The conventional wisdom, that Mac's OS X is superior to Windows Vista, is flat-out wrong. In fact, despite much belief to the contrary, Vista is a superior operating system. Here are five reasons why.

Reason #1: Vista runs more software

Reason #2: Vista is safer

Reason #3: It's the money, stupid

Reason #4: The Mac is closed; Vista is open

Reason #5: Two words -- Steve Jobs

Over on Computerworld, Preston Gralla posted a piece called "Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X." I'm going to be straight up and say that I don't agree with much that Gralla wrote in this piece, but one of the five reasons he gives comes down to that age old argument - are Macs more expensive than PCs?....

Are Vista machines cheaper than Macs? Well, let's take a look. Going to the Apple Store I see that the cheapest Mac on sale is the Mac mini, and this retails for $599. iMacs start at $1,199, MacBooks at $1,099, the MacBook Air starts at $1,799 and MacBook Pros start at $1,999. Skipping over to the Dell store, the cheapest desktop range is the Inspiron, and these start at $349. The cheapest Dell notebooks start at $499.

Conclusion: Yes, Macs are pricier than Vista systems.

But …

Personally, I think that this price argument is bunk....

Microsoft's continuing Vista woes, including price cuts and a retreat to Windows XP on the low-end, obscures an important fact: Mac users pay more than double for Mac OS X than Windows.

Are Mac users mindless robots, buying whatever Cupertino ships, or is Vista really 50% inferior?

Let's run the numbers.
Since Windows XP's release in October, 2001 Mac users have had four releases of OS X:
Jaguar 10.2 released August 2002
Panther, 10.3 released Oct 2003
Tiger 10.4 released April 2005
Leopard 10.5 released Oct 2007

At $129 a pop your loyal Mac user paid $516 for new OS releases. There is no "upgrade" pricing for OS X.

Over the same period the steadfast Windows user would have spent a paltry $219 - had they waited for the Vista price cut - for an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate - less than half what Mac users spent.

Microsoft's Windows juggernaut is collapsing as it tries to support 20 years of applications and becomes more complicated by the minute. Meanwhile, Windows has outgrown hardware and customers are pondering skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7. If Windows is going to remain relevant it will need radical changes.

That sobering outlook comes courtesy of Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. Half of a full room of IT managers and executives raised their hands when asked whether Microsoft needed to radically change its approach to Windows.....

My PowerBook is showing it's age, now just over five years old. I need a replacement. Buy now? Or, wait awhile?

This time I'm waiting until the next generation of Mac notebooks. Why? What's coming? Less of the same. Much less.

Don't get me wrong. My Mac PowerBook, one of the original 17-inch aluminum body machines has been the best Mac I've ever owned. Ever.

Do I want another Mac notebook? You bet I do....

I'm waiting for the next new line of Mac notebooks which I expect will be faster, cooler, thinner, lighter....

Not just thinner, but ultra thin, and probably wedge shaped. Wedge? Yes, the MacBook Air is a wedge, thicker in the back near the screen hinge, and very thin at the front near the touchpad.

If you think about it, what else can Apple do with the MacBook Pro models?...

You have to understand, this thing is replacing a six month old Compaq laptop that was perfectly fine, if a bit ugly and heavy. It ran Vista Basic, which has to be one of the most unintuitive and ugly operating systems ever put out by Microsoft. The next Windows Me? Not so much, but XP is a much better.

Okay, enough Windows talk. Let's take a look at Apple's gem of a laptop.

If you think the MacBook is a Paris Hilton one note - sexy, but really can't perform its way out a paper bag - think again. It's a lot more like Cameron Diaz: sexy, yet with the brains and power to back it up.

The MacBook I'm using is a refurbished October 2007 model, which sells for $849 on the Apple Store's refurbished page...

Apple has hit a home run: They've won the championship, and there was really no competition. The MacBook is an amazing laptop with every feature the average consumer could think of.... It's the best laptop on the market for under US$1,500.

Adobe Systems today released its cross-platform Adobe Media Player (AMP) as a free download.

The software, which was written with the company's offline web apps platform Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), plays Flash-only web videos on Macs or PCs and works as an online and offline application.

Adobe said it has inked deals with a number of players in the entertainment industry including CBS, PBS, MTV Networks and Universal Music Group. Video content from those suppliers can then either be streamed or downloaded by anyone using AMP.

Adobe announced this morning the immediate availability of its new Media Player in conjunction with the launch of Adobe TV, "a free online video resource for expert instruction and inspiration about Adobe products." Adobe Media Player 1.0 is an AIR-based application, making it a cross-platform and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. With Adobe Media Player, Adobe hopes to offer people a more user-friendly way to interact with Flash content on the desktop and to offer publishers a way to reach a new audience and monetize their media....

Adobe claims that Media Player will let users watch their own content stored on their desktops, like QuickTime or Windows Media Player. However, Adobe Media Player is quite limited in the types of media it can actually play....

Thankfully, the player does have other merits. In addition to being able to play back videos from the desktop, Adobe Media Player also serves as a media streaming service, complete with "channels" with different content.....

It was a stinging blow for Steve Jobs when a boardroom power struggle ousted him from Apple, the company he co-founded as a 21-year-old. A friend was so concerned over what the distraught Jobs might do that he drove to his house and sat with him for hours.

Jobs didn't stay down for long though. He soon began poaching Apple employees for his new company NeXT and picked up a digital graphics company, later called Pixar, from George Lucas for $5 million.

These moves set Jobs up for a spectacular comeback. He sold Pixar, which made blockbuster films like Toy Story, to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion. Earlier, a struggling Apple came knocking at Next's door, hoping the company could help bolster Apple's flagging software lineup. Apple paid about $400 million to acquire NeXT in 1997.

Apple didn't only need Jobs' company, it also needed his leadership.....

Regular readers of my articles know that I am the back up king. I lost my main drive a while back and I will NEVER let that happen to me again.

At the time, I was backing up, and cloning my main drive, but had gotten lazy and had not run the back up in several weeks. Nowadays I back up my main hard drive (HD) to four external drives. Overkill? Probably, but I feel secure. I'm about to add a fifth backup that will be offsite just in case disaster hits my house.

My main HD has all of my music, photos, the files that make up my website, business information etc. If I lose that drive, it will take me years to re-create some of the items, while others are irreplaceable. Think about what is on your main HD.....

Remember, its not "IF" your hard drive will fail, its "WHEN."

Announcements of new content on the iTunes Store are a bit like Christmas: most of the time, you get cool stuff. But sometimes, you get an ugly reindeer sweater from your aunt. Fortunately for us all, the recent content additions to the Store have been quite good. At the end of March, three networks added content to the iTunes Store, and yesterday, the New York Public Library began offering content through iTunes U.

Everyone loves new content, but the NYPL has the additional distinction of being free.....

Here's where we left off in the 1990s: Apple CEO Steve Jobs, then with the word "interim" ahead of his title, conceded that the operating system wars were over and Microsoft was victorious. It doesn't matter if Microsoft cheated to get there - and I think they did. In the end, Apple was doomed to be no better than second best, and, at that point in time accepted a $150 million dollar investment from Microsoft and a commitment to continue to develop Office for the Mac.

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