Comparison Between Windows 7 And Mac OS X Essay

Comparison Between Windows 7 And Mac OS X - Essay Example It is shown that despite having nowhere near as much malware as on Windows, the Mac remains vulnerable although its usability and multimedia support are much better. The Macintosh OS X series of systems introduced in 2002 is based on Unix, specifically the FreeBSD and NetBSD implementations that were contained in the NeXTSTEP object-oriented system. Mac OS X enabled Apple to move away from its previous Mac OS operating systems, which lacked pre-emptive multitasking support and memory protection (Abu Rumman, 30). Mac OS X is POSIX compliant that is built on an XNU kernel. Originally designed for the PowerPC architecture, it is now made for the x86 architecture, the same as for Windows. The current version of the Macintosh operating system, as of March 2012, is 10.7.3 named Lion and the next version 10.8 named Mountain Lion is due later this year. The Windows operating system is made available in a number of editions including Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate. Windows 7 added su pport for a number of additional features such as virtual hard disks and handwriting recognition. It is considered to be a vast improvement over the previous Windows Vista, which was considered to be a disaster. ... OS 10.7 Company Microsoft Apple Minimum system requirements 1 GHz IA-32/x86-64 processor; 1 / 2 GB RAM; 16 / 20 GB free disk space Intel Core 2 Duo or higher processor; 2 GB RAM; 4 GB disk space for installation (OS X Daily, 2011) Retail price $119.99-219.99 $29.99 Variety of versions Six different versions including Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate A single all-in-one solution (with built-in server) Sources: Microsoft and OS X Daily Of the two systems, Windows enjoys the greatest market share. The main reasons for its dominance is the huge variety of hardware it can run on, the amount of developer support behind it and the amount of games that are available for the platform (Abu Rumman, 30). Apple instead enjoys a niche in the creative and educational markets. On the other hand, the Mac has the advantage of access to Apple's Mac App Store, it has a built-in browser that is better than Internet Explorer, it already has multi-touch support, suffers from much less malware than W indows, it has several features not present in Windows and it has better refinement overall (Reisinger). Examples of the special features are Resume, Air Drop, system-wide Auto Save, Expose, Spaces (virtual desktops), Mission Control, Time Machine and Remote Wipe. These make Lion well ahead of Windows 7 (Warne). With Lion, Apple also introduced a digital distribution method for greater convenience instead of the traditional physical selling method, which Windows is still following. In terms of usability, the Mac is renowned for being generally easier to use from being more intuitive and built on the principle of minimalism. Microsoft on the other hand, is generally more cumbersome and complicated with perhaps too many unnecessary elements that can cause confusion. As a simple example, if a