I'VE FINALLY FOUND an article ("Windows 95," December '95, page 99) that compares Windows 95 to the Mac OS without throwing sticks and stones. You did a great job being honest about both products.
As your article points out (and unfortunately, as many folks seem to forget), Windows 95 and the Mac OS have good as well as bad points.
Michael Purdy
via the Internet
AS AN OWNER of a Mac and a PC, I found that your excellent review gave the hard facts on Windows 95 without any of the whininess many of the other mags (both PC and Mac) did.
Christopher Angel
cja124@mail.usask.ca
THANKS FOR your Windows 95 article -- it helped me understand the good and the bad about this new operating system. However, I wish you had been a little less defensive in the article. I don't need to be told that my Mac is better than a Windows-based PC.
Tom Berry
via the Internet
THANK YOU! My year's subscription to MacUser was worth it just to obtain the cover of the December issue. You can bet it will be prominently displayed both at home and at my office for the next few months!
Tim Frankovich
timelf@aol.com
I WAS DISAPPOINTED that you failed to mention the hardware/software integration differences between platforms. Built-in features such as support for multiple monitors; a desktop independent of monitor size, aspect ratio, resolution, or color depth; automatic detection and ejection of external media; power on/off from the keyboard; SCSI; sound; high-speed serial ports; and ADB support in every Mac just don't exist in the Wintel world and aren't likely to exist soon.
Ignoring these differences discounts much of the Mac advantage. The rest of the computer press ignores them too, but surely not MacUser!
John Bartleson
via the Internet
YOUR COVER DELIVERS the exact sentiment shared by many Mac users -- Windows can never equal the ease of use and power of the Mac OS, no matter how many characters you can use in a filename.
Davin Flateau
via the Internet
I'M CERTAIN I heard this exact same tune about 15 years ago. Only back then the lyrics were, "VHS: So What? It's Still Not a Betamax."
E. J. Campfield
via the Internet
YOU PRESENTED a convoluted "shortcut" for adding an item to the Start menu, in an effort to illustrate how "typically" difficult Windows 95 is to use. A much easier way than the one you present -- even easier than adding an item to the Mac's Apple menu -- is simply to drag the item to the Start menu. One step. Done.
Paul Farrah
pfarrah@aimnet.com
/ You're right. I'm wrong. I got that "shortcut" from a Windows 95 expert who's now as red-faced as I am. Let me substitute another example of a tough Windows 95 chore: You know how the Find command saves your ten previous search criteria? How do you delete one from the list? / RM
YOU FOLKS JUST don't get it. I didn't get rid of my Mac and buy a Pentium-based PC and end a seven-year commitment to the Mac because I enjoy tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys files. I did it because in my line of work, over 90 percent of businesses use PCs and PC-based programs.
Yes, Macs are more intuitive and offer a cleaner GUI, but the percentages are with the PC world.
John Schmidt
jschmidt63@aol.com
ALTHOUGH I AGREE with many of the points made in your article, I strongly disagree with your overall assessment that the Mac OS remains a superior product.
As an advanced user with many years of experience using the Mac OS and PCs running Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95, and OS/2 Warp, I am convinced that Windows 95 is the best operating system of the bunch. It is more reliable, stable, crash-resistant, and flexible than the others. With Windows 95, I routinely have Microsoft Excel, Access, Word, and PowerPoint; a DOS accounting system; a DOS payroll system; a contact manager; a screen saver; and Microsoft Exchange open on the desktop at the same time. I switch among these applications frequently, effortlessly, and flawlessly. I have been using Windows 95 (including the prerelease version) for about four months, and I have yet to experience a system crash. Can any other OS claim such stability?
The tragedy of your article is that as long as influential Mac users such as yourselves continue to gloss over the Mac OS' limitations and deny the existence of truly superior alternative platforms, Apple will continue to offer only meager improvements with each OS release -- witness Copland, which still won't offer full preemptive multitasking when it rolls out. It's too bad that Apple's complacency has let Microsoft justifiably claim that it now offers personal-computer users the most technologically superior operating system available.
Darin Patrizi
74673.477@compuserve.com
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, I have taught middle-school and high-school computer classes. Skills on Macs as well as PCs are a regular part of my curriculum, because this is the world in which my students will have to work.
Every time I encounter this juvenile mentality of some Mac users who think the only way to justify using the computer of their choice is to disparage the choice of others who don't agree with them, it turns me off. It will never be just a Mac world nor just a PC world. Get over it!
Macs are excellent computers. So are Windows machines. Neither are perfect. We need this diversity to drive manufacturers, developers, and users to ever improve the technology. If the Mac is your choice, great. Use it, and shut up. Nobody is forcing you to switch.
And you, Macintosh publishers, stop pandering to this juvenile mentality of some of your readers. Stop the DOS/PC/Windows-bashing.
Phillip W. Bugg
via the Internet
YOUR COVER ENTIRELY missed the point. Everybody knows that a PC running Windows is not a Mac; in truth, it doesn't have to be. Windows 3.0 was maybe 50 percent like the Mac OS and captured 90 percent of the market; Windows 95 is, arguably, 90 percent like the Mac OS, and it will continue to gain market share.
The problem is that even if Windows 98 ends up being 10 percent better than the Mac OS, Mac owners will be too proud to recognize it.
The Mac is a beautiful, elegant product, and I want nothing else. But do we really need to slam the other products to feel good about our own?
Mark Phillips
via the Internet
YOU GIVE WINDOWS 95 the edge in file-finding capabilities. Having not used Windows 95, I can't speak from experience, but the Mac's Find File in System 7.5.1 should at least match Windows 95's.
The Mac's Find File can search on any combination of more than a dozen attributes. You can choose to search only a specific drive, all local drives, or all network drives. All this, and then you can perform Finder operations on the found files.
I really can't think of any type of search I would want to do that is not covered by Find File. Please let me know what Windows 95 does better!
Hardy Macia
hardy@catamount.com
/ We agree that System 7.5's Find File is a powerful improvement over previous versions. (After all, it was based on Find Pro, a MacUser/ZMac Utility of the Month!) We gave Windows 95's Find command the edge because of its ability to save searches and to find other PCs on the network by name. / RM
