Been using OS X for over 2 years now...

Is it perfect?

Of course not...

Is it the best thing available today?

Yes! By far as well...

Haven't had single security issue, virus issue, loss of data issue, crash issue or anything similar... Thing simply works and does any job you through upon it.

I can't complain and will stick with it for a very long time by look of it

Hmm... well.

In Vista:

- I hate the start menu.  The flyout menus of pre-Vista worked just fine, but now rearranging my start menu and finding programs is 3x harder.

- Its a resource hog.  This is obvious.  Just about everything OS related is stupid-slow.  Of course, it doesn't help that my computer only has 1 GB of RAM either.

- Occasional compatibility issues with hardware/software.

In OS X:

- Mouse cursor smoothing.  Good lord.  As a graphic designer/animator who uses the computer extensively, I absolutely cannot stand this.  It is utterly impossible to move the cursor only 1-2 pixels, because Apple decided it looked better if the cursor flowed neatly across your screen.

- Mouse cursor smoothing.  Oh, wait, I said that already.  I hate it, and I can't figure out how to turn it off.

- Various program options having to be accessed through the top menu bar instead of the program itself, particularly the "close" function.  More of an irritant than a real problem.

- No right-click functions.  This makes many high-end programs more difficult to navigate through, such as Illustrator.

Of course, Windows gets a bad rap for being slower and less reliable.  Yeah, that's the two-edged sword of the open-platform idea.  If OS X was required to support the ludicrously large number of hardware and software combos that Windows does, it would be just as bad.

The top menu bar is the program's menu bar. The idea is that the top menu bar is easier to target since it is a "mile high".

Mac OS X

I tried to make a list of ten points, but simply couldn't find anything that I find consistently annoying beyond these:

1. There is no keyboard interrupt that can be used to deal with a GUI or login screen hang. Windows has ctrl+alt+del. Mac OS X has nothing of the sort.

2. Finder keeps hanging whenever it wants. Snow Leopard comes with an allegedly rewritten Finder, but it still hangs when I expected the old Finder to hang. I had a script that would kill -9 my loginwindow for those cases, but in Snow Leopard loginwindow is now owned by root and I cannot kill it any more without sudo.

3. The remote desktop software is really VNC and thus very slow. Windows has a much faster remote desktop server.

4. Apple design software well but have on obvious disinterest in testing software. Most of Mac OS X and most Apple applications have easily-found bugs and annoyances that would have been spotted immediately if someone had tested the software professionally before release.

5. Apple's main development platform is not portable and Apple totally ignore Microsoft .NET instead of offering at least lukewarm native support.

Windows

1. Application windows jump to the foreground whenever they want, interrupting whatever I am doing. Mac OS X is able to start an application in the background with new windows opened by the application appearing BEHIND the window I am currently interacting with.
2. Upgrading from x86 (32 bit) to x64 (64 bit) requires a re-install and the x86 (32 bit) OS cannot run 64 bit programs. 32 bit Mac OS X can run 64 bit programs and upgrading to the full 64 bit OS requires but a reboot with Snow Leopard.
3. The Windows command line window sucks. There is no decent support for copying and pasting (in fact the window doesn't even know it contains lines of text and thinks of blocks of text instead).
4. Windows still has no built-in support for SSH.
5. When I double-click on a word in a text the entire word and the space behind it will be selected automatically. When there is no space behind the word (perhaps a full stop follows or a newline), no such space is selected. The result is that copying individual words quickly means that the word in the clipboard contains either a space at the end or not and the user has to remember whether the word was in the middle of a line and sentence or not in order to paste it quickly. Also, Windows doesn't have much knowgedge of grammar and concepts like email addresses and there is no system-wide standard of what exactly will happen when I double-click some text. (Doubleclicking the "double" in "double-click" selects only "double" in Firefox but selects "double-" in Notepad.)
   
6. Deleting and moving files is a period of time in Windows and a point in time in Mac OS X.
7. Not I, the user, but Windows is the ultimate judge of which files can be deleted. In Mac OS X I can log in as root and do what I want with my computer. In Windows there are always files that even the top-level administrator cannot delete. In Mac OS X administrators cannot delete some files either, but a root account can be activated if a power user insists.
8. Everything takes an installer. I cannot just copy an application into "Program Files" and later delete it again in order to get rid of it.
9. Speaking of "Program Files". For some reason Windows traditionally insisted (since Windows 95) on directory names with spaces even though Windows has tremendous trouble dealing with these spaces (how many people know that ^ is the escape character?). At least "Documents and Settings" became "Users". "My Documents" became "Documents" but is again displayed as "My Documents". Why not show the user what's really there and make what's really there showable?
10. The control panel is a mess and everything is difficult to reach. Mac OS X' System Preferences are MUCH easier to navigate.

Sounds like Windows 7 ....;p

Jafo I had no issues with Windows ME either. Sounds like you are the exception and the one the did have problems.

Sounds more like you're the exception.
ME is and always will be a shitty OS.

The One?  One of the !,000,000 who had the misfortune to buy it, more like it.  Never had ME myself, but everyone I know who did have it reckoned it was the worst OS in history.... and were pissed there was no refund when it failed miserably/HAD to be uninstalled.

People will say the same about Vista, though many pre-judged it, based on hearsay from 'so-called' experts, and never changed their minds.  I've been running Vista Home Premium x64 for about a year now and it is the most stable/least problematic OS I've ever used... until Win7, that is.

Speaking of Win 7, I picked up 2 copies of Home Premium x64 for $129.00 AUD a piece from my local PC store today... one each for me n' the missus.  Can't activate them 'til next Thursday, though... but that doesn't matter... we've got 'em.

Hmmm, ME always worked ok for me too...

Vista is more irritating than faulty. That effin' awful start menu, the fact it says I haven't got permission to access folders on my own PC, that stupid auto mouseover graphic that follows your mouse over documents... grrrrr! Stinking pile of dren...

I wouldn't go into a giant list cause its not really necessary... I like Win 7 a lot, but as with all MS products it cant be fully secured. Security is the achillies heel of Windows and it always will be, period. I use Linux quite a bit and I use it for most of my intensive web surfing. In Windows, I will only go to trusted sites where I have never been attacked in the past. As for Mac, I never really saw the need to have it... I've dabbled in it and it looks nice, but I'm not going to buy a new rig just to accomodate some expensive proprietary operating system. Theres too much proprietary crap with all Apple products... I generally look for alternatives to everything they sell. So while Mac is superior in most ways to Windows, its overpriced and not all that practical when considering other options. A dual boot Win7/Fedora seems to work good for me... when I want to game and use things unavailable to me in Linux I will use 7 and when I want to surf the web invulnerable to attack I will use Fedora.

How is a mac overpriced? It's not more expensive than any designer PC. If you compare the hardware on a recent mac with equivalent hardware on a recent pc, the price really is the same.

You can't just look at the specs though. You need to look at the big picture (Design, battery life (for notebooks), weight, size, Software, Stability, Support).

You CAN get a cheaper PC than a mac, that's a given. But show me a single PC that will give the full package you get with any current mac at a significantly lower price... You'll *always* make some kind of trade-off until you get around the same pricetag.

indeed.