Bitey said:
MS didn’t ignore Apple on the Vista bashing commercials, they just didn’t have a come back….
What could MS say to refute a lie? All Apple was doing is driving home stereotypes for how bad the OS was even though most of the problems either weren’t serious issues or had already been fixed. You can’t advertise that your competitor is lying in their advertisements, that only works in politics.
If MS cared they would have wiped the floor with Apple back on OSX10.0-10.3 which were extremely hyped and were lightyears worse than Vista. Combine the pure fail of the original Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows XP pre SP2, and Vista and you might get to the same ballpark as the early OSX releases. They could have, at any time, annihilated Apple for how they let OS7 rot without adding any significant feature for 6 years, their extremely underhanded legal postering towards 3rd party manufacturers in OS8, and the way they hyped, released, then completely abandoned OS9. Then they released 10.0 which actually removed features previously in OS9 like CD burning and DVD playback and was extremely unstable. It was so bad they gave a free upgrade to 10.1 which still had all the stability issues of 10.0 and even diehard mac fanatics refused to use it as their main OS because of how slow it was. 10.2 fixed the stability issues but was still widely criticised as being slow and unresponsive even on brand new computers. 10.3 was so cool that a couple lines of 10.2 computers literally didn’t have the hardware capability to install 10.3, they met all the minimum requirements but were locked out because of a bootloader change hardcoded on the motherboard. Apple refused to make 10.3 compatible the old bootloader but 3rd party groups later created a workaround that tricked the 10.3 installer into thinking the computer had the newer bootloader. Oddly enough, once installed, the OS didn’t care what bootloader you were using.
One thing I find interesting that Apple gets away with that Microsoft never could, whenever Apple releases a new version of their OS they completely drop all updates and support for the previous OS. If you have a problem or a new bug is found you’re simply told to upgrade to the new OS and/or buy a new computer that supports the new OS. Compare this to Windows 2000 which was support through 2010 (9 years after replacement), Windows XP that is supported through 2014 (8 years after replacement) and Vista is supported through at least 2012 (3+ years after replacement). It would also have been hilarious if Microsoft had told every Windows Vista user that complained about speed issues to buy a new computer designed for Vista… hilariously expensive to settle the class action lawsuit, that is…