For the love of god, whatever it is that is happening with this article that causes it to appear multiple times per day in NetNewsWire, please stop it. This is a stupid article with a puerile title and I'm fed up of it appearing day-in, day-out.
Sorry, I'm normally OK with the content from this site but this article is just annoying me.
I still fondly remember Panther, which was my first Apple OS upgrade after I switched. Received as soon as possible I was amazed at its quality for a .0 release and I contemplating downgrading to it again after Tiger's release since I had a few issues with that until about 10.4.2. If Leopard is anywhere near as good to my as Panther was then I'll be very happy.
I've seen the odd kernel panic over the past 3 years, usually when waking the PowerBook from sleep. I think I've had 0 when running Jaguar, 1 when running Panther and around 2 when running Tiger. The increasing number of kernel panics in the OS as the iterations are cranked out may be coincidental but I'm pretty sure that the initial versions of Tiger had issues that caused the increased number since I've not seen a new kernel panic (touch wood) in about a year.
I'm quite certain that the majority of Blue Screen of Death issues under Windows is probably hardware related, or at least hardware driver related. Given this, if your hardware and its drivers aren't causing problems then severe crashes probably should not occur. Unfortunately, given the sheer volume of hardware configurations possible for Windows systems, it's very difficult to ensure that you don't hit problems and therefore I still see that Mac less liable to encounter a fatal crash. When I switched from Windows to Mac I was seeing Blue Screens of Death on a very frequent basis and I was not prepared to risk seeing them again.
All this said, the statement that Macs don't crash is absolute rubbish. Applications crash when they haven't been written correctly (not Apple's fault, usually) and the OS can terminally bomb. Saying that they don't crash at all is a distortion of the truth and I rather wish they wouldn't keep saying this.
Option 1. Apple is a hardware company so giving up the opportunity to sell your "bread and butter" products is commercial suicide. The only way to avoid this problem would be for Apple to charge much more for the OS or change their business model entirely, which obviously won't happen overnight.
It's a reasonable article but I wouldn't necessarily agree that once you have switched you won't go back. I've been a Mac user now for the past 3-years and, with the current state of computing, my next laptop will be a MacBook Pro. However, since I've made a switch once I would be prepared to switch again if Apple manages to drop the ball again like they did in the 90s. At the moment, however, I will certainly concede that Windows is no competition once you know how good the Mac platform currently is.
I hate to be the one to play devil's advocate here but we should note that there's stuff coming in Vista that I'd like to see in OS X/iLife. In particular the final item in the video where Microsoft states that you'll be able to create slideshows from both still images and video. At present, as far as I am aware, you can't do that on OS X because photos are kept in iPhoto and video is managed in iMovie HD, with the exception of video shot by your digital camera. While they can be mixed together in iMovie, it would be nice if iPhoto could manage your video as well.
Still, aside from this and a few other items it is good to see that Tiger is going to remain on the cutting edge even after Vista is released, let alone after Leopard arrives, although, apart from Boot Camp, what it will deliver remains a mystery.
Just to add to the Universal applications, QuickSilver is also Universal. In order to check whether an application installed on your Mac is Universal or not, view the application's Info in Finder. If the application is Universal then the Kind will be "Application (Universal)"; not Univeral applications show up as "Application (PowerPC)".
Do We Only Buy iPods Because Our Poop Stinks?
October 25, 2003: Day of Panther
Ask Apple Matters: OS X Crashes After-all
Do you want OS X with that PC?
Switch to a Mac and You'll Never Go Back
Pretty Funny Vista Preview
10 Essential Mac Apps