Читать книгу macOS Monterey For Dummies - Bob LeVitus - Страница 13

As someone once told me, “Claiming that macOS is inferior to Windows because more people use Windows is like saying that all other restaurants serve food that’s inferior to McDonald’s.”

We might be a minority, but Mac users have the best, most stable, most modern all-purpose operating system in the world, and here’s why: Unix, on which macOS is based, is widely regarded as the best industrial-strength operating system on the planet. For now, just know that being based on Unix means that a Mac running macOS benefits from nearly four decades of continuous Unix development, which means less downtime. Being Unix-based also means getting far fewer viruses and encounters with malicious software. But perhaps the biggest advantage macOS has is that when an application crashes, it doesn’t crash your entire computer, and you don’t usually have to restart the computer to continue working.

By the way, since the advent of Intel-powered Macs more than a decade ago, you can run Windows natively also on any Mac powered by an Intel processor, as I describe in Chapter 23. Note that the opposite isn’t true: You can run Windows on your Intel-based Mac if you care to, but you cannot run macOS on a Dell or HP or any other computer not made by Apple (at least not without serious hacking, which is probably illegal anyway).

In June 2020, Apple announced that the Mac will transition from Intel processors to Apple’s custom silicon processors “to deliver industry-leading performance and powerful new technologies.” The bad news is that Macs with Apple processors can’t run Windows (or most other operating systems) natively. The good news is that Windows 10 on ARM Preview and Windows 11 (when released) already run on Macs with Apple processors under third-party virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop (www.parallels.com), and virtualization support will only get better in the future.

Please don’t let that Unix or Windows stuff scare you. It’s there if you want it, but if you don’t want it or don’t care (like most users, including yours truly), you’ll rarely even know it’s there. In fact, you’ll rarely (if ever) see the word Unix or Windows again in this book. As far as you’re concerned, Unix under the hood means your Mac will just run and run and run without crashing and crashing and crashing. As for Windows, your Mac can probably run it if you need it; otherwise, it’s just another checklist item on the list of reasons Macs are better than PCs.