Report Offensive Message
I love that analogy!
Windows as a "tuner street rod", Mac as a Porsche you have hit the nail there 
And oh yes, you most certainly can tweak Windows to give far better performance than OS X sometimes even on the same hardware. But is it worth the price tag, at least in labour costs? Sure, if you do that as part of a hobby or consider it entertaining.
I have to say that 15 years ago I was pretty much agnostic and used whatever OS they would put in front of me. Then, a decade ago, I was being paid for the hour. Windows was going through the horrible transition era between Windows 98 (good), Win ME (awful), Windows 2000 (acceptable), and ultimately Windows XP (very good). Suddenly my monthly income was dropping as never before. Why? I figured out that of the eight normal working hours, I would be spending on average four tweaking Windows, because something constantly didn't work right: it might be constant crashes, it might be a failed driver, it might be the printer refusing to work, it might be unexpected slowness... whatever it was, every day there was something new that would make me spend a few hours fine-tuning Windows again, or recovering backups after a bad crash which became increasingly common and waiting for restarts and so forth.
I was aware at that time that I was actually enjoying myself doing all that tweaking and dealing with the crashing; I was even learning something along the process, and being able to help others to go through the same sequence of steps to fix their own Windows setups. But I also realised that this was costing me a *lot* of money every month. Sure, what I did was to push those hours of "Windows fixing" outside the working hours, and do it on my "spare time", working 12 hours a day, 8 of which for customers (who would be billed), and 4 on "fixing Windows" (who would not be billed). It was at that point that I thought there had to be a better way of doing things. Linux was not yet an option due to the lack of compatible applications it was good for the servers, bad for the desktop. Mac OS X was relatively new at that time, so I gave it a try and all those hours of constantly tweaking and fixing problems magically disappeared. It just worked.
Windows XP had by then been released, and I certainly tried it out and found it stable enough for my purposes, but it was too late for me: I didn't turn back. I knew that Microsoft, sooner or later, would break things and that certainly happened with Vista, another nightmare as bad as Windows ME. While in the mean time I was enjoying the extra time I had working on a computer that "never" crashed and "never" had any problems. It was simply a question of productivity.
Later I saw this phenomenon spread to small software houses, who very reluctantly moved to Mac. I remember at least a place where developers were driven nuts changing their environment to something completely different, having to re-learn everything, nothing made sense any longer. They complained, and complained, and complained. But after a few months the board just saw the results: there was never again any issue of employees needing to pause their work to fix their computers. No more excuses of missing deadlines because "Windows crashed and it took me three days to recover my work". Developers might still grumble and complain after many months or years, but they also had to agree that it's far better to spend time doing what they are paid for developing software! than in constantly fixing their operating system during working hours.
Aye, Macs are low-maintenance Porsches. They just work and never stop.
Granted, after a decade, and looking back, the average Windows-savvy user can have a perfectly stable experience with Windows XP and work year after year without a crash. My own roomie at home runs Windows XP on a desktop and won't change it for anything else (she has an abandoned old PowerBook G5 which she seldom turns on, just to read books in bed). Her setup never crashes not due to Windows, anyway: it's more frequent that the computer stops because of hardware failure (blown up power supply units, failed hard disks) than because of Windows yes, that means that she crashes perhaps less than once every year or so. While I have to reboot my Macs more often than that a few times per year at least. So, sure, Microsoft has gone a long way to make the Windows experience far more stable than it was a decade ago. But the point here is that every Windows PC user needs to be their own car mechanic to keep their machine running smoothly; while Macs just work by themselves.
It's pretty much like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Bikers are of two kinds: the first, loving their bikes, are constantly tweaking their own bikes to get the best possible performance, and enjoy fiddling with their machines as much as riding them. They frown upon the second class of bikers, who love to *ride* and want their bikes at top form, so they occasionally send them to an expert mechanic to fine-tune them, and spend the rest of their times on the ride and have just rudimentary mechanical skills, which they find less important than having free time to ride. Both attitudes frown upon the other group. Windows users are bikers of the first kind: the love to tweak their PCs is as important as actually using them. Mac users need to work (or play...) on their stable hardware/software combination and have no time left to spend time tweaking their Macs, and cannot understand why a "personal computer" user needs to waste so much time kicking their hardware into submission.
And oh yes, you can certainly fine-tune your Mac as well But be prepared: it's harder than it seems, and it will quickly consume even more time than doing the equivalent procedures than on Windows. It's like fine-tuning a Porsche on your own, as an amateur: you can do it, but don't expect it to be as simple to do as on an old Fiat.
And oh yes, you most certainly can tweak Windows to give far better performance than OS X sometimes even on the same hardware. But is it worth the price tag, at least in labour costs? Sure, if you do that as part of a hobby or consider it entertaining.I have to say that 15 years ago I was pretty much agnostic and used whatever OS they would put in front of me. Then, a decade ago, I was being paid for the hour. Windows was going through the horrible transition era between Windows 98 (good), Win ME (awful), Windows 2000 (acceptable), and ultimately Windows XP (very good). Suddenly my monthly income was dropping as never before. Why? I figured out that of the eight normal working hours, I would be spending on average four tweaking Windows, because something constantly didn't work right: it might be constant crashes, it might be a failed driver, it might be the printer refusing to work, it might be unexpected slowness... whatever it was, every day there was something new that would make me spend a few hours fine-tuning Windows again, or recovering backups after a bad crash which became increasingly common and waiting for restarts and so forth.
I was aware at that time that I was actually enjoying myself doing all that tweaking and dealing with the crashing; I was even learning something along the process, and being able to help others to go through the same sequence of steps to fix their own Windows setups. But I also realised that this was costing me a *lot* of money every month. Sure, what I did was to push those hours of "Windows fixing" outside the working hours, and do it on my "spare time", working 12 hours a day, 8 of which for customers (who would be billed), and 4 on "fixing Windows" (who would not be billed). It was at that point that I thought there had to be a better way of doing things. Linux was not yet an option due to the lack of compatible applications it was good for the servers, bad for the desktop. Mac OS X was relatively new at that time, so I gave it a try and all those hours of constantly tweaking and fixing problems magically disappeared. It just worked.
Windows XP had by then been released, and I certainly tried it out and found it stable enough for my purposes, but it was too late for me: I didn't turn back. I knew that Microsoft, sooner or later, would break things and that certainly happened with Vista, another nightmare as bad as Windows ME. While in the mean time I was enjoying the extra time I had working on a computer that "never" crashed and "never" had any problems. It was simply a question of productivity.
Later I saw this phenomenon spread to small software houses, who very reluctantly moved to Mac. I remember at least a place where developers were driven nuts changing their environment to something completely different, having to re-learn everything, nothing made sense any longer. They complained, and complained, and complained. But after a few months the board just saw the results: there was never again any issue of employees needing to pause their work to fix their computers. No more excuses of missing deadlines because "Windows crashed and it took me three days to recover my work". Developers might still grumble and complain after many months or years, but they also had to agree that it's far better to spend time doing what they are paid for developing software! than in constantly fixing their operating system during working hours.
Aye, Macs are low-maintenance Porsches. They just work and never stop.
Granted, after a decade, and looking back, the average Windows-savvy user can have a perfectly stable experience with Windows XP and work year after year without a crash. My own roomie at home runs Windows XP on a desktop and won't change it for anything else (she has an abandoned old PowerBook G5 which she seldom turns on, just to read books in bed). Her setup never crashes not due to Windows, anyway: it's more frequent that the computer stops because of hardware failure (blown up power supply units, failed hard disks) than because of Windows yes, that means that she crashes perhaps less than once every year or so. While I have to reboot my Macs more often than that a few times per year at least. So, sure, Microsoft has gone a long way to make the Windows experience far more stable than it was a decade ago. But the point here is that every Windows PC user needs to be their own car mechanic to keep their machine running smoothly; while Macs just work by themselves.
It's pretty much like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Bikers are of two kinds: the first, loving their bikes, are constantly tweaking their own bikes to get the best possible performance, and enjoy fiddling with their machines as much as riding them. They frown upon the second class of bikers, who love to *ride* and want their bikes at top form, so they occasionally send them to an expert mechanic to fine-tune them, and spend the rest of their times on the ride and have just rudimentary mechanical skills, which they find less important than having free time to ride. Both attitudes frown upon the other group. Windows users are bikers of the first kind: the love to tweak their PCs is as important as actually using them. Mac users need to work (or play...) on their stable hardware/software combination and have no time left to spend time tweaking their Macs, and cannot understand why a "personal computer" user needs to waste so much time kicking their hardware into submission.
And oh yes, you can certainly fine-tune your Mac as well
But be prepared: it's harder than it seems, and it will quickly consume even more time than doing the equivalent procedures than on Windows. It's like fine-tuning a Porsche on your own, as an amateur: you can do it, but don't expect it to be as simple to do as on an old Fiat. 
Posted by Gwyneth Llewelyn
23rd Aug
