My twitter feed today has yet again been full of designers/developers (hi Ollie) arguing about Windows and OS X – throwing the phrase “fanboy” around and arguing rather too passionately one way or the other about something they very little understand

As a developer that uses both OS X and Windows (sadly) – I feel very strongly about this subject and trying to get the sum of all my rage arguments across on twitter was failing badly – so I thought I’d write a post about it here

A little history…
I was a massive hardcore windows fan. I built my first pc back in 1995 while I was at college and got heavily into coding and online gaming.
Every few years I spent a simply ridiculous amount of money building another cutting edge gaming PC  - right up until I moved in with Rick Nunn a few years ago.

By this point I had an Xbox 360 and my online PC gaming had pretty much ended, but I did still use a Windows PC for web development and freelancing. I had just spent £2700 on a brand new cutting edge PC setup running Windows a few weeks before moving in with Rick.

Rick is a very talented designer and me being a developer we decided to work on a few projects together. Rick was using a couple of years old iMac and I was using my PC.
The days coding/designing seemed like ground-hog day. Every day he would come in, pick up his graphics tablet pen and start drawing or start hacking some CSS together.

I would sit and wait for the PC to boot up, see a notification about updates and have to install them and reboot. Plug a usb device in, find some drivers, reboot again. Half way through coding it would blue screen for some completely un-known reason and I’d have to reboot again.

This continued for a few weeks until eventually I kicked my PC into pieces, drove to Meadowhall’s Apple Store and bought a £600 Mac Mini.
Rick helped me get it all setup, showed me the differences between windows & OS X and I discovered bliss!

Suddenly no more reboots – for months and months on end. System updates installed silently and I forgot what a driver even was.
There was no risk of virus’s so I didn’t have to run a virus checker that scanned every file on my machine until it became too slow to use.
My stress levels halved over night and my productivity went through the roof.
I’ve not touched a PC since until….

My current job…
I took a job last year working for a large insurance company. That means an office with 300+ people and a windows domain *sigh*
The IT team chose windows over OS X/Linux because of the control over the users, what they run and what they can install. Exchange is a good mail server and it’s easy to find IT staff trained in microsoft OS’s. This unfortunately meant they wouldn’t let me have a Mac

For 6 months I used a windows PC and my daily experience was hell.
It took on average 5 minutes to get the machine booted up, logged into the domain, start apache+mysql+php, load up komodo, and actually start coding.
If there were any windows updates to install this would require a reboot and my time from arriving at my desk to actually working was knocking on 20-30minutes
The machine crashed regularly (and it’s a new PC not some old 2nd hand hardware). Even with anti-virus on people in the department got virus’s which then meant 1-2 days downtime as they were re-formatted and all the software pain-stakingly re-installed (with the mandatory reboot between each application!!! Argghh)

I eventually had enough of wasting time and asked my manager if I could have a Mac. It was agreed that if I could justify it I could – so I started creating a log of all the time lost specifically because of windows updates, reboots and crashes.
I kept a spreadsheet for over 2 months and the results suprised even me!
In an average 40hr week I was losing between 6 and 9 hours a week to windows.
The cost of this to my company was insane so they agreed to a solution – a £650 mac mini arrived and I’ve been using that ever since.

My experiences now are an 8-20second time from sitting down at my desk to writing my first lines of code.
It hasn’t crashed ever. I installed all the apps within 2 hours of un-boxing and didn’t have to reboot once.
I’ve only had to reboot once in 3 months for a system update – all the rest installed seamlessly without interrupting me.
Even the next version of OS X, called Lion, installs fully without a reboot.

Costs
At this point I can hear you all screaming at your screen “Yes but a mac costs THOUSANDS”
This is of course only half true and usually spouted by people who’ve done no proper research (they usually follow it up with “macs only have one mouse button” LOL)

I have a 15″ macbook pro which I use for development which cost £1850. I’ll admit that’s a boat load of money for a laptop in this day and age
However at work I have a 2.4ghz dual core mac mini with 8gb of ram which cost £650. That’s no more than the equivalent Dell PC would cost with a windows license – and I can ensure you it is sooo much more of a machine.

Windows is cursed by the impossible task of writing an operating system for infinite combinations of hardware. OS X runs beautifully because you are restricted to a certain set of hardware for its use. It’s that simple and it’s that brilliant!

So there you go – same cost – infinitely better user experience.

The cost of my macbook has never bothered me because it is a beautifully designed piece of hardware. I wouldn’t ever complain about spending more money on a Ferrari over a Volvo because it’s a slicker, better looking car. The same applies to computer hardware for me. I would rather spend nearly £2k on a Mac than use an Acer laptop slowly falling apart in front of me.

While on the subject of costs – even if the hardware was more expensive (which it isn’t) the cost of windows is astronomical compared to the cost of OS X. The next version of OS X costs £20.99 – for 5 licenses
Windows 7 Premium costs 5x that for just 1 license – making it effectively 25x more expensive if you have multiple computers in your house.

So.. in closing to all those people on twitter arguing about this let me leave you with something

You wouldn’t call someone an idiot for buying a diesel car at a slight premium and then saving hundreds on fuel costs
You wouldn’t argue that from a design/aesthetics point of view that a ferrari isn’t worth the extra money over a volvo
You wouldn’t ever argue that you prefer spending a day rebuilding a broken windows installation rather than doing actual chargeable work

Any extra cost involved for buying a Mac is more than saved over the years of hassle-free development/design work and stupidly cheap OS updates… end of

Oh and to those of you arguing windows is better and you have never actually used a mac for a few weeks – I hate you, I hate you from the very bottom of my soul for arguing about something you will never understand!