Christmas Morning – Macs vs. Windows

This past Christmas morning, Santa left behind two brand-new new laptops for my two oldest nephews. Parks, the more conservative nephew, received a really nice, very powerful HP. Peyton, the younger of the two, snagged a gleaming white MacBook.

At virtually the same time, they opened the boxes, flipped open the laptop lids, and powered up their computers. From that point on, though, their experience was dramatically different.

On Parks’ new HP, Windows took its sweet time booting up. Once the operating system was running, the laptop spied the family’s home network … and then the desktop disappeared beneath eight fat, competing program windows: Norton Utilities, an anti-virus program, a Windows update program, a registration utility, and four others.

Each of these programs attempted to download updates for itself simultaneously; as a result, the progress of each one was reduced to a crawl. Rudely, all of these programs launched themselves and began downloading updates without asking for the owner’s permission before doing so.

By contrast, Peyton’s new MacBook hummed for a few seconds before presenting him with a clean, uncluttered registration sequence. He entered some personal information and clicked a button or two. While Parks was still desperately battling to regain control of his own computer, Peyton was surfing the internet. By the time Parks managed to stop and close those eight competing program windows, Peyton had downloaded and installed software he really wanted, including Firefox for the Mac and Quicksilver.

Two smart guys. Two new laptops. Two drastically different experiences.

Their first few minutes with their new computers reveals a lot, I think, about the difference in the philosophy and usability of PCs and Macs — right out of the box.