Gary Morgenthaler of Business Week is the latest in a series of tech journalists to really disappoint me. Why? Just look at his latest rubbish posted on Business Week’s website today.
Consider the following paragraph and tell me that bias and sensationalism haven’t taken over tech “journalism.”
With last year’s arrival of Vista, Windows has swollen to 1 billion bytes (a gigabyte) or more of software code. The “Mach” kernel of the Mac OS X, however, requires less than 1 million bytes (a megabyte) of data in its smallest configuration, expanding modestly with the sophistication of the application.
So the iPhone kernel is smaller than all of Vista and its included applications. Sound the alarm, get the president on the line, this is huge news.
What Gary forgets is that the CPU of my Dell workstation is hundreds if not thousands of times smaller than an entire Mac Pro. I think, advantage Dell.
Of course I’m joking, these comparisons are absurd. Yet in the very next sentence Gary piles on the bull crap.
This bloating has saddled Vista users with increased costs and poor performance on average computers.
If you look at Apple’s own website, they state that Leopard requires 9GB of available disk space to install. Not surprisingly, this is almost exactly the same amount of space required for Windows Vista. But how can that be? Windows is bloated! OS X is not! We know these things, and working backward from this knowledge we can’t possibly come to the conclusion that they’re both just about the same size. So why bother with the facts at all when you can work backward from what you want to be true?
The facts, in fact, are even worse for Gary’s argument than you might think. You see, while Leopard and Vista require about the same amount of disk space to install to, one of them does have a far larger kernel image than the other.
The more portly of which is by far OS X. I just rebooted my Macbook into Leopard to see just how large the kernel was. The Mach kernel alone, which is only part of the OS X kernel, is 10MB in size.
So how big is the 64-bit Vista kernel on my desktop machine? 4.5MB
But this is hardly a fair comparison. After all, that’s the size of a 64-bit Windows kernel. We can’t reasonably compare it to a 32-bit Mac OS kernel (there is no 64-bit Mac OS kernel at the time of this writing). So what about the 32-bit Vista one? That weighs in at a massive 3.4MB.
Alright, the sensationalist “journalists” have won me over. Come on NT guys, 3.4MB? In 2008? What’s with all the bloat?
