My cynicism about computers and the power hungry ways of operating system (OS) manufacturers have tended to temper my willingness to enter the “PC vs. Mac” debate. However, I have just read the most articulate and beautiful exposition as to why Mac OS X is so much better than Windows, and I have found it reverberating in unexpected ways in terms of how I think about all the little things I immerse myself in daily. Compared to what computers should be, both OS options (as well as Linux, Solaris, etc.) are quite terrible. But within the general failings, there are differences, and significant differences. Some differences might even lead to inspiration. An excerpt:

“The bouncing icons (and the puffs of smoke and the pipe-organ speech synthesizer and the way dialogs tidily resize and the drop-shadows on the windows and the jellybean buttons and the eject key on the keyboard) are not individually rationalizable on utilitarian grounds, and they do not pretend they mean to be. They are there to, in aggregate, change the nature of your relationship with the device. They are joyful, and they hope their joy is infectious. The more you use a Mac, and the more of its secrets you learn (and the bizarre truth is that although simple tasks are designed to be much simpler on the Mac than on a PC, the Mac is also much more deeply and pervasively capable of being tweaked and customized and automated and shortcutted), the more you will like it. This is exactly, radically, totally the opposite of what happens in Windows, where every damn thing you learn after the first ten minutes will make you hate it more and more violently.” Source: <http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0415.html>