It's the best of times if you're a lover of operating systems, with the nearly simultaneous release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6"Snow Leopard"(available right now) and Microsoft's Windows 7(available Oct. 22). This leads to the inevitable debate: Which is the better operating system, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard?
To help determine that, both operating systems went through their paces, and catergorized for a head-to-head competition, and then a winner was chosen in each category. .
Overview
The two companies took diametrically opposed approaches to their newest operating system upgrades.
Microsoft, burned by the compatibility issues that bedeviled Vista, strove to make compatibility with Vista-level hardware and software a centerpiece of Windows 7, and so didn't dramatically change the under-the-hood plumbing in Windows 7.
However, significant interface changes and features were added. The taskbar got a thorough reworking, making it much more Mac OS X Dock-like -- in fact, even better than the Dock. Similarly, the addition of HomeGroups was an attempt to make networking simpler for home users.
Apple, on the other hand, focused its efforts largely on internal plumbing, and many of those efforts won't pay off immediately for users. OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch are new technologies designed to better take advantage of multi-core CPUs and to offload more graphics and animation processing to graphics cards.
In the long run, this should make for significantly juiced-up performance. But in order for people to reap much of the benefits, developers will need to rewrite their programs. The new Apple technologies are designed to make that easier, but until those new applications are written, the effects most likely won't be extremely noticeable.
Apple also tweaked the operating system interface, refining the Finder and integrating the Dock with Exposé. But those changes are not nearly as significant as the ones Microsoft made to Windows 7.
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