I think a long time ago Apple secretly bought Microsoft and spent a decade beating themselves in the market so that when they released their long-planned suite of iHardware and OS X, it would make Windows look silly in comparison. That’s the only logical excuse for the way user accounts work in Windows.

Why, first of all, does a home operating system have an administrator account option? Then, second, and perhaps most important, why does this administrator account have the option, and a mandate in most cases, to run apps in administrator mode? Isn’t the very act of logging in as an administrator signaling to the operating system that you would like to run apps in administrator mode?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to get rid of user account levels and just prompt for a password when I need higher-than-normal access to the file system? Wouldn’t that be easier to explain to people than, “While running in administrator mode, right click the app and click, ‘Run as Administrator,’ and then when it pops up and asks, ‘Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?’ click ‘Yes.’”

In OS X you tap, type in a password and press enter.

In Windows, you log in as Administrator, right click, click, get a psychologically jarring audible warning with a dimmed screen, then click again.

Microsoft made an administrator mode that requires an administrator to modify administrator mode. That’s the deal.