I’ve been using Mac OS X for about six months now, and really love it. Mac OS X is built on top of Unix technology. My computer has crashed exactly once in that time. Once.
Stewart Alsop questions the effectiveness of Microsoft’s ability to “innovate,” comparing Windows XP (which just shipped a few months ago) with Unix (which was developed in the ’70s):
XP really isn’t all that new or stable. XP is based on what used to be called Windows NT, which Microsoft developed over many years as a competitive response to Unix. Yet XP requires you to do things Unix doesn’t require, like restart your machine when you install a new application… This reflects the design of the core of the operating system, called the kernel. The kernel in XP is not fully protected against what application programs might do; the kernel in Unix is.
As he points out at the end of the article, when you have $40 billion in cash in the bank, you don’t have to do squat.
I like Mac OS X.