Why I Upgraded to Mac OS X Instead of Windows 8 (Part 1)
June 09, 2015
As if I needed another article on why I’m so excited to be on a Mac now, here are my thoughts on why Microsoft screwed up so badly with Windows and how I moved on to buy a new Macbook running OS X.
##Windows 7
Up until very recently, I have been a strong Windows and PC user. I built my own gaming desktop back in high school and of course that had to be a Windows system. My first laptop for college was a nice powerful Asus running Windows, which I still upgrade and use every day, and the computers I’ve used at work have all been PCs running Windows. The biggest thing that has kept me on board? The Windows 7 operating system.
Windows 7 (source)
Windows 7 was released in 2009 as the successor of the infamous Windows Vista. It was a great release with improvements in performance and new features, such as the oh-so-useful ability to split your screen with multiple application windows for multitasking. Most people agreed that Windows had done well to fix everything that made Windows Vista a big sore in the OS world. So I enjoyed several years of peace and happiness on Windows 7 with a desktop interface that was sensible and productive, until the Shangri-La of Windows 7 was disturbed by the news of Microsoft’s new OS…Windows 8.
##How Windows Screwed Up Desktop
My absorption of news of Windows 8 goes as such:
- Microsoft announces Windows 8 with a whole new interface
- Outrage. Microsoft and Windows are dead to me
Why the sudden and strong reaction to Windows 8? Microsoft decided, only 3 years after Windows 7 had been released, that the rise of mobile meant that everything should be immediately changed to be mobile-oriented…including the operating systems on desktops.
The image of Windows 8 shown in
A history of Windows
Microsoft calls the new layout “Metro”, which makes the interface tile-based, with each tile representing an individual application. Now this layout no doubt makes sense on mobile devices, but on a desktop environment? I don’t think so. The whole “Metro” conversion wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing if Microsoft made it optional on the desktop OS. But instead, Microsoft completely threw out the desktop Start menu that users have depended on for years and booted up all devices to a screen of tiles. And as an ignorant compromise, they plopped the desktop environment on the home screen as another silly tile. So forget about desktop productivity with Windows 8, all Microsoft did was create an operating system for a market that they struggle to achieve market share in.
As a result of all this, I made a pact with myself to never allow Windows 8 into my computing sphere. Windows 8 had nothing exclusive to it compared to Windows 7, and after 3 years, Windows 7 was still very much alive as a leading operating system. So if I were to buy a new computer, I would either wait until Windows 8’s successor came along or get an entirely different operating system.
To be continued…