Just How do Macs and PCs Differ? - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

for some it's about brand loyalty for some it's about aspiration they're marketed and advertised in different ways but but let me try and answer it as a kind of technical question a little bit more as a technical question so some of this comes down to to to the ways in which we think about computer systems so generally if you think about the it this way you have what we would call the hardware then on top of this we have a special set of programs called the operating system and on top of the operating system you will have what's called applications yeah now all of those also have what we broadly speaking is a windowing system so this is the ways in which they present themselves to you this would be you you would interact with a window say um you that window would interact with a a word processing application say that word processing application would ask the underlying operating system to do certain things like open a file and that opening a file would make certain things happen on the hardware so there's quite a long history of different operating systems from the very first Inception you would have different operating systems which would run in different manufacturers equipment so IBM would have one Honeywell would have another ICL would have another and all of those different systems would each have their own operating systems so the BBC micro had one Theodor 64 had another and all of those would come and go so they'd be closely kind of tied to the hardware historically what's happened is they'd also each of those manufacturers would offer a different way of presenting the computer so they have different windowing systems so originally they they would simply be command line you type out a command line and something would happen Max and PCs has been two of the main competitors at one point through the early 80s the big difference that people would speak about would be the windowing system difference one was graphical one had a desktop metaphor the other didn't with the Advent of that sort of facility on Windows machines that difference less clear so a Windows 8 machine and a Macintosh interface uses icons mice drags and similar ways but you still will have a religious separation between people about those each to each say they're done in slightly different ways so today I think the real difference between them is that Apple still own and build the hardware that they put their operating system on so they exist both as a software company and a hardware company and it's only recently that Microsoft have even attempted to do that again so the Microsoft Surface is the first time Microsoft has s to do this why is that important well it's important because what the operating system has to do is translate the application needs into things for the computer the hardware to do and if you've built that Hardware you know how that Hardware works you can optimize in particular ways if you don't then you can't necessarily do that quite as smoothly and quite as efficiently so detecting things happening in the hardware is more difficult if you haven't built it because you're relying on other people building things so that's why um the operating systems and macintoshes can actually make presumptions about the hardware and its use and therefore build an OP and contest it so they've actually tested their systems with the actual Hardware that that they run on Microsoft have a different orientation their operating systems installed in many manufacturers hardware and so they can't really test it on every single possible machine so that means they're not as optimal at that point or smooth at that point and they're relying on what's called device drivers being specifically installed for each device so that would translate the operating system commands to the specifics of that Hardware that's why often you see when you're using a PC um machine or Microsoft machine you will see a a need to reinstall and update and change different drivers mostly those are invisible in the Macintosh cuz they're pretty much owned by Apple and installed by Apple and updated by Apple the plus side of this is it feels nice and and and more efficient the downside of this is you've only got one machine that it runs on and therefore you've got a kind of sealed unit which means that McIntosh machines are often recused of being more expensive because on a Windows and windows types devices you can run it on a range of Hardware from high to low end and you can optimize the price of the hardware down by running on that whereas you don't have that range of Hardware in quite the same way I've used macintoshes and Microsoft as the kind of classic divisions that people use but if you actually go through the the range of others this separation down into different systems also applies so in terms of Linux Linux roots are from original open source Unix people have taken the kind of original Unix platform and ported it made it work on a on a on a PC um environments and sets of PC environments and so that operating system is capable of running across a wide range of hardware and also there is a number of windowing systems that it itself supports now the advantage with Linux environments as Linux environments are open and so no Corporation or company owns them in quite the same way they're open source they're modifiable by people and people can moderate moderate them and use them so it's championed as one of the um classic um a champion one of the one of the biggest forces for keeping the internet and computer systems open and accessible to all floating Point looks at 1/10th plus 210 what you just typed in 0.1 plus 0.2 in decimal and it says that 1110th plus 210 does not quite equal 310 because to its mind it doesn't