The previous versions were built on a proprietary system, and had many things added to them, by Apple, and by users. As a result, OS 9 and earlier were susceptible to incompatibilities with those added elements. I mostly ran the system without a lot of bells and whistles and added screensavers and so even with the earlier systems I rarely encountered crashes. Usually, screen savers were the cause of earlier system crashes.
With OS X, the system is not tied down with those kind of elements. It's built on top of a UNIX-y core, and when one program quits, it doesn't bring down the whole system or freeze the computer.
And actually, people pretty much know why there are problems when there are any with the Mac. The website
http://www.macfixit.com almost always has the latest on any reported problem with any third-party software or whatever.
That's as easy as it gets. No frequent patches, no worries about macros that make your system vulnerable, no frequent viruses infiltrating your Outlook email addresses.
And Steve Jobs only supports liberals. And Al Gore's on the board. While Microsoft, an adjudicated monopolist that has tried to kill Netscape, and Java, and QuickTime, and on and on and on, and brought Michael Savage Weiner to the masses, continues to feed its bloated and unstable proprietary madness to the Wintel hordes, and the government has to issue warnings that your system is vulnerable if you're using Windows, and Navy ships go dead in the water because their system runs on Windows.
I'll take the conscientious consumer route any time. And I feel even better about it going with the company that brought out the iPod, and iMusic, and iMovie, and the iCam, and popularized the use of FireWire, and QuickTime, and Safari.
Yup, Mac users don't have to "get over" anything, except maybe feeling left out for not supporting an adjudicated monopolist with an operating system the government sends warnings about because it's so vulnerable. I guess if I try real hard I can maybe get over that.
Dan Brown
Saint Paul, Minnesota