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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.
please show me where you can build your own mac for 400 bucks or less.
hmmm... so are you saying that the home user's time in maintenance/upkeep doesn't have an attributable value? The enterprise-level user can at least call their IT dept and have problems dealt with quicker than they could do themselves.
time = money:
v=(w((100-t)/100))/c
v = value of an hour
w = person's hourly wage
t = tax rate
c = cost of living
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
They aren't published because you actually have to pay for that info.
But, doesnt information want to be free?
As other people have already pointed out in this thread, PC's are a lot cheaper for hobbyists and other people who don't value their own time. This group of people probably heavily overlaps with the group of people who don't value the Gartner Group's time to compile the report.
This overlap probably doesn't affect the Gartner Group at all -- the only people they can reasonably expect to sell the report to are people who value time, and the conclusions are probably only applicable to people who value time, so it must all work out in the end.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Yes, if tinkering with your computer is the point of the computer, then a PC is much better for you. 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.
Think about things like oil changes and car tune-ups. It might be cheaper to do it yourself, but a good number of people will take their car in to the shop because it is faster, easier, and will be done right.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Uhm, the GeForce board that came with my brand new Mac is compatible with ALL PC monitors - just because the manufacturer is too stupid to check this out and put it on the box to sell more units doesn't mean I'm that stupid...
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...
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"
If I were a non-Mac user I suppose I'd have to seriously consider the possibility :P
And, for corporate entities, "the Gartner Group says so" DOES carry a huge amount of credibility whether you wish to recognize it or not. This isn't Joe Blow from down the street or some anonymous person on the net saying this, the Gartner Group has a VERY good reputation as a market research company.
You seem to misunderstand that the Gartner Group's reputation IS their selling point. They would not make a statement like this unless they had very solid research on the subject - their entire business is based on their reputation. They also are not talking about the individual user, this report is created based on supporting thousands of installed units - clearly a different issue...
...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.
We sure wouldn't want that.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Sadly, independent sources cannot be found. Better Homes and Gardens and Reader's Digest haven't done a Mac review in ages.
I did find a couple of sites you will find that aren't biased towards Macs, but the have no lists either.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Well first, its highly unlikely that the browser is using anything but good old TCP/IP, so mentioning AppleTalk is somewhat irrelevant.
Secondly---since you have mentioned it :-)---like many other things that are well known, AppleTalks 'chattiness' relative to other protcols "ain't necessarily so".
As an exercise, take a look via tcpdump at what is actually happening on your LAN (more difficult now everybody uses switches, but it will give an idea). Don't just assume, don't just theorize, measure!.
See the flood of NetBIOS messages. Look at the Novell SAP torrent. Shudder as page after page of NetBEUI broadcasts flash by. (What you will see depends on what protocols are present on your LAN of course). Tell me again about chatty protocols?
But wait---now look to see just what percentage of the available LAN is consumed by all these chatty exchanges. 1-2%? Ask yourself---does this chatter actually matter anyway?
I'd never recommend AppleTalk over TCP/IP, since AppleTalk has a number of scalability problems and is just not appropriate for modern networks, but I'm so sick of the 'chatty' AppleTalk myth.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Boy, do I ever agree.
GeForce 2 MX -- Okay, I have a Matrox G450 that I'm very happy with. Up until very recently I had a G200 that worked fine -- I upgraded so that I could have more video memory to cache pixmaps in. Frankly, I think that anyone buying bleeding-edge 3d hardware is a nut, and paying badly for it. If the current games require $350 video cards, I'll play older games, thank you very much. My PII/266 plays Half Life (and expansion packs), Jagged Alliance, and zangband nicely.
5400RPM drive you must be joking. I'd pay *more* for a 5400 RPM drive than a high rotational rate drive. Let's take a look at the pros/cons:
Pro:
Quieter
Cheaper
Lasts Longer
Cooler
Con:
Runs at at 75% the speed of a 7200 RPM drive.
And I really don't care about the single con. Why? Because the hard drive is almost never the bottleneck affecting you. If you're downloading something, if you're compiling something, if you're playing a game, if you're running productivity software, it is simply not the bottleneck. (If your system is paging like mad, it means you should either switch to Linux and/or purchase enough RAM to keep the stuff that should be in memory in memory, not try to run your hard drives a little bit harder.) The only time an ordinary user runs into a hard drive bottleneck is when copying (not installing, which is often limited by the CPU not being able to decompress stuff quickly enough) files. And, of course, there's the people running serious servers. You know who you are, and you're running RAID and you don't care about paying the extra money.
From a user perspective, a 30% increase in speed is just *barely* the minimum level necessary to produce a perceptable difference.
Recent 5400 RPM drives are *much* more reliable than recent 7200 RPM drives. I've seen a bundle of 7200 RPM drives fail in my dorm so far -- not a 5400 among them. 7200s get toasty when you're working with them -- that heating and cooling is not good for the drive. The big thing I want hard drives to do is to store my data and not wipe it out. The agony you go through in a single hard drive failure is much worse than the benefit you get from a 30% speed increase during the 1% or so of the time on your computer that you're actually working with the disk.
Finally, I'm really big about running a quiet computer.
Unless you really don't like single buttons, Apple mice and keyboards are pretty nice hardware.
That being said, I *do* wish that Apple sold with paper-thin margins instead of disgustingly fat ones, but that doesn't mean that they make bad products. They sell a good system, but you have to throw down more money for it -- I'd rather throw down the same amount and get the good system.
May we never see th
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
Aside: I kind of think having an office of dumb terminals would be cool. I remember many late nights years ago hacking away on VT220s.
That being said, the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes is pretty tough to defend. The MacOS has a native, modern and free-with-the-OS scripting language -- AppleScript. Windows has the limited, ugly-as-hell and slow batch file system.
A nice new Mac comes with a rather large number of very powerful UNIX utilities. The Windows command line utilities are poor, very limited copies of the Mac's tools.
Ever edited resources? On the Mac, the power user can hack up his applications to do all sorts of interesting and useful things -- but there's no reasonable equivalent on Windows (Windows resources are rarely used and the editors archaic and poor).
I remember downloading for free from Apple a free resource editor (ResEdit) and free system-level debugger (MacsBug). Microsoft doesn't give you anywhere *near* the tools Apple hands out for free to get at the guts of your system. Hell, the best thing MS puts out is regedit. Whee.
So I'd be interested to hear how you're going to defend the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes. For a power user, Windows is the most limiting currently sold OS that I know of -- certainly much more so than the MacOS.
May we never see th
Have you ever seen what kinda traffic that the Mac network browser generates?
Yup. A lot. Much like the Windows network browser generating a bunch of SMB traffic.
seeing as most Mac users don't know jack about proper computing they screw things up CONSTANTLY
This differs from the Windows world how again?
I tend to find that Macs are easier to fix than Windows boxes, though. Break your Mac? You've got some sweet troubleshooting tools from Apple. I haven't had a Mac for a few years, but the Extension Manager was a great little program. Windows doesn't give you anything nearly as powerful. Plus, you can boot into a fresh, clean copy of the MacOS right off a CD if you (and mind you, this is *very hard to do*) manage to get the thing into a state where it won't boot...the only thing MS gives you from booting off the CD is an install-only environment (and now, the rescue console, which is a pretty piss-poor environment for actually fixing things).
not to mention when they email out 40 meg Photoshop files
As long as this is over a nice peppy intranet and you aren't Scrooge when it comes to mail spool quota, I don't see the problem.
May we never see th
Uh...this is completely ridiculous.
With a PC, you usually get better complete hardware. Like a disk drive with an eject button.
Um...the PC design is significantly inferior and a bad design choice that unfortunately legacy issues have prevented anyone from fixing. See, there are two states the computer might be in when you want to eject a disk. Either it wants to spit it out or it doesn't. If it doesn't want to spit it out, it's writing to it. That means you shouldn't eject it anyway, period, or you're going to be damaging the disk and maybe the drive. If it does spit it out, then you can eject just fine on the Mac via software. Also, if you haven't noticed, Windows boxes have absolutely godawful performance when writing to a floppy. It's because they *cannot* queue writes -- all writes must be synchronous, since the disk could be ejected at any time. On the Mac (and optionally Linux, though you're running a risk that someone's going to push the eject button while the thing is still mounted), you can complete writes quickly and then flush the cache over time.
Why do you think CD-ROMs and other modern drives all eject via a software mechanism instead of a hardware mechanism?
PC's? You get ports for standard parallel and serial devices. Oops. Bargain basement inferior Mac forgot them.
Actually, Macs had their own formfactor serial port (which, BTW, had significantly higher throughput than the PC serial port). Apple just started migrating to USB earlier than the PC, and is significantly ahead in moving to a modern architecture -- new Macs do not and have not for some time had these ancient ports out of box. In a year or so, PCs will be doing the same thing. Maybe one in ten thousand people work in a research lab that does CE stuff and want to interface with some controller circuitry -- and they can get a serial card.
As for parallel ports, you're looking at an ancient, slow, and disgusting freak of nature with expensive cables that should have been killed off long ago. Anything that requires a parallel port is much better off on USB.
May we never see th
If there were any truth to it, the study would be all the rage in the IT journals...
Riiight. Think about the IT industry for a moment. Most of it consists of semi-skilled workers who know nothing but Microsoft software. No one, and I do mean no one, is going to make their skillset useless by recommending that the Mac OS replace Windows in their workplace.
May we never see th
Personally, I seldom bother putting money into my old PC's. I either give them away, or turn 'em into Linux servers and shove them into my closet.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Apple is more like a $50,000 Hyundai. It looks better than the Chevy, but it costs a lot more.
... well, this dual G4 seems to be handling the task of running this OS rather well.
I think that one might've needed a little work there...
Mac is too expensive since you pay much more for something with fewer features, fewer capabilities, often with less memory and a slower system.
I see. Please explain to me the list of features that I'm missing out on by running OS X on this dual-processor G4 800. What would Windows 2000 / XP offer me that I am lacking with OS X? The challenge of creative problem solving? How about Linux--perhaps that's what OS you favor. Will it keep me in good karma becuase I'd be forced to use only open-source apps what with all those pesky commercial apps like Photoshop and Office being unavailable for Linux? Would I miss the freedom of choice in baing ableto choose one of a number of GUI desktop interfaces for Linux--none of them the defacto standard?
OS X has married Unix and average Joe desktop computing successfully. This has never happened before. It's rather exciting and I feel priveleged to be in on it. So...I'm not feeling the lack of features too greatly. As for a "slower system"
And cost? High end hardware does have a price. But for what I get in return, it's a steal. Such a steal that I had to break down and grab a new iBook 700 so that I can have OS X even more at my disposal. Yea...only I had a PC...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
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