot do anything—run a new program, install a piece of hardware, or blow your nose—without Vista pinging you on it. Vista also includes virus and adware scanners—which some say lock out competitors products—and advanced phishing protection.

But OS X has one thing going for it: our trust in its innate goodness. I’ll download anything and everything, secure in the knowledge that I won’t get logic bombed into oblivion. Worms are rebuffed and Internet hacks are almost non-existent. While Vista will definitely have some sort of major exploit emerge within the next year, with OS X I can visit porn site after porn site without worrying that some insane Direct X application will destroy my files. I still don’t feel comfortable enough with Vista to trust it to keep me safe. That’s why I got my Dad a Mac Mini. His XP machine was so full of junk that it was almost unusable. Now he is able to do everything and I don’t have to act as his 24/7 tech support drone.

Winner: OS X

Speech Recognition – Hands down, Vista. Voice recognition in OS X is an afterthought at best and cripple-ware at worst . I’m not big on voice recognition, but I do know when someone has gotten it right.

Winner: VISTA

Web Browsing – Internet Explorer 7 is quite nice, but it can’t beat Mozilla on either platform. Whereas both operating systems have had tabbed browsing, through Mozilla, for years, for IE to introduce it this late in the game is a travesty. Out of the box, Safari is considerably quicker and easier to manage than Vista’s icon-heavy IE 7. Thankfully IE 7 has improved phishing detection, but it’s too little too late in this case.
On the other hand, Safari has a lot of problems browsing much of the web. Sites fail to load properly almost by default and as a result. the browser has distinct usability issues .

TIE

Multimedia Authoring – Vista is blessed with a very powerful set of media authoring tools that rival or improve on the iLife collection. Vista’s Photo Gallery photo organization tool is considerably approved over XP’s “Ummm… stick them in that folder over there” system of organization while the Movie Maker and DVD Maker applications owe much of their usability to iLife itself. You can easily create multimedia with Vista out of the box.
The Vista Suite - Photo Gallery, MovieMaker, and DVD Maker

Nevertheless, iLife is still the gold standard for powerful movie and DVD authoring along with intelligent photo browsing and sharing. With iPhoto, you can share photos with other Macs on the network, for example, and iMovie and iDVD are powerful without being overwhelming. I would be comfortable editing professional video using iMovie. I don’t feel the same comfort with Vista’s applications.

Winner: OS X

Widgets/Gadgets – This is a tough one. Apple’s Widgets are hobbled because they require a single click to enable. Clearly, Vista’s always on sidebar of gadgets is considerably more useful than the OS X Dashboard but the glut of available widgets makes us like OS X a bit better. Again, it is too early to tell, but at this point I prefer Vista’s sidebar over Dashboard.

Winner: VISTA

Kernel – Clearly it is difficult to compare as Windows and OS X are built on two divergent technologies that are years old and, in some cases, not very well documented. As a layman and, at least in a current SDK and kernel development sense, a non-programmer, I can only say that OS X is based on a FreeBSD and Mach kernel while Vista is based on NT and its attendant technologies.
Windows has a number of interesting improvements added to its presentation layer as well as its search system. These run neck-and-neck or a close second to XNU (that’s what they call the OS X kernel. Who knew?) One major issue, however, is the graceful mounting and unmounting of external devices. Windows has OS X beat hands down thanks to differences in the file system and the way disk activity is given priority in the kernel. This is a huge pet peeve.

OS X is opaquely open-source while Windows Vista is ostensibly not. While a direct value cannot be placed on either of those two descriptions, fans of Linux will definitely be comfortable with OS X while Windows fans can go years without touching the command line. Both of these operating systems are “graphical” in the broadest sense, which has kept the mass of kernel functionality hidden from the average user.

TIE

Performance – Now we get down to brass tacks. Which operating system “works” better? I’ve used OS X every day for the past two years and used XP regularly before that. On a two year old Pentium 4 machine with an equally aged graphics card, Vista runs like a champ. This is very strange to me and my brain is having difficulties processing it. I have a Mac Pro with two Dual Core Xeon processors and 1GB of DDR2 RAM and the PC is running at about 3.20 GHz. So what is going on here?

Like it or not, operating systems accrue a number of slowdown issues over time. This is a completely fresh Vista install while the Mac Pro has been in constant use for about four months. Does this excuse poor performance on Apple’s part? No, but it does give us pause. If Vista is this peppy out of the box, how peppy will it be once the disk and registry are full of garbage? I can’t answer that right now, but for my money I would say Vista is considerably more impressive, from a productivity standpoint, than this Mac Pro. Would I switch? Probably not—I love everything OS X has to offer. Is Vista a great OS? Yes.

Winner: VISTA

Verdict – In the context of this examination, we see that Vista is currently pouncing all over OS X Tiger in most scenarios. Microsoft has considerably improved its flagship product and should be applauded for taking so many modern operating system concepts and dragging them front and center. That said, what should you buy? Clearly, everyone’s use case is different. As a certified Mac fanboy, I would recommend OS X to anyone who has no interest in experiencing the many negatives that drove me away from XP in the first place, namely weak security and a lack of media authoring tools. Vista is currently in its infancy, however, and the jury is still out on security and ease-of-use over time. If you have to use Windows, use Vista. If you want to join millions of happy Macites, go right ahead. The choice, as they say, is yours.

Well that just depends on who you ask, and if the person is myself then you are going to get the following four reasons why I personally would not even bother with Windows Vista.

…Windows Vista won’t run Microsoft Word any faster, won’t make your presentations look any better, and if my own experience is any indication then Vista is not going to make managing your PC any easier either…. To make matters even worse this *new* version of Windows is really just the Windows Server 2003 kernel in colorful clothing with some snazzy new mini-applications…. Additionally, my own informal tests on my Macbook Pro seem to indicate that Vista upgrades will likely run existing applications slower than XP for many folks forcing the purchase of new hardware just to “keep up”. Bottom line; Vista does not add any substantial new features for new or existing Windows users and may even be a significant reduction in speed for some users who dare to upgrade from XP on today’s hardware.

…One of the first things you are going to notice is the new interface which is a major case for the bifocal lens thanks to the excessive use of transparency. Unnecessary eye candy is everywhere, and seems to not add or enhance any features that might make users more productive. No well thought out GUI tricks like OSX’s expose here, just pure bling that quickly becomes annoying on all but the fastest PCs. The bottom line; Windows Vista does not bring anything new to the table other than more gizmo-style features that only serve to get in your way when you are trying to actually get some work done.

…Security will still be a major problem - Since Microsoft decided not to build Windows Vista on the longhorn kernel (which was rumored to be a complete rewrite, or close to it) they ended up leaving many of the known problem areas of Windows XP (and other previous versions) still in place…. This layer is visible to the user in the form of dialog boxes that pop up every time you require “administrator” or direct access to system resources, something that seems far too common on the Windows platform…. Bottom line; constantly annoying pop-ups intending to improve security will actually result in even greater problems as users begin to blindly click “Ok” even more than they already do now.

…The reality is that you can do everything promised by Windows Vista in Windows XP today with less hassle and in most cases faster than you could in Windows Vista on the same hardware. If you already use Linux or Mac OSX then Vista is not going to impress you anyway so don’t even bother taking a look.

New systems running Vista are heartier still, typically having a dual-core processor of around 2 GHz and 1 Gbyte of memory.

…By encouraging users to put systems to sleep rather than turning them off, the systems will seemingly boot much faster.

…The system, made by Polywell, contained an Asus M2 NBP-VM CSM motherboard with a 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ dual-core processor and 1 Gbyte of memory. Engineers benchmarked the system using PassMark Software’s PerformanceTest benchmark, which can be used free by anyone for up to 30 days.

The PerformanceTest software runs multiple tests on the CPU, graphics subsystem, memory and disk drives to generate composite average scores for each category.

…Running XP, the system earned a PassMark rating of 468.3; that’s 16.4 percent faster than Vista, not an insignificant difference. Race car drivers will go to great lengths to shave a few tenths off their elapsed times but rarely perform upgrades that hurt performance. Yet upgrading to Vista can lessen a system’s performance by as much as 58 percent, depending on what’s being processed.

…More specifically, Vista beat XP at CPU string sorting, 2D graphics shapes, simple 3D graphics, medium 3D graphics, memory writes and random disk seeks.

For CPU string sorting, XP processed 2064.8 thousand strings per second, while Vista processed 2080.1 thousand strings per second. For the 2D graphics shapes test, XP processed 29.2 thousand shapes per second, and Vista processed 30.4 thousand shapes per second. For the simple 3D graphics test, Vista processed 125.8 frames per second, and XP processed 134.0 frames per second.

In the medium 3D graphics test, XP processed 16.0 frames per second, while Vista processed 18.6 frames per second. For the memory write test, XP processed 950.5 MBps and Vista processed 954.6 MBps. And for the random disk seek test, XP processed 2.91 MBps, while Vista processed 3.88 MBps.

…For the 2D graphics lines test, Vista processed 76.3 thousand lines per second, whereas XP processed 138.3 thousand lines per second. For the 2D graphics rectangles test, Vista processed 39.7 thousand images per second, and XP processed 94.3 thousand images per second.

…In the 2D graphics fonts and text test, Vista processed 115.2 operations per second, while XP processed 172.7 operations per second. For the small block memory allocation test, Vista processed 1349.3 MBps and XP processed 1861.6 MBps. For the large RAM memory test, Vista performed 127.2 operations per second, and XP performed 229.2 operations per second. For the sequential disk read test, Vista processed 32.4 MBps, whereas XP processed 65.4 MBps. For the sequential disk write test, Vista processed 39.4 MBps and XP processed 60.6 MBps.

The significant differences in these individual tests resulted in significant differences for the overall 2D graphics mark and overall disk mark…. The differences in those two main categories greatly contributed to the 16.4 percent overall difference between the two operating systems.

After running PerformanceTest under Vista, engineers installed and ran Microsoft’s XML Mark 11 test to measure the .Net runtime performance…. The XML Mark 11 test can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Download Center.

…The XML Mark test was originally written by Sun Microsystems about two years ago to show Java’s XML processing speed relative to .Net 1.1’s XML parsing. With the release of .Net 2.0, however, Microsoft adopted the test and was able to show that C# code ran just as fast as Java code.

Because Vista includes .Net 3.0, engineers had to recompile the C# code using Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), from the November 2006 CTP version. Microsoft does not have a finished .Net 3.0 framework out yet for Visual Studio developers.

…For XML Mark to compile and run properly on both operating systems, engineers added .Net 3.0 as an additional prerequisite to .Net 2.0, instead of eliminating .Net 2.0 from the compilation process completely.

…The XML Mark showed that XML applications run faster on XP than on Vista when both operating systems use .Net 3.0 runtime…. With the DOM parser test, XP ran about 20 percent faster than Vista. However, Vista ran about 3 percent slower with the stream parser (SAX) test.

…The DOM test provided a more precise view of .Net’s memory architecture because of the large objects it created and deleted.

…And unless it’s imperative that users have an operating system with a more exciting look and feel, XP will offer better performance than Vista.

I need it sooooooo bad I am just going to burst all over the place like a ripe pimple if I don’t get me some Vista soon. Now, as to the whole “Vista doesn’t do anything you can’t already do with XP” bit; well, you can’t just go quantifying needs like that…. If you throw me just a bit of Vista, I’m sure I can get it together enough to finish this…… So, listen - Microsoft needs us to buy Vista for the sake of their profits. What’s good for Microsoft is good for the consumer.

…You already have XP, and alternatives like Linux are free.”: Time is money.

…• “It’s outrageously overpriced”: When something is this good, it doesn’t matter the cost…. I mean, how can it be overpriced, if money is infinite?

…I mean People really really like buying new kit.

…• “Applications that don’t work”: This is merely an opportunity to buy more stuff, and people love buying stuff (See #4).

• “It’s a big fat target”: Now this is exactly the kind of insensitive, prejudiced rubbish I’d expect from APCMag…. Besides, if Linux were as popular as Windows, and made it impossible to get anything done without being administrator, and integrated Internet Explorer with the operating system kernel, and included gigabytes of legacy code and nasty hacks just to make sure stuff written for Win95 would still run, then Linux would be a pretty damn easy target too.

• “UAC”: Look, all UAC means is that the user has to click “OK” a few more times than usual. What’s the big deal - users are used to clicking “OK” anyway, what with Windows having wizards for every damn thing, and pretty soon users don’t even think about it, or read the dialog or anything, so it’s really not much of an inconvenience, once the user is properly trained. And the extra security of having that enormous “OK” button to click on is very much worth it.

…nothing more than a liability to you, the user”: Now, hang on a minute. I may not know what big words like “liability” and “to” mean, but I’m pretty sure you’re saying something bad about DRM, and I for one won’t stand for it. DRM is a philanthropic effort on the part of movie studios and record companies to ensure that the consumer gets the best possible product for their money - none of this nasty pirate stuff.

…• “The Draconian License”: Hey, it’s not easy to eke out a meagre living as a predatory software monopoly, on the bones of your arse, scratching in the dirt for some meagre crumbs, and along comes the callous, uncaring user who suddenly wants to buy/build a new computer without buying a new copy of Windows…. Remember, What’s good for Microsoft is good for the consumer.