Mac OS X use versus Windows XP use... 598
We've been through this before. operating system n : (computer science) software that controls the end of computer programs and may provide various services. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Regardless - your claim is this: "Those things are applications...
Edwin, Edwin, Edwin. You just love to see the world in black and white, don't you?
What set Macintosh apart from other OSes was that it defined not only how applications must talk to device drivers and operating system services, it defined how applications should look and feel. Mac OS provides not just things such as allocation of resources and interprocess communicationÑwhich any Unix in usermode 3 doesÑit also provides the tools to provide a unified look and, packaged with it the same way that a Unix has a user shell, a primary interface for controlling it: the Finder. You can insist that the OS is only the hardware and the lowest levels of device drivers and process managers if you want to, but that ignores what operating systems provide to the user and what differentiates them.
Of course, it's in your ideological interest to ignore those things that differentiate Mac OS from Windows. That's the only way that you can pretend that Windows is as good as OS X.
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