syn
Senior Member
You're having a difficult time counting. While Apple may now be bringing in an operating system that can't be installed on hardware that it stopped selling over three and a half years ago, Microsoft released a system that wouldn't run on systems selling concurrently that were labelled "Vista Capable". That's the distinction I am making. No one expects their existing computers to be indefinitely upgradeable, no matter what platform you're on, but people do expect to be able to update for a while, and people expect a new purchase to run the system that it promises on the box, which was not the case for a lot of what was on sale when Vista hit the market.
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"Vista Capable" meant that it could run an edition of Vista - not necessarily all of them. Unfortunately a lot of people didn't pay much attention and bought the wrong version for systems they had, which probably could only run the least taxing version.
I've said many times that Vista has a lousy launch. Microsoft made a big mistake with too many versions and not enough clarity. You'll get no argument from me. This is one of the great things Apple has done with the Mac OS - keeping it down to one simple, fully featured version.
My point, however, was that one of the supposed major benefits of the Mac OS, frequently repeated (to quote Metroman: "While new Windows releases have required increasingly more powerful hardware, new versions of OSX breath new life into old hardware.") is not really true anymore. Not only will Snow Leopard not breath life into old Power PC systems - it won't even run on those systems. People can keep bringing up Vista, but you won't find anyone defending Microsoft's ridiculous product schemes and confusing requirements. Vista is pretty much done. Windows 7 is the version you should be really looking at.
The fact is, Windows 7 increases the performance of my 5 year old XP system. Can you say the same for Snow Leopard? If you have a 5 year old Mac, you won't be getting any new OS upgrades. If you have 3 year old Mac, there's a good chance you won't be able to run the new OS either (Apple was still selling remaining Power PC systems until the end of August 2006).
Windows 7 has been shown to increase the performance of even older systems too. So I'd say at this point this is really not a disadvantage for Windows...in fact, I'd say they've jumped ahead of the Mac OS in that regard. Wouldn't you?
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