I share the same past as many of the people here, I was a member of XvsXP. And unfortunately it’s closed down now. Even more unfortunate is the site that is trying to replace it. I went on it today and saw that the owner had updated his page that talks about XvsXP. This post is a rebuttal to that page.

You will now need to pay to read a novice computer user write up their limited knowledge, experience, and ill informed opinion that is shot with a strong Mac bias throughout.† For your “modest fee”, you will also gain access to a site that goes offline at least once per week due to who knows what sort of technical difficulty.

I don’t get how someone who has written a site that is highly PC biased can complain about XvsXP being Mac biased. I thought that the whole idea of the site was to be an unbiased alternative to XvsXP. And XvsXP did go down fairly often, but not every week, often due to database problems. Many sites has suffered this and I doubt that PCversusMac will be magically immune.

Either way, it is impossible to compare two OS’s in the abstract. OS’s are not self contained entities: they require hardware, users, third party software, outlets for purchase and support, internet and network connectivity, etc. Another fundamental problem with the scoring system was the lack of weighting; the same scoring weight was given to how each OS handles the caps lock key, or support for remote access, or video editing. Certainly some of the graded areas would be considered vital by a majority of users and others would be considered quite trivial.

XvsXP did a very good job of comparing the two OS’s. If you start making the argument that you can’t compare an OS on it’s own then you need to start comparing hardware as well, and software that runs on the OS and countless other things. In the end, to compare two platforms you have to compare every aspect of computing. And as for weighting, a weighted calculator was used, though if you are being entirely fair, while sections like Cap’s Lock got a section all to it’s own, Developer Tools, of which Apple’s free offerings surpass Microsoft’s, shared a small section. It was unfair on both sides of the story.

XvsXP.com was also run with a heavy hand. For about two years, forum members attempted to have corrections made and missing data added. Rather than correct or amend the site, the site administrator chose to permanently ban members and ultimately shut down the comparison rather than fix the problems. To top it all off, the material will now only be available by paying a fee.

I think that the owner of PCversusMac is getting a little agitated in this paragraph. He was banned from the XvsXP forums for disruptive behaviour, despite being given many chances. In my time at XvsXP I’ve only know of 4 bannings, 3 in the past few months. And none of them were for trying to get things changed. They were for being disruptive or offensive on the forums. And the choice to shut down was not to hide away from having to change the site. It was because the owner of XvsXP has a family and looking after a site like XvsXP was a full time job in itself.

My reading of the full XvsXP.com site made it readily apparent that the site was created by a relatively savvy Mac user, but an amateur (at best) Windows user.† To claim an exhaustive comparison, yet not even know about WMI, is disingenuous at best.

Even though he claims to have used Macs for a long time, the owner of MacversusPC has shown very little knowledge of recent Macs. Many of the things on his site or either because he just doesn’t know about them or he is choosing to leave them out due to his bias.

His poor attempt at a comparison site is highly biased. It took many times of asking for him to change the site to show that Apple releases many OSX updates. He tries to compare a server in a work station box to the Xserve, a 1U server blade. And proof that it is hard to keep a site like that up to date and accurate is his failure to mention Xserve upgrades on the server page 6 days after they were announced.

I am no doubt aiding him with is feeble attempt to compare these two platforms by giving him advertising, but the ability to point out many of his flaws is worth it