My personal View of Mac Pro with Snow Leopard compared to a High End PC with Windows 7.
The "Machine":
A PC that's similarly spec-ed as a mac pro, it would cost A LOT MORE than if you buy the Mac Pro, plus you don't get the precision cut, well thought out, zoned air flow, aluminum casing with temp controlled fans (buying a custom built case like that will cost much more than a regular spec-ed computer). Not to mention, you got the dual Xeon board with Xeon processor and it's memory on a daughter card (a similarly motherboard for a HP/IBM server cost a lot more than the Mac Pro), so no more headache when adding memory.
Since Mac Pro + EFI + Snow Leopard works in conjunction, it's by far the "smoothest" package available (outside a Power6 Workstation from IBM, if you're crazy enough to use such machine). The EFI will take care of pre-boot environment, drivers, memory maps, etc. When a Mac Pro boots, it boots straight up to the OS, no more boot loader bull s*ht, setting boot parameters, or detecting devices, or whatever. Major drivers for the hardware are embedded on the EFI it self. So no more IRQ conflicts, no more slow downs because improper BIOS settings, etc... Although, for those ease of use, you will miss some of the customization ability you had in the prehistoric BIOS. Even if you use BootCamp to install Windows on a Mac Pro, the BootCamp program "installs" a driver in the EFI so that Windows will see the EFI as BIOS based computer, which is somewhat an irony... it must dumb down it self to be compatible with the "smartest" of all Windows...
The Software Package:
The OS, Snow Leopard... is it much better than Windows 7? Some of it features are, some aren't. Let's dive in to some...
GPGPU
Windows 7 have "Direct Compute", parts of DirectX Library for those who want to harness the power of GPGPU. It's integrated into the gaming/multimedia part of the OS (make sense for a game developer, not so much for an business/whatever application developer). The application MUST detect if an OpenCL device is available or not to be able to use it. On the other hand, Apple have a new Grand Central Dispatch, it's a new scheduler for SL that will dispatch instructions to whatever computing device available. If a program that is properly uses GCD dispatched an instruction to use an OpenCL device, the GCD will then search for a compatible device in the system. If none found, it will use the CPU to process the instructions. Different ways to accomplish same problem.
Search
Since Windows 2000, Microsoft relies on "Indexing Service" to index any volume with any content. From a humble Indexing Service, Microsoft enhanced it to the stage it's good enough to be a new product, "Windows Search". To be honest, I personally not fond of the performance of Windows Search, I have no idea where the "Indexing Service" layer works, but most of the time, it search executions are horrendously SLOW, even if I already use the proper search query (I even have to resort to the magical windows search query syntax to get a little to none speed boost, an example to search files with .php as it's extension: "name:*.php", still slow) in a folder with few hundreds of mixed files. On the other hand, SL's spotlight works at the File System level, so whenever you write or read or modify anything in any volume, Spotlight will always have the latest update of your files, not to mention it's query speed is "Speed Demon" compared to "Snail slow" Indexing Service. In Windows search, you MUST define which volume/folder you want to index, which is somewhat dumb to begin with. In SL, you don't get such option because it by default indexes everything. If I own the computer, of course I need to find EVERYTHING in it, not just the "Data" volume, or "Work" volume, I need all... and the way Microsoft tacked Windows Search, it's embarrassingly idiotic... just to get that bottom left search box to compete with Spotlight's top right search box... jeez.
System Response
Since SL, Apple has changed it's way of handling UI. In SL, the OS is if ever, the most responsive UI EVER in the history of Personal Computing. Compare that to Windows 7, whenever you access a folder/program/whatever that invokes UAC, your HDD will grind, your mouse will work smoothly, but whatever you clicked just now shows as if nothing is clicked... until the screen dimmed... Right click "My Computer" to get to "Computer Management", it will take some time to show the dimmed notification (not that long, but compared to SL's Username/Password dialog box, it's day and night). Click the "Device Manager" in "Control Panel", it will behave similarly. So, system response is where Windows 7 is lacking...
Since we all in Windows 7 Forums, we already know what Windows 7 can do brilliantly, so I don't think I need to write them here. In some cases, SL is way ahead of Windows 7. As a package, the Mac Pro undeniably is a better package for the money (assuming you spend the same amount of money to get similarly spec-ed machine), but that's just me
Cheers,
zzz2496
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