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> Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era It's a holdover from two different earlier eras. First, you have everything up to about 1998, which c
by mumblemumble 5y ago
> Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era
It's a holdover from two different earlier eras.
First, you have everything up to about 1998, which covers MacOS Classic through Mac OS 8, and Windows up through Win98. At the beginning of this period, when "PC" meant MS-DOS, the usability difference was obviously stark. But even in GUI era of PCs, System 7 compared favorably with Windows 3.1, and Mac OS 8 compared favorably with Windows 95.
Then Windows 98 and Mac OS 9 came out, and I'd say that things at least evened up. All else being equal, OS 9's GUI was still simpler and more intuitive, to my taste, but all else was not equal. Windows 9x had memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking, and Mac OS Classic didn't, and there were issues with system extensions and stability in Mac OS that I personally felt were more troublesome than Windows's famous BSOD problem during that era. This opinion could be a product of my experience working tech support at the time. BSOD was usually fixed by cursing profusely while rebooting. System extension conflicts were fixed at great physical and emotional cost to the person doing the fixing.
So I'd say Windows was generally easier to use than Macs for a while, until OS X eventually came into its own. It's harder to place a start time on this, but let's say 2002ish, with the release of Jaguar. And then there's been a sort of long slow decline as they clutter up the GUI, while at the same time Microsoft was putting serious work into cleaning things up. I'm not sure if the switch happened during the Windows 7 era or the Windows 10 era, but yeah, I'd definitely say I find Windows easier to use nowadays.
Personally, the main thing keeping me on Macs nowadays is frankly just the touchpad, to which I seem to be addicted.