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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.
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
Frankly, be glad you've waited until now to look into getting a Mac.
I grew up with Macs, and have many fond memories of those old days (when connectivity and interoperability weren't crucial situations) but frankly, OS 9 and back are just crap. Crap, crap, crap. No real multitasking. Random preference corruption. Extension conflicts arising out of the blue. Random crashes. Any application crashing kills the OS forcinga reboot. The damn Chooser just refusing to work. The fact that inserting a CD freezes the machine until it is finished mounting it.
To do any serious work other than Desktop Publishing or graphics/video processing work (word processing isn't serious work...it's menial idiot work that anything can do...I can do word processing on my Palm for goodness sake) the functionality had to be grafted onto the operating system, and it didn't work very well. Anything certainly COULD be done, but most of it is alot easier to do on another OS.
OS X changes all that. I do mostly Mac support these days, and we have one client that runs OS X on everything, and we have hardly hear from them unless they want a new machine installed, or their network is having issues. No problems with the OS that couldn't be solved with a quick page through the Admin Guide, and a little computing common sense.
I run OS X exclusively on my iBook, with OS 9 installed only so I can play all the old games I used to play when I was a kid. The only time I've had any problems was when I started deleting files instead of running an uninstall script for the Dev Tools. Aside from that, I've never once had a problem with it. I've had applications crash, but those were just beta browserware like Chimera. I've never had a kernel panic. Never a sad Mac. Nothing untoward at all, and I use this machine quite heavily (it's my laptop for consulting as well as personal stuff). I've compiled many programs for Linux that claimed no OS X support, but have run without a hitch. And for what doesn't compile out of the box, there's the fink project which ports a whole bunch of common open source software to OS X.
So basically, be glad you waited, it's actually a functional, stable operating system now.