I love OS X, and in general find Apple’s software on the platform extremely high-quality, but when it comes to running Apple’s software on Windows…well, it’s an entirely different ballgame. Safari uses its own widgets, windows, and font rendering, which makes it look utterly out of place on my desktop. QuickTime for years simply looked bizarre, using a window to hold just the menu bar, and then other windows to hold the movies. iTunes uses Windows-native font rendering and some native widgets, but mostly tries to foist OS X paradigms on Windows users for no particular reason. And all of these applications on Windows use tremendous amounts of RAM and CPU.

Yet even I have to admit that iTunes 8’s stability issues take Apple’s past poor performance to an entirely new level. Installing Safari with an iTunes update some months ago was bad enough, but installing a poorly vetted driver and a fleet of MobileMe services that cause Windows to lock up hard is inexcusable. For all people like to rant against Windows, the OS, at its core, honestly is very stable; it really is almost always third-party drivers that cause issues. In this case, that third party vendor is Apple.

I don’t think Apple is writing crappy Windows software on purpose; I just think that their Windows team is grossly incompetent. It’s past due that Apple either starts writing non-sucky Windows software, or quits trying.