Review - OS X Lion vs. Windows 8

Last October at an event on the Apple Cupertino campus called "Back to the Mac," the world got its first peek at the stylish tech firm's next desktop operating system, dubbed "OS X Lion." CEO Steve Jobs explained that the success of the company's iPad tablet was a major driver in adding features to Lion. More details were demonstrated at this year's WWDC. And just last week at D9, the world got its first peek at what the company has code-named "Windows 8," in a demo by Microsoft's Windows President, Steve Sinofsky. That operating system, too, it turns out, was heavily influenced by a smaller-form-factor OS—Windows Phone 7.

But the similarities don't end at the two future desktop OS's mobile influencers. Both Lion and Window 8 will make heavy use of touch interfaces, but with a big difference, as you'll see in the slideshow below. Both will have an App Store, both have full screen app views, and both offer new ways to switch among and navigate within apps.
There are, of course, important differences between Microsoft and Apple's overall OS strategies, as outlined by Peter Pachal in "Mac OS X Lion vs. Windows 8: Who Will Win the Post-PC World?" It all hinges on tablet support. Pachal points out that Apple is aligning its tablet and phone OSes, and keeping the desktop OS separate, though mobile-influenced. Microsoft, on the other hand, is creating one OS for tablets and desktops, while keeping the phone OS separate—for now, anyway. Microsoft may even have its ideas for a grand unified OS for all devices. Keep in mind that Lion, which is due for release next month, is much further along in the development process. Windows 8, on the other hand, isn't coming out until next year, so we haven't gotten as full a picture of the latter.

Clearly, the tablet and mobile worlds have begun to impact the desktop OS in a major way. This begs the question: Can the desktop survive? Once you see all the powerful goodies these new system software heavyweights bring to the table, however, you'd be hard pressed to make a case for the irrelevance of the desktop computer. Click through the slideshow to see whether you disagree, and to see which looks better to you: Windows 8 or Apple's OS X Lion.

Lion's Mobile-like User Interface

OS X Lion's interface won't take on its iPad/iPhone-inspired guise until you run Launchpad. This gives the desktop a view that's nearly identical to the home screen of an iPad or iPhone, with pages of square app icons that you can swipe through. And just as on iOS, you can create folders of related apps by dragging one icon on top of another. And, of course, you can drag the apps around Launchpad's pages to place them wherever you want—doing so is actually easier on the Mac than on an iDevice.

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Windows 8's Mobile-like User Interface

Windows 8's overall interface shows more influence from Windows Phone 7 than OS X Lion does from iOS. It uses the Metro interface found on Windows Phone 7, with "live tiles" that give quick access to and display info from your apps. But we've also seen a legacy desktop interface, in which Windows 8 looks exactly like Windows 7. This showed up when Windows President Steve Sinofsky showed Windows 8 running Office at the D9 tech gathering. This brings us back to the point about Windows 8 doing double duty for desktops and tablets, in contrast to Apple's strategy of using the phone OS for its iPad tablet. The reason Microsoft is taking this route: It cares more about business users than Apple does. And business users use desktops primarily, and will want desktop capabilities on their tablets.

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Windows 8's Touch and Gesture Support

Both OS X Lion and Windows 8 have claimed greater multitouch and gesture support, but Windows 8 will actually support touch screens, whereas Lion won't let you use your screen as an input device, instead relying on touchpads that support multitouch and gestures. The OS will go so far as including a thumb-able on-screen keyboard for tablets without keyboards. Apple, in contrast, is adding a similar feature to its upcoming mobile OS release, iOS 5.

Lion's Touch Gesture Support

Mac OS X Snow Leopard already includes a good deal of touch and gesture support on touchpads, and these are very well illustrated with video demos in the Mac's System Preferences' Trackpad section. For Lion, Apple claims that the touch experience with be even more direct and natural, featuring rubber-band scrolling, page and image zoom, and full-screen swiping. You'll be able to call up Mission Control , tap to zoom, and switch between full-screen apps.

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Switching Among Apps

For OS X Lion, Apple has revamped the Spaces virtual desktop feature, wrapping it into the Mission Control app switcher. But Spaces will likely be more frequently used in its new guise, since you'll be able to switch VDs through simple swipe gesture. Windows 8, too, has switching by swipe, but Microsoft's version is just app switching versus virtual desktop switching.

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