Microsoft and Apple have been locking their horns more often now. With Apple gaining more share of the computing world consistently (though no where close to PC) it is imperative for users to understand the degree of technological change that each is offering to end user.

64 Bit & 32 Bit Systems
While Microsoft and Apple both provide support for their proprietary applications for both 32 & 64 bit platforms, Microsoft offers different variants of applications and OS for supporting 64 bit systems. 64 bit systems are more secure by providing security at hardware level and provide fast performance to users. Mac has worked extensively towards reducing the gap between the 2. Their new OS Snow Leopard is 64 Bit and is backward compatible with 32 bit applications. This is quite an achievement considering that Microsoft, even after the setback from Vista has not made any effort to bridge the gap between users of 32 bit & 64 bit Operating Systems. This makes Windows 7 look like just another update to Windows Vista and considerable under hood technology enhancements by Apple.

Utilization of Multi Core processors

While Microsoft has not made substantial changes to the way their Operating System utilizes multi-core processors, Apple has doen a tremendous job of providing application developers a tool “Grand Central Dispatch” which can be used by developers to create applications that can utilize multi core prcessor capabilities to deliver enhanced performance. Maybe Microsoft has already achieved this is yet to be discovered with Snow Leopard slated for launch in Mid September, a month before retail launch of Windows 7.

Graphics and Video

Both Microsoft & Apple have invested substantially in this area. Windows 7 will come with enhanced graphics support with greater desktop responsiveness. Compared to this, Apple will introduce Open CL (Open Computing Language), which is a C-Based language that will be familiar to programmers who can use the code to develop applications that work closely with OpenCL. They will only need to rewrite the performance intensive parts to deliver better application performance.

  
Other than these comparisons, there are other enhancements that Apple will introduce with Snow Leopard OSX. One of the noted changes will be native support for Exchange Server. For people familiar with Outlook 2007, there will be a similar functionality in Snow Leopard. Just enter the domain, username and password and you will get connected to the server on the Apple platform. You can then continue to use Mail, iCal and Address Book to utilize the capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server.

In my opinion, Apple has come out with lot of technological changes as compared to Microsoft. Apple will transform computing experience to a new dimension through Snow Leopard, unlike Microsoft’s Windows 7 that appears like a “Service Pack” for Windows Vista with lot of user level changes.