Yes, the following is a rant in fustration and not a scholary look at the two.... 

So my son and I are writing this after a whole morning of head to head comparions of installing and using two Vista machines and our iMac 17 inch Dual Core all in our office. Its not even a contest. Its Vista in about every way as the iMac is fustrating the heck out of us so much that we had to write this post. We also are still waiting for 15 minutes for Sims2 to install on the iMac as we write this. Note, to be fair, its Sims2 for a PowerPC and not a Universal Intel binary so it will run dog slow and doesn't really count. However, I do find OS/X sluggish itself on a Dual Core iMac for even regular OS stuff. It shouldn't be. One reader points out that it could be slugish because there is only 512 MB of RAM/

Don't get me wrong, I have always appreciated what Apple did in using the best of the open source BSD and packaging it up in a great package, such that I haven't had to mess with Linux the last 5 years as I bought a series of 3 Mac machines. I love having the raw power of *nix when I wanted to.I have admired the attention to design in packaging.

But even with a Dual Core Intel OS X itself still runs like a dog quite sluggish , especially in comparison to Vista. And I know its going to get all the little Mac heads here in their hysterical rants (its great because its Apple) but the Macs are still toys in my book and IMHO. Vista is snappy, OS/X just shows me hourglasses and waits for nearly everything and if they can't get it together with a Dual Core Intel how much of a CPU do you need to run OS/X? A Cray? I'm tired of people that I respect say "get a xxx Mac" as its always so cool but then what? There is not a lot of useful things I can personally do on it. yes, I can run Parallels and run Vista but what's the point? I have never understood their much touted superiority as it just isn't there and security is just as much a problem. My apps are not their apps. I have used both OS stacks for nearly 10 years together and it just isn't true. And Leopard offers nothing that remotely excites me. Their only advantage left is in media stuff that those touchy feely arty types do-).

Ayende asks what is the killer app for Vista and he uninstalled it. I say the killer app is Vista itself. It is twice as fast as XP, quite noticably faster than XP for me, its way faster and more productive than OS/X, it's UI is leagues ahead of Aqua and I love it for all the reasons that Chris lists here. It's been my daily machine for 2 weeks now and it has worked well with the heavy development and other demands of it I have made on it. There is not a single app that hasn't worked even some that go back to Windows 95 days. Having .NET 3 right out of the box is extremely important for my development needs and for my customers. Visual Studio starts up in 1-2 seconds compared to 10's of seconds on my best XP machines. Yes, I am doing daily Enterprise Development for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server SP2 and they both work fine for me on Vista. I don't use or run previous versions of VS like VS2003 (haven't for years) but I know spme people do and there are problems there. The killer apps will come for Vista, its not even out until Jan 30th but I know I can't go back to XP given what I have right now.

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