David Pogue Takes On Vista

guruevi writes to let us know about a review of Microsoft Vista in the NY Times, in the form of an article and a video, by the known Mac-friendly David Pogue. In the article, Pogue recasts Microsoft's marketing mantra for Vista: "Clear, Confident, Connected" becomes "Looks, Locks, Lacks." Pogue writes that Vista is such a brazen rip-off of Mac OS X that "There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives' ears to power the Polar Express." But the real fun is in the video, in which Pogue attempts to prove that Vista is not simply an OS X clone.

Check links

[Anonymous Coward]

kdawson, the link to video not working...can you fix it?

Broken Link

[aardwolf64]

Since the poster broke the link to the video, it is available here:
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a718 aabc2:10f959c69f8:-76e0&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37 920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166446268999&mp=FLV&cp f=false&fvn=9&fr=121806_075108_718aabc2x10f959c69f 8xw76df&rdm=415999.3568509814 [nytimes.com]

What???

[brunes69]

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if that was either total bunk, or gross misrepresentation by the author.

The idea of using a flash drive to supplement main memory is assenine for a number of reasons. Like the above, yanking it out would leave the OS in a totally assed up state. As well, flash only has ~ 1-2 million write cycles. Your thumb drive would be toast in just a week or two if you were using it as RAM.

Re:Video brokenness

[erlando]

You could read the article and find out, that the link [feedroom.com] is prominently displayed in the lefthand side. But then again.. This is Slashdot... ;-)

Re:What???

[_xeno_]

No, it's real. He's parroting Microsoft's selling of the feature. It's called Windows ReadyBoost [microsoft.com] (they helpfully don't offer an anchor to link directly to it, it's there, scroll down). Another poster [slashdot.org] offered a FAQ about ReadyBoost [msdn.com] on an MSDN blog, where the blogger assures his readers that Microsoft has worked out the issues involved with limited writes and removing the drive.

To quote the linked Microsoft advertising page:

Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. Windows ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device, such as a USB thumb drive, to improve system performance without opening the box.

They really are selling it as "add a USB drive to improve your system's memory."

Re:Or in other words...

[walt-sjc]

Nah - they are competitors even in the eyes of the courts / law, but that doesn't meant that MS isn't a monopoly for legal reasons...

Remember, a dictionary definition of "monopoly" is not the same thing as the legal definition as far as anti-trust laws are concerned. MS's 95%+ of the desktop market is "good enough" for them to still be considered a monopoly in the marketplace even though they are not the "exclusive" provider of operating systems.

it's a pagefile cache, ReadyBoost

[_Shorty-dammit]

a recent typical USB thumbdrive is something like 10x faster at random access of 4KB chunks than even the fastest hard drives. So Vista can use one of these USB drives as a cache for the pagefile, speeding up a system quite a bit *IF* it is using the pagefile quite a bit. That is, if you're a bit low on RAM and the pagefile is getting hit pretty hard. Pop in a USB stick and allow it to use a portion for this feature and you should get a pretty decent boost. If, however, you already have tons of RAM you aren't likely to see as big of a gain. On my 2GB machine I can't tell the difference with a stick in or not. If it only had 1GB, or god forbid 512MB or less, perhaps this feature would be more noticable.

Re:What???

[aauu]

You should investigate before babbling ignorantly. The usb stick is a mirror of the data paged to disk. Pulling the stick just means the system uses the disk for reads of the data. This only works when the memory sticks are faster than disk and have adequate space. The stick is tested for speed and capaciy before such usage. This is a significant benefit to those systems (laptops and older systems) that have limited expansion capability for ram. This is a capability that I could use daily as I routinely overcommit ram at work in windows and *nix laptops. Try running office apps, Oracle, MySQL and SQL server with development tools as well as several virtual machines on a laptop with one gig ram.

Using usb sticks for this purpose will take a while to do 1 million cycles paging unless you have completely overcommited memory to the point of continous thrashing. In such case you will melt down your desktop low duty cycle drives well before the stick fails. My usb stick on my personal laptop did not become toast even after months of running Vista.

Windows is a total mystery to those who only barely understand just enough *nix to run a live cd with kde/gnome. Windows and *nix are functionally equivalent, just minor syntax differences to access the semantics. After your fifth OS, its all the same, just syntax. Except for those who use FreeBSD or Gentoo with complete source package installation by compiling everything including the kernel, you're just a binary whore beholden to Red Hat, Novell, etc. instead of Microsoft.

Re:I Like It!

[_Hiro_]

Two comments:

I can put Tiger on a G4 and run with it... Last I heard anything below a P4 / Athlon XP would have issues with Vista. (My memory is a little fuzzy, but I seem to remember the G4 coming about a little after PIII / Athlon) Have you tested Vista on any older hardware (even without Aero) to see how it performs?

And 2nd is that 10.4 isn't 64-bit yet.... 10.5 is.

Re:Some...

[kalidasa]

I'd suggest that you watch the video. It's not the 3D graphics that he's talking about.

Also, I've had OS X on my laptop since July of 2001. Aqua was first released to the world in an OS X alpha build presented at MacWorld in January of 2000 [apple.com]. According to the Wikipedia article (if we can trust that), work on Vista started in May of 2001. And Aero (even if not by that name) has only been in Vista since build 4074 (according to the Wikipedia article on Aero); Paul Thurrott's images of that build are dated May 5, 2004.

So, some might "remember" that even before OS X was launched for its first version, the "Vista Road Map" had been published clearly stating that Aero has always been slated as part of the operating system - but they'd be remembering wrong.

Re:Some...

[Reverberant]

might [sic] remember that even before OS X was launched for its first version, the "vista" "road map" had been published clearly stating what major components would be part of Vista... "Aero" has always been slated as part of the opertating system.

The earliest I can find of any discussion of Longhorn's "advanced user interface" as part of the roadmap appears to be about 2003 timeframe [winsupersite.com]. Aqua was publicly revealed at Macworld 2000 San Francisco [wikipedia.org].

Re:Apple didn't do EVERYTHING first...

[Chrononium]

A few notes: 1. Glowing buttons were completed in Mac OS X long before WindowBlinds came up with it (August 2005). 2. As a former Apple employee, I know that we sure had Spotlight figured out to a large extent by the time that GDS came out. 3. The widget thing is pretty old, at least as old as the original Mac OS (sure, the technology and capabilities were not the same, but widgets really are supposed to be mini/assistant apps). Linux has quite naturally taken a liking to it and has a better "widget" system than either company, though (IMHO) not as easy to use. 4. Yup. Although, how could they not stay competitive and not include these apps? 5. I think that Expose likely corrupted their imaginations into what was possible with a 3D windowserver. I honestly believe that they didn't have anything better than Flip3D that wasn't already too similar to Expose.

Re:Without Apple

[drsmithy]

It's slower, [...]

OS X is the slowest mainstream OS on the market. Heck, Vista on an old ~500Mhz P3 laptop is snappier than OS X on my 1Ghz iBook. Windows XP or 2003 even more so. XP or 2003 on a 1Ghz iBook-era PC laptop absolutely trounces it.

OS X has a lot of nice features and very cool technology. Performance, however, is *not* a feature.

[...] not in fact cheaper, [...]

Well, that depends entirely on how much value you assign to Apple's software bundle and small hardware footprints. I assign little, since most of the functionality it bundles I'm not particularly interested in and I have loads of empty space under my desk. Add in the significant expense to get any sort of decent hardware flexibility and the comparison is even worse.

[...] particularly when you consider the average life of a Windows PC is about 3 years and a Mac, closer to 5 years.

Of course, the PC likely only cost 3/5th as much as the Mac in the first place or has 7/5 the performance.

This "Macs last longer" canard carries about as much truth as the "Macs have lower TCO" line. Apart from a handful of exceptions, over the last 5 - 7 years, PCs have consistently delivered more powerful hardware at equal or lower cost to Macs. Combine this with OS X's atrocious performance (especially in the past), lack of hardware options and configurability (especially on the low end) and the idea that Macs "last longer" in any sort of competitive sense is laughable. People may well hold onto their Macs for longer, but a Mac that's X years old will be slower in an absolute sense than a PC of equivalent age, and in a relative sense (how fast the whole package is) it will be slower still. You need a G5 class Mac with a gig of RAM or more for OS X to deliver the kind of responsiveness Windows XP can on ~1Ghz PCs with half as much memory.

Windows is so clearly a knockoff. It's the classic knockoff strategy, looks similar but lower quality.

For most of the things *I* care about, Windows does them better and has been doing them for longer. I fail to see where the "knockoff" is in this equation.

I don't use an Apple... I'm not a Mac zealot, and I'm speaking from experience in a corporate environment.

So where's the evidence of Macs having a lower TCO ? I'm not aware of any recent third-party studies, and I've done the maths before as to evaluate the possibility, with Macs being distinct losers (largely due to an incredibly rigid and uncustomisable hardware lineup).

Re:Corporate environments

[swillden]

Can any one of the Mac fanboys come up with one Fortune 500 company (other than Apple) that has deployed more than 50% Macs?

I'm a Linux fanboy, not a Mac fanboy, but I can: Genentech. 90% Mac and pushing towards 100%. I'm familiar with Genentech because I did some consulting for them last year. The Windows dominance on corporate desktops has much less to do with suitability for the task and much more to do with inertia and culture.

Re:Without Apple

[Azureflare]

OS X is the slowest mainstream OS on the market. Heck, Vista on an old ~500Mhz P3 laptop is snappier than OS X on my 1Ghz iBook. Windows XP or 2003 even more so. XP or 2003 on a 1Ghz iBook-era PC laptop absolutely trounces it.

I beg to differ. I worked at a part time job at my college in University Relations and they had an old 400mhz clunker with OS X on it. I didn't even know it was a 400mhz Mac. OS X was very responsive and pretty much the only thing that took a long time was the disk load time. Having run Vista personally I am wondering if you have even run Vista. The idea of running Vista, even Windows XP, on a 500mhz PC and trying to get anything done makes me shudder in fear and terror.

Well, that depends entirely on how much value you assign to Apple's software bundle and small hardware footprints. I assign little, since most of the functionality it bundles I'm not particularly interested in and I have loads of empty space under my desk. Add in the significant expense to get any sort of decent hardware flexibility and the comparison is even worse.

Yeah, that's why I build my own PC and use linux ;) I agree with you there.

but a Mac that's X years old will be slower in an absolute sense than a PC of equivalent age, and in a relative sense (how fast the whole package is) it will be slower still. You need a G5 class Mac with a gig of RAM or more for OS X to deliver the kind of responsiveness Windows XP can on ~1Ghz PCs with half as much memory.

Windows XP on a 1ghz PC is fine if you just browse the web and edit word documents, but it's sluggishly slow, especially if you have an antivirus agent and are trying to do multiple things at once. A G5 Mac is incredibly powerful and responsive. Some guys at my part time work had one and I was blown away by how smooth everything was (they use a lot of multimedia apps like Photoshop, the Macromedia suite, etc.) I've had direct experience of both of those types of hardware and IME at any rate, I found the opposite to be true.

For most of the things *I* care about, Windows does them better and has been doing them for longer. I fail to see where the "knockoff" is in this equation.

I'm not sure that's the issue here. We're talking about Vista. The eyecandy in Vista is the part of the product that is being marketed to customers, and appears to be the only interesting feature that Microsoft was interested in completing. Personally, *I* don't care about anything in Vista either. That's why I'm sticking with Windows 2000 and Windows XP on my parents' machines. Windows XP just got pretty stable. After the horrors Microsoft brought with Windows XP I really don't think I'm going to upgrade to Vista for a long time. Say, 5 years.

with Macs being distinct losers (largely due to an incredibly rigid and uncustomisable hardware lineup).

Wait wait, wouldn't uncustomizable hardware be a lower cost of ownership, because you don't spend money on upgrades every 6 months?

I can tell you right now that I will likely never have a mac for a desktop. I know I can get more value if I build it myself, since Intel's offerings for desktops are pretty affordable now and I enjoy having more control over my desktop. However, if I get a new laptop, it will probably be a Macbook Pro. Those things are really sweet. I would get it for the screen alone. I hope they can get the graphics drivers for linux on the macbook fully working, because that's what I really want on there.

Re:Or in other words...

[Moofie]

Wow. Apple was so never anywhere near bankruptcy. That investment was a settlement of a lead-pipe cinch lawsuit Apple was prepared to bring against Microsoft. The money was chump change.

Frankly, I think Apple should have gone ahead with the suit. They had enough cash on hand to weather the storm, but didn't have the clear way forward.

Shoulda woulda coulda...

Re:Or in other words...

[blugu64]

I love it when people drag this up, from your article.

"Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content,"

Apple was not about to go bankrupt. Microsoft was essentially buying the right to have Internet Explorer installed on Macintosh computers as the default Web Browser.

Re:Or in other words...

[NoCoolNickLeft]

They've never had a better product than Apple has and they stubbornly continue to polish that turn of a system in the hopes that someday it'll be shiny.

Reading /. for two years now, never even saw the need to reply any post. Somebody always wrote what I'd have written. But this time is different. And sorry for the english, us krauts are not entirely talented when it comes to that matter. :-) Of course Microsoft once had a much better product than Apple! Let me kick some buzzwords: protected memory. preemptive multitasking. real 32bit multi-user-system. command line (yeah, well cmd, but at least it's a command line at all). Now you tell me where these things were on OS7, OS8 or even 9??? WindowsNT had them all! to me any OS before X from Apple wasn't even a real operating system :-D And to all the others who always say Apple is SO innovative: just think about it this way for a minute: OSX-Developers that are really on Apple's payroll don't even do the Core-Work on the OS! The entire Kernel is developed by the open source community, let alone all the core-applications and libraries. Apple would have NEVER been Apple making the swith to x86 in such a (seemingly) short amount of time. Why? it has already been prepared for by the Open Darwin Team to make that step a long time before Apple even decided to change CPU-vendors. Yes, Apple doesn't even pay their Kernel developers! Microsoft does :-P What I want to say is: Apple is really developing much less than most people think, they don't "do OSX", they do it "the Apple Way": If it can be done elsewhere - let's do it elsewhere or buy it. If it doesn't fit our needs - we'll do it ourself. I don't have to mention that the iPod wasn't an idea anyone at Apple thought of? At the moment a "Mac" is mostly Intel Hardware running BSD. Apple DOES do a lot of the software and UI stuff, though. Don't get me wrong, I think Apple is a cool company making cool computers, but they're not half as "innovative" as most fanboys like to think. just my 2 cents. And talking about monopoly and stuff: apple is going to could very likely become sued by the country of denmark, sweden, norway and france for making the iPod only compatible with iTunes AND putting DRM on the Tracks from the Music Store. (But it's very likely that this is going to happen to MS and "Zune" too :-)