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Macs Are Cheaper than PCs
astrodawg writes "According the Gartner research firm, Macs are cheaper than PCs.
'It compared direct costs such as hardware and software for desktops and mobile computers, servers and peripherals, upgrades, service and support and depreciation. The study also examined the indirect costs of supporting end-users, training time and non-productive downtime.'
MacCentral posted a story; evidently, the full report from Gartner is a bit expensive." I think the news about this should be that anyone questioned it to begin with.
(On a side note, I miss having a Mac)
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Windows is only cheaper if your time is worthless.
Reality has a liberal bias
please show me where you can build your own mac for 400 bucks or less.
First off, software costs? Are they referring to the costs of the CD-Rs I have to purchase to burn my Debian CDs? ;)
Second, i still can't function on the Apple realm like I do in the PC realm. In a few months I'll grab a new mobo and a CPU and basically breathe life into my PC for $300. I might have a few upgrade issues, but I'll search google and lkml before choosing a chipset/brand.
Macs are probably cheaper to people that hop down to the local electronics superstore and buy a PC, but it's probably not cheaper for alot of the crowd here.
I would sell my soul for a Powerbook though.
Cory 'G' Watson
At the company I currently work for, we use exclusively macs. There are about 100 people here, all with computers. How many support personnel do we need?
One, non-overworked person.
At my old job, we ran WindowsNT. There were about a dozen people using computers. How many support personnel did we need?
Two, somewhat overworked people.
This is just an anecdote, so don't interpret this post as an argument for/against the Gartner group's findings. This story is simply in line with my experiences, so I'm disinclined to reject their findings. I'm really not saying you need sixteen times more support personnel to employ Windows; I'm just saying we needed more.
Remember, most computer users are not computer literate. These are people who struggle to use Internet Explorer.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
I preferred it when they were more expensive. I love owning the BMW of the computer world. If you are a cheap ass who only wants to spend $400 on a computer, then you get what you pay for! Trying to defend against these people is a waste of time. There will always be some moron who claims that the Mac is too expensive for him. Too fscking bad. If you can't afford it, you don't deserve to be using one. Its like a welfare bum crying because they can't afford a porsche. I don't have any time for these whiners. If you want a premium brand, expect to pay more for it. If, as this study says, the total cost of ownership turns out to be less, good for you. Thats why its a premium brand.
Reality has a liberal bias
did the poster realise s/he just started a holy war?
/. with one of the biggest incentives to /. maccentral)
(not to mention providing the
.
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Has anyone seen the new ad campaign by Apple trying to convince PC users to switch to Macs?
Here. (with Quicktime commercials)
http://www.apple.com/switch
Personally I think PCs will always be cheaper than Macs (especially for the hobbyist). You can hack up a PC from scratch (that's what I did) and find pretty cheap components and cards from Taiwan or some such place... not every part of the PC has to be of premium quality.
"I can resist everything except temptation" - Oscar Wilde
Funny, the two links in the article that supposedly support the claims do not support it. Has anybody seen any numbers or facts that support this claim ? I'm sorry, but in this day and age, mere opinion is not enough.
X
The thing about it is this: it's a Centris 650, built in 1993. $4000 is what it's cost, materials-wise, since it's birth. That comes to about $500 a year, or around $1.50 a day. That covers a full complement (128MB) of RAM, a monitor, a hard drive upgrade and software upgrades. That's all I've ever had to do with it, really. Actually, the best part is that I didn't have to pay the initial $2,700 purchase price: I purchased it used from a university for $25. So really my TCO, since I've owned for a year or two, is more like $300 (RAM and hard drive - the rest came with it).
Sure, that doesn't take into account the cost of my time, but I really don't have much in the way of non-productive downtime either. My other Macs have similar stories. Probably my best one is my Mac Plus. Last time I calculated, that machine cost about $.23 a day since it's birth. And it does everything the Centris does, only in black and white.
Do not touch -Willie
...to buy a new PC when a company doesn't port their app to Apple.
Apple is more like a $50,000 Hyundai. It looks better than the Chevy, but it costs a lot more.
Mac is too expensive since you pay much more for something with fewer features, fewer capabilities, often with less memory and a slower system.
Macs are only cheaper to own than PCs because you end up buying more for PCs... because there is more.
A store had a sale on a nice cheap 19" monitor. For PC only, not Mac. That's $200 blown just by having the PC, I guess. If I had a Mac instead, I'd be $200 richer, still looking at a tiny screen.
The study also examined the indirect costs of supporting end-users, training time and non-productive downtime.
Translation: Macs don't ship with Solitaire!
"And like that
" If you are a cheap ass who only wants to spend $400 on a computer, then you get what you pay for"
A typical $400 PC will meet or beat the lowest level Mac on everything except the flat screen. If you pay for a better computer at a great deal, what you get is a better computer for a great deal. Those Mac owners who pay a lot more to get less "get what they pay for".
"Remember, most computer users are not computer literate. These are people who struggle to use Internet Explorer."
Ahem. There are a lot of computer literate people who struggle with Internet Explorer's bloated size, vast security holes, configuration difficulties and Java-crashes, and a lot more.
Hey, it's Internet Explorer. Not smooth sailing for any sort of user.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The "office of Macs" is one step down the line toward supporting an office full of dumb terminals. When you have machines which are much more limited and harder to do a variety of different things with, of course support is easier.
"In a few months I'll grab a new mobo and a CPU and basically breathe life into my PC for $300"
Doing this kind of thing is much more difficult with the Mac, as to discourage most people (but not discourage most PC users). If you upgrade your PC mobo at the tune of $300 twice a year, that's $600 you save just by getting a Mac you can't upgrade.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
"Macs are only cheaper to own than PCs because you end up buying more for PCs... because there is more. "
Not lame at all. Just true. Compared to the pc there is not much in the way of software and add-ons for the Mac. The Macintosh is just less useful. The PC will only draw more from your wallet as you give into temptation and buy more programs and add-ons: just because they exist.
There are three reasons I haven't used Mac's in the past:
It's been too expensive for me.
I got really heavy into computers in the late eighties; the Mac had already come out and the PC arena domination by IBM was breaking hard.
I was making $8 an hour and had a social life. Saving the $3000 to buy a Mac wasn't possible or desirable for me. My main reason for using a computer was gaming; Mac didn't have the games I wanted at the time. I also could buy the PC a piece at a time, where that wasn't (and still isn't) a possiblity with the Mac. It's much easier for a 16 year old to spend $300 for something than it is to save $3000 for another.
My work prevents it
I develop software for a living. Without exception, my clients use PC's and Sun's. The tools I use in developing Oracle stuff just aren't available. If I don't have the software to do what I want, I won't use the system. Period.
Claiming that people like me switching platforms would cause the software to appear doesn't work. I'm not an evangelist, I'm a consultant. If I sit around and wait for the software to magically appear on another platform, I don't eat.
Which brings me to my third reason...
Mac Evangelists
With two exceptions, every Mac user I've encountered has preached at me with the furvor of a Deep-South Bible Thumper. I know that not all Mac users are this fanatical, but 95% of the encounters I've had have been.
I've actually been told, while in a "discussion" with one of the above-mentioned users, that my points were "more offensive than being criticized by a racist". In my experiences, this is the norm, not the exception. I don't care what the topic is, if you accuse me of being worse than a racist when I debate your points, you look like an asshole.
As long as I encounter this type of person a majority of the time when trying to discuss the merits and disadvantages of a platform, I have no interest in discussing it any more. Furthermore, all of the (possibly valid) arguments made on the Mac's behalf are now in the category of
Finally...
All that being said, OSX looks really nice. The compatibility isn't as much of an issue now that it's based on a BSD operating system and I can run real Unix apps on it. I haven't heard any complaints about the Linux ABI layer not working, so maybe my Oracle stuff will run under OSX, as well as a host of other applications that aren't available on the Mac.
I'm contemplating buying an iBook as my next laptop because of these reasons. Had I been able to have a rational discussion with somebody about the pros and cons of the system, I'd might just be a Mac user today.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
" But for the other 90% of people who use the computer as a tool for something else, and who don't want to build their computer from scratch, the Mac is a better option."
For 90% of users, the PC is the better option because it is more versatile. The Apple Mac only is a better option for a minority of users who need excellence in the niche areas Mac excels in, like desktop publishing. The Mac might be a tool, but the PC is more like a toolbox. A hammer is great for smashing things and pounding nails, but is not best suited for cutting a board in two.
1. Save one of the Gartner PDFs.
2. Open it.
3. Look at properties.
(File:Document Info:General)
I'll save you the trouble.
"Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.0 for Windows"
"...most digital cameras [apple.com] work fine, and brand name MP3 players [apple.com]...."
Of course Apple says everything works best with Apple. Does this surprise anyone? Can we see what an independent source says?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Time spent fixing: A normal enterprise-level user's time actually spent solving a problem would be greater than their IT guy's time actually spent solving the problem. And if it isn't that way, they should either swap jobs or get a new IT guy.
So instead of the cheap stuff that (you say) won't work on Macs, they buy more expensive stuff that does work on Macs (like almost all digital cameras, or a nice iPod) - and still have a lower TCO.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Read the Ephpod item from yesterday. From what I recall, also, the Ephpod is not crippled like the Apple software for iPod that tries to make it hard to have multiple copies of things moving around involving your iPod.
iGoofed is what happened.
Laugh, it's funny. Not just the ridiculous assertion that the hardware is cheaper, but most of the replies.
"Any camera that doesn't work with a Mac simply doesn't conform to the STANDARDS which have been established for such devices."
This is Apple we are talking about. If they cared about standards, they'd be building PC's!
No, if some camera works on 90% of the computers out there but doesn't work on Mac due to Mac differences, the standard-following problem does not lie with the camera owner....
So what am I supposedly not going to be able to do with my Mac? I:
* Write letters and things for work using MS Word (Office v.X for the Mac)
* Access the Citrix Metaframe farm at work (I can use either a third-party Java client or the official ICA client for MacOS 9).
* Edit photos and other graphics in Graphic Converter (haven't gotten around to upgrading to Photoshop 7 yet).
* Use the Canon software that came with my PowerShot G1 to copy photos onto my computer, or I can use my USB Compact Flash card reader, or I can use Apple's iPhoto program. Same results, either way.
* Print said photos on my Epson Stylus 740 (using drivers included in MacOS X, just like in Windows XP)
* Use iMovie and a firewire cable to copy DV off my Canon ZR40 miniDV camera (although, I just bought it so I haven't tinkered with it much)
* Write e-mail to family and friends in MS Entourage (similar to Outlook Express on the PC, with a built in contact manager)
* Play games when I need some relief (just picked up Return To Castle Wolfenstein, but spend most of my time lately in the Mac port of MAME.)
* Use the open source, spyware-free OpenAG client to troll AudioGalaxy for MP3s
* Organize and burn them to CD using iTunes (or any one of a number of MP3 players, but iTunes is pretty good)
Shocking! All without using a PC!
Your point, again?
With Linux, you do not need to recompile your kernel to get new features. Linux has had kernel modules since Linux 2.0. You only need to apt-get the right module and its dependencies. Rarely will "Grandma" need to recompile her kernel!
Plus USB and Firewire support is greatly improved in the new Linux 2.5 kernels, so there is no need to wait any longer. And with GNOME 2.0 (with Nautilus) just around the corner, Linux will be even easier to use than Windows and Mac combined.. Because Linux is open source, it will always be improving faster than closed source.
cpeterso
Your statement was that the monitor was for PC's, not for Macs - your implication was that the monitor could NOT be used on a Mac. That is bullshit - I use Princeton Graphics "PC only" monitors on both of my Macs. Your further implication is that it was being marketed as PC only - which, whether you only have one Mac user 18 miles away or not, is bad business. Sorry, I'll call stupidity by it's name when I see it...
my G4 400 AGP has lasted me 2years and cost me just 80$ in that time. i forsee it lasting another two, although i will buy it a little vidcard present for jaguar soon.
I want 2D games back.
Ok, lets be honest here, the context of the study was an Art college, Melbourne University's Faculty of the Arts, or at least I am seeing "art" in the name. From personal experiance, I can tell you that artists generally aren't the most tech savvy, generally aren't accomadating and frankly bitch a lot. I am sure support costs were much greater for the art types using wintel's. Now if they did a similar study at a regular college, that might tell us something.
Could you tell me which of the four or five major-brand comptuer manufacturer will offer pre-built boxes, with warranty, and phone support for Linux, so I can buy a system like this?
I don't really know a lot about building computers and all... I just want to sit down and write some letters and e-mail, web surf, maybe work with some digital photos (I have a Canon -- can I plug that right into a "Linux" computer and have the photos copied off automatically like in Windows and on the Mac?) You know, normal stuff.
Anyway, your description sounds great! So where do I buy one, again?
Have you ever seen what kinda of traffic that the Mac network browser generates? I have a buddy who works in a similar envionment (an advertising company) with all Macs and seeing as most Mac users don't know jack about proper computing they screw things up CONSTANTLY, not to mention when they email out 40 meg Photoshop files and other none tech savvy things.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.gart ner.com
last time I checked, macconnection.com, newegg.com, compusa.com, amazon.com, etc. had full selections of Mac peripherals and add-on goodies. and with the fact that Macs use the same USB, FireWire, IDE, SCSI, etc. peripherals that PC's do, I guess I don't understand what you mean.
Which PC-only add-ons and software? I will grant you that Mac games do come out a few months after their Windows counterparts since they're often produced by third-party porting houses -- e.g. Neverwinter Nights will follow the Windows version by two months, I think. But all the top games are out and available for both platforms.
...would realize that many companies use software on Macs that has never been ported to PC's?
"Since when is a hardware compatibility list not a proper info source?"
Get the clue that what you will find on apple.com is basically ad copy. They avoid listing or talking about all the devices that won't work, even if the list is 5 times as long. Look for an objective source that has no stake in what is on or off the list.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
(nuff said)
TCO: Of windows vs UNIX (Sun Solaris, IBM etc)
/. idiots who didn't read or understand the article.
TCO: Of windows vs Linux
TCO: Of windows VS Mac OS X
Using windows as a bench mark in a corporate environment against all of the other alternatives would be great.
I'm sure you would even save money going w/ one monster big iron server vs many windows servers.
To address the
Gartner did some research at a university that purchases multiple computers that are pre-assembled. The IT department doesn't have time to assemble all of the computers in an organization. The PCs in the report are prebuilt Dells, Compaqs, Gateways or ect.
The $avings were only $400 per year of roughly 5,000 machines per each type. These are probably labor savings & not much else. Software is standardized across all platforms (Office, Photoshop, IE etc). And decent hardware is also cross platform (Network printers, the ocassional didital camera / scanner for art students).
The report also states that there were fewer hardware costs (repairs). And fewer technical support costs(Memroy leaks - buggy M$ software). As well as fewer training costs (Crufty M$ gui).
Does this mean that thier aren't exceptions? No.
Can you build a $400 PC and install slackware and only run OSS software on it? Yes.
Is a university or buisness going to do that? No.
The report merely states that in a networked multi user environment (not in your bedroom) Macs have a lower TCO than Windows PC's. It's amazing that this is:
A. Surprizing
B. A debated issue
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
"Sorry, ANY piece of USB enabled equipment that I need a driver to use is NON-STANDARD"
If it works on the vast majority of machines out there, it is standard. The ones that need special drivers are the ones in the minority, non-standard. What part of this is unclear to you?
Sure it will plug in and work: on a standard computer, that is.
5400RPM hard drive = consumes less power and is worlds more reliable than a 7200rpm drive (this is more important than raw speed for anything other than your kiddie 1337 gaming b0x0rs)
Keyboard/mouse = i've never had a problem with them.
total price = 1800. A bargain, considering how much time I've saved diddling with drivers and OSes since getting my Mac.
" It's amazing that this is:
A. Surprizing
B. A debated issue"
Surprised? Debated? The vast majority of IT departments find that the Mac platform does indeed cost a lot more and is less versatile. There really is no debate. You should not be surprised, despite the cooked numbers and "overlooking the obvious" of this study.
"You seem to misunderstand that the Gartner Group's reputation IS their selling point"
The same could be said of Arthur Anderson accounting firm... until recently that is. This boneheaded and obviously biased "study" surely won't help Gartner's reputation. They will be ignored, and the study will be treated as part of Apple's ad campaign, and IT departments will continue to save money and get things done better by ignoring the Apple Macintosh platform.
Such studies have come out ever since the first Macintosh was introduced. The real world experience of companies who know what costs more or costs less puts the lie to the studies, and the Macintoshes are few and far between.
Translation: Deploy Macs instead of PC's and you'll can kiss 22% of your budget, headcount, and corporate influence good bye.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
"Previous studies have been conducted that show that Mac users tend to use a much broader range of software than their Windows counterparts. This is, in part, due to an easier to use system encouraging more exploration.
That can't be true, since there is a much wider variety of software available for PCs than there is for Macs. Odd applications that just aren't on the Mac at all. PC's are also much easier to use encouraging exploration. Until recently, the Mac OS has been a limiting straighjacket made all the harder to use by the lack of a command line which lets you do some things that are still harder on any modern GUI. This is part of Apple's ideal of "simplicity" at the expense of ease-of-use. If you "think different" chances are there is a PC app for it, but no Mac app.
See title.
I've used AMD for years. Wonder if the numbers are altered by insisting on Wintel PCs instead of any PC even if it is not a "Wintel". Wonder how this impacts costs?
"Translation: Deploy Macs instead of PC's and you'll can kiss 22% of your budget, headcount, and corporate influence good bye."
In the real business world, you probably instead kiss 22% more money goodbye just by using Macs. I've seen many studies like this for many years. If there was one bit of truth to it, Macs would have taken over by now: companies are interested in the bottom line after all.
If there were any truth to it, the study would be all the rage in the IT journals, instead of being part of an Apple advertising campaign.
"Macs .....hardware .....costs were lower
Guess no one at Gartner could have been bothered to check a catalog, online store, or walk into a retailer. Is it new math, where a system that costs $2200 has a "lower hardware cost" than one costing $1300?
...amd cheaper to support, the article says. There is a difference. Value means a lot more than how much money it costs, as the executives where I work still don't understand.
"Gartner never suggested that this was meant for EVERY company. It depends on what your business is and what your needs are. That you wish to overgeneralize and take their claims out of context has very little bearing on their credibility."
The fact that Gartner's claims aren't true for the overwhelming majority of companies has a lot of bearing on their credibility. Companies that would have gone Mac years ago if the Gartner claims had any substance: just because they do not want to waste money.
Interesting that this comes to light in a "Macintosh evangelism" site, not from a place devoted to helping business run more efficiently.
Gartner isn't going to get much of anywhere with claims like the one where the Macintosh hardware costs less than the PC hardware (aside from all support, training, and everything else). Everyone, even Mac evangelists know that this is not true (the evangelists just argue that it is worth paying more to get something better).
I use a PC. It has AMD in it. Who cares about Wintel. With a PC, you usually get better complete hardware. Like a disk drive with an eject button. Looks like someone busted it off the Macintosh.
PC's? You get ports for standard parallel and serial devices. Oops. bargain basement inferior Mac forgot them.
Been years since I used an inferior Wintel. I've used PC's lately that are much faster and have more options than Macintoshes costing hundreds more.
http://www.currid.com/research.htm
Many Mac fans cite the Gartner Group's May 1995 study of "Dual-Platform Support Costs," summarized as Technical Support Costs and Dual-Platform Desktops: Managed Diversity. The study was performed during the Windows 95 beta test. This study was sponsored and paid for by Apple Computer, according to the Gartner Group.
All it would take it a size block on the email server and a few second of explaining to people what not to mess with.
Trust me, he tried that many times, and explained it MANY MANY times, didn't help, seemed the artists had the attention span of fruit flys.
Multiply that list by 100, and see how much more useful a PC is. Inside that list, many of * items have many more options, instead of "this is the only thing that does this on the Mac, so I have to make do."
"Do you know how much time it would take for a non-techie to get all this stuff to work on a POS $400 Linux machine?"
Much less time with a point of sale PC (not necessarily Linux though) than on a Mac. You could probably go to a nearby store and get most of the software to do this stuff and install it all taking a couple of hours.
"I would rather hire a lawyer. Most importantly, 95% of the general public would do the same."
What is the point of the analogy. How does it fit the close to 95% who get PCs instead of Macs?
With the Mac, chances are you will drive much farther, or give up on that and have to wait days for mail order.
"PC: Last decade's ports
Mac: This decade's ports."
More true to say that the PC has last decades AND this decades ports. Both types. And you pay less for the privilege.
PC: last decades ports and this decades ports.
Mac: Only this decades ports. F* you and won't you buy our port dongle if you want to run something a little older.
"PC: Last decade's ports
Mac: This decade's ports."
My new PC has a bunch of USB ports and a few firewire along with the legacy ports.
I'm not living in the past with this machine. But if I want to, I can. Is there any drawback to having the legacy ports as long as you have new ones? You act as if it is a bad thing to have legacy ports.
I really have to laugh at Gartner reports, they do one case study at one location and try to justify that that is how it must be in the real world. I would be willing to bet money that if you took all the variables and compared them using the three major OSes of today - Unix, MacOS, Windows - you would find that no matter what platform you went with your overall cost (TCO) would be the same. It's just plain common sense.
I do have to say, though, that it doesn't much matter to me whether you buy a Mac or not. But, anyway:
It's much easier for a 16 year old to spend $300 for something than it is to save $3000 for another.
Sure, and when I was sixteen I worked for a summer with the YCC and bought a TRS-80 Model I, which I hooked up to a B&W tube television that I had found in the trash and rewired to accept video input. It wasn't technically my first computer, because I had built a Cosmac Elf a couple of years earlier, but it was my first computer with a keyboard.
Then I got older.
I develop software for a living.
So do I. And I have two Mac laptops, an older Mac that I hardly use any more, and a PC. I do development for the Palm and Win32 on one of the Macs. The other Mac I use for Cocoa development and video.
With two exceptions, every Mac user I've encountered has preached at me with the furvor of a Deep-South Bible Thumper
OK, but on the other hand, most of the PC enthusiasts I have met have either been script kiddie wannabes or ignoramuses. Most people are idiots, period.
Here's why I like the Mac. I'll limit it to statements about OS X, although many apply to Mac OS 1-9 as well. Mind you that I've used almost every imaginable machine and OS, from IBM/360 DOS to Dec Vax and Alpha VMS to the Connection Machine to NOS on the ETA-10 and, yes, even every variety of Windows and PC/DOS.
From the very first beige toaster, one gets the impression that someone actually sat down and thought hard about every aspect of the hardware and software. In contrast, every other system I've seen seems more thrown-together, even Linux (which I like). Apple didn't always get things right, but getting it right was always important. The sliding washer on the power cord for my titanium iBook: somebody thought of that. There was a rough period in the mid-1990's when they slacked off, but they're back with a vengeance.
When I get dragged down by having to develop for patchwork systems, sometimes I just need to freshen my brain, so I sit down and write a little Cocoa application. The development system just works and doesn't get in my way. I get the feeling of cooperating with colleagues rather than struggling against enemies. It restores my hope and reminds me why I'm doing this for a living when there are a lot easier ways to make more money.
Everything I like in UNIX I can continue to do under Darwin. I can slip back and forth with no effort, and everything fits seamlessly together.
I would sell my soul for a Powerbook though.
:)
Really? Hmmm....
No, I think I'll keep my Powerbook. Thanks for the offer, though.
Yes, it is a 7 year old report. Back then, Apple paid Gartner to get the results it wanted. Who paid for this current study?
And yes, that site is rather stale isn't it?
in OS X, anything you can print, you can turn into a PDF. Just print a document (word, excel, web page in mozilla or ie), hit the "print preview" button, then click on "save as pdf" and bam your done
cool huh
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
...would get sucked in by a troll so easily.
AC in the hizouse.
This article was written from a business standpoint. Businesses have very different concerns and values than hobbiests and home users, but I'm sure you know that. The cost differential is not nearly as large between a Dell and a similarly configured Mac. Then the study sites a lower annual maintenence cost which I would guess is a result of having fewer help desk and support people. Partly becuase less stuff works with it, so the stuff that does works well, becuase both sides have more time for testing. My own guess is that while Microsoft gets (and deserves) lots of the blame for unstable PCs running Windows, lots of it can be heaped on the heads of some of the crappier companies making software and hardware. Macs have much less of this problem, since these companies generally stay out of the Mac market.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Hee!
Excuse me but please give me some of what you are smoking, I have been using linux since the first versions of Slackware, and I have been waiting for a day that the gui would catch up in usability, continuity and form... There is no chance Gnome is going to beat OSX in that race, said it before - sorry. I am writing this from my Gnome faced Linux box now...
The study was based on PC/Macs in the workplace, not the home. I used to administer a small NT network for a small engineering company. My main role at the place was being a CAD technician and I did the admin stuff as needed.
:o)
To "save money" they bought the cheap homemade boxes and they were nothing but a nightmare. Cheap cards and drives that constantly went out and were nearly impossible to find drivers for.
After much nashing of teeth by everybody, the boss decided to get rid of the crap boxes and go with Compaq workstations. It was the best decision that could have been made. I spent my time doing my normal job and going home at night rather than replacing parts and fixing things.
The $400 boxes belong in the dumpster and no self-respecting company would run their business on them.
Before you reply with "What about using Macs?" there is ZERO software in the civil engineering field to be used on Macs so it wasn't an option. I took enough heat for being a Mac user at home anyway
I've tried JBuilder and IntelliJ IDEA, and they ran pretty well. They didn't impress me enough that I wanted to fork over the bucks. One developer friend is running emacs and another is running vim on their Powerbooks, and they both seem pleased. To my knowledge, Eclipse doesn't run on OS X, but I heard rumbles of plans to support it. If you're willing to spend some money but don't want to spring for a full IDE, BBEdit is awesome.
So I think the answer is that the majority of UNIXish and Java-based dev tools will work, and there are a few nice OS-X-only options as well.
And, in case you're wondering what I've been doing with Java, here's a dump of the Java libs I have installed (yes, some are out of date):
... and post it on apple.com. That way, if the data is any good, advocates and opponents could collectively argue about it, rather than the current "my anecdote is better than yours" stuff.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Thank you for pointing that out. By coincidence I was at that moment just trying to figure that out. I knew MacOSX could do it but wasn't sure how.
and the horsepower, it's a point and mash the gas experience that I wont soon forget
Horsepower and BMW are opposites. I bet it doesn't even make 300hp.
you might as well go with the m roadster, it'll spank that s2000.
Yeah, but will it spank a 1967 Chevelle Super Sport? HINT: NO!
I've seen a bundle of 7200 RPM drives fail in my dorm so far -- not a 5400 among them.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I have not yet run into a USB or Firewire device that will not work on a Mac. And I don't look on the box to see what they say, cause most of the engineers just conform to the standards, and if it is made to the standards it'll work on a Mac. If your trying to run a digital camera or MP3 player through a parallel port your wasting my time.
Just look at some of the old columns (some of which are by people who still write columns, like John C. Dvorak). The whole idea of a GUI was anathema to them. Until Windows, of course, and then GUIs were great and totally better than the Mac. I can remember one column about 15 years ago stating that the Mac was bad because the Motorola processors were too orthogonal and therefore didn's impose discipline.
- the faculty itself doesn't have anything like that number of computers, so they were clearly studying the world beyond the faculty, and
- it is anything but a place for graphic artists, being much more of a traditional history and philosophy oriented big old university arts faculty
If you are more interested in what you are using the computer for than in the computer itself then the Mac has been the only choice for 18 years, says he sitting next to a Linux gateway/server and sharing with a dedicated PC/Linux user.-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Windows is expensive, Linux even more so!
There isn't a day I'm not thankful the Mac exists.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
No PC's are cheaper...much cheaper...so cheap in fact they should not be sold! hehe