I was at a mate’s house the other night and helped transferring data from his old PC running Windows XP to his new MacBook and was amazed by just how much better Mac OS X looks compared to Windows XP (and to be fair, Gnome).

Everything from the toolbar buttons, the task bar, the clock, and the window borders just look so much more polished. In comparison, Windows XP looks like a toy:

I know it’s not fair to compare the latest Mac OS X to the aging Windows XP, but even back in the days, Mac OS X was a much more compelling alternative if you cared about looks (which I shamelessly do). And anyway, Mac OS X looks better than Windows Vista too.

By the way, my friend who bought a MacBook is as far from a computer geek you can get. All he uses a computer for is basically instant messaging and downloading stuff. So it was nice to see him think outside the box and get a Mac instead of a PC. I had nothing to do with that (if anything, I’d probably recommended Linux).