Quote:
The multi-monitor support still isn't as good as it was way back in Windows 98. It's a resource hog. With Safari open with 2-3 tabs, a couple of chat windows in Adium, iTunes, and Mail, I have about 1.8GB of RAM free out of 4GB. In Windows with the equivalent open, I'm barely passing 1GB used. My battery life, on a relatively new battery since my original one blew up like a balloon and Apple wouldn't replace it despite it being a known issue and a fire hazard, has been cut by about an hour under Lion.
Whether an upgrade from Snow Leopard or a clean install, Lion feels significantly slower than Windows 7 on the same hardware. Sure, the multi-touch gestures are nice, but no amount of Mission Control or gesturing can make up for the lack of Windows style alt-tab that takes you exactly to the window you want versus going to the application.
The only good feature about Lion is "Versions". But who wouldn't have set up auto-saving of critical documents and such in applications that support it prior to Lion?
And, again, the worst part is that when I'm done doing what I need to do on my Mac, I can't fire up the latest game or blu-ray disc to relax.
As I've said before, there is literally nothing Windows can't do that OS X can. However, there is plenty Windows can do that OS X can't. Modern entertainment (games and blu-ray discs) being one among many features that OS X does not have.
Oh and love the fact that the cheapest Apple computer with an optical drive is now $1200. And its only a DVD writer. $1200 in the Windows world on a desktop would get you a a DVD writer with Lightscribe or some sort of other labeling technology and a blu-ray writer that can do DVDs as well. Among many other features, like USB 3.0, missing from Macs. Including the ability to replace your HDD without performing system surgery.
Ugh, going point-by-point is takin too long. I'm just going to block response.
Amount of RAM used by an app is not a measure of performance. At all. How quickly and easily the OS can release RAM makes a bigger difference. The point of RAM is to cache as much data as possible so instead of constantly reading from the hard drive it's reading from much faster memory. So using more memory isn't actually necessarily a bad thing. What would be bad is if the OS used up al your RAM and then was stingy about handing it over to something else. Which, oddly, it's not.
Lion is pretty **** slow for the first day or so for most people. Why? Because it's re-indexing your entire harddrive. There are a number of new Spotlight features and abilities that require this to happen so for as long as it takes your computer gets a very noticeable performance hit. Once it's done, however, it speeds right back up and on new hardware it runs better. Remember, unlike Windows, OS X focuses on the most current Apple hardware and optimizes for that.
Alt+Tab in Windows is Command+Tab in OS X. Or using Exposé, or Mission Control... So, yeah.
A lot of applications don't support auto-saving. It's not an overly common feature. Photoshop, for some stupid reason, has never implemented it despite the fact that it's known for crashing at the most inopportune moments. As for other features, what YOU find useful and what I find useful may be two different things. The full-disk encryption with FileVault 2 is very interesting to me. Because of Mission Control I'm actually using Spaces now and finding them rather handy. There are a number of other lesser-known features as well that I'm enjoying. So yeah, going back to "My preference is this thus it must be true for everyone," is not a valid argument for anything.
Also, note how at no point have I stated my opinion. So far just pointing out all the little factual inaccuracies and discrepancies you've made.
Oh, back to gaming and blu-ray. Well, as I said, gaming is a null-issue because you can run Windows on a Mac these days and more and more games are coming out on the Mac. Blu-ray is still a dead-in-the-water format. Oh, and USB 3.0. I love that one. People make such a fuss about it. Firstly, we have Thunderbolt. It's 10 Gbps instead of 6 Gbps and does daisy-chaining, target mode, video and audio, all of which USB 3.0 does not. USB 3.0 is, however, cheaper to implement. However, it's useless as a connection type.
USB 3.0 is pointless for things like keyboards and mice as the data throughput is over-kill. USB 2.0 is overkill for most of it. The big advantage would be data transfer speeds. However, if you actually want a good data transfer you'd never use USB. It's infamous for doing a bad job. It causes system issues on large amounts of data and it's not uncommon to transfer a few gigs only to find the total size transferred does not match. That doesn't happen with FireWire, eSATA or Thunderbolt. Which is why those are the means of transfer used in professional setups.
So brag about it all you want, it's bad at what it's meant for and overkill for everything else. Oh, and yes I admit that part is opinion. You could easily come back with "Thunderbolt isn't very well supported," or "It has a much higher cost for implementation," but if we're judging which is the better tech, Thunderbolt wins.
Oh, and I've replaced Mac hard drives before. Some of them are more difficult than others but the same can be said of any brand. HP, for example, has a nasty habit of installing their motherboards upside down. Which makes it harder to modify them.
As for the battery issue... Different experiences I guess. Apple has replaced faulty batteries for me multiple times. Then, I always buy Apple Care so that probably helps. Though, EVERY company lists batteries as "consumables" and almost never provides any level of support for a dead battery one-year out. So even if you want to lay this criticism at the feet of Apple I'll merely spread it around to the feet of every single other PC vendor.
