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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.
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.
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
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
.
-
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
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
"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.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
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...
Did you have an accident, or have you always been that stupid?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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
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.
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
Uh,... 90% of computer users know how to do 4-5 things:
1. Turn the computer on.
2. Open up a word processor, browser or email package.
3. Type a letter/document/email.
4. Browse.
5. Shut the machine off.
"versatile" doesn't matter one lick to these people.
If they have a machine that encourages them to use it by making the process easier, then they have in effect a more versatile machine.
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.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
...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.
but a good number of people will take their car in to the shop because it is faster, easier, and will be done right.
I agree with what your saying however you chose a poor example:
I change my oil im my car with Mobil 1 - it costs $20 in materials, and takes me ten minits. My local shop would cost $45 and take half an hour of my time loitering in their lobby.
I don't care much about the cost diferance, but the time diferance keeps me doing it myself. YMMV.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Sorry, ANY piece of USB enabled equipment that I need a driver to use is NON-STANDARD. If it doesn't plug in and work, it is NOT COMPLIANT. End of issue! USB is *the* standard - if the camera needs extra software to work properly, the camera violates the standard. What part of this is unclear to you?
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.
None of it. My Kodak DC-5000 works without any additions on my Mac, I had to install drivers on my friends PC because it didn't recognize it. Ditto for my Fuji FinePix 4900. When my other friend bought his Minolta, the results were the same. They worked out of the box on the Mac, they required driver installs on the PC. These are top of the line, name brand cameras, not crappy generic shit. That Windows doesn't support them natively is just tragic (let's not even get into the fact the Linux doesn't support them at all.)
So, who supports what here?
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? A very long time, and for most, it would *never* be accomplished. The extra $300 for a bottom of the line Mac that could do all of this, without breaking, and with higher quality hardware and software is WORTH IT.
Here's an analogy: If I needed to sue somebody, the cheapest route would be to act as my own lawyer. There's pretty much nothing important that the lawyer could do that I technically could not do. But I don't want to spend time trying to understand the whole legal system, and then reading through documents and presenting my case. I would rather hire a lawyer. Most importantly, 95% of the general public would do the same.
Do you follow me?
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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.
What's obvious becuase I am over looking it.
___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
A thoroughly useless observation which has no bearing on this conversation and no relavance whatsoever.
This boneheaded and obviously biased "study" surely won't help Gartner's reputation.
Your evidence of this is...nothing? I thought so. What are you allegations here, I'd certainly like to hear them.
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.
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.
...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.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Thanks for playing.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Mac: This decade's ports.
If living in the past is good enough for you, then fine. Have fun.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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.
A good number of those people have friends that are techs and perfectly willing to help upgrade a computer.
Until Apple makes nonproprietary computers it will always be cheaper to run a machine running on intel/amd commodity parts. Apple also adds cost by integrating everything. If I plan on upgrading my PC in two to four years, I can keep the monitor and save alot. Not so if I were using an Imac.
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.
Suddenly we're not talking about a POS $400 box then, are we? You start getting into the range of brand new low end Macs if you go much higher at all.
And you may say that theoretically this is possible, but in practice getting any of this stuff to work is going to be easier on a Mac 9 times out of 10.
You are comparing different things than me. You are comparing all PCs to all Macs, which is like comparing a cheaper lawyer to a high quality lawyer (or something). I was responding to someone saying they could do all these things with a POS $400 self-assembled PC. And I figured that since it was only $400, this was going to have to be a Linux machine. So now we have the situation of making all the hardware work, and the software, and compatibility of software, etc. And a very small percentage of people are interested in doing this.
As opposed to spending days making the PC work right? And then spending time throughout the life of the computer to keep things working?
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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.
Oh yes, how foolish of me. I didn't remember that study. Everybody's set.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
I would sell my soul for a Powerbook though.
:)
Really? Hmmm....
No, I think I'll keep my Powerbook. Thanks for the offer, though.
Ah yes, Cheryl Currid's anti-Mac "Justifications". If you'll look, you'll see that all that information was used by her to justify her 1996 Houston Chronicle article. Which means the data is 6 years out of date, and dates to the "bad old days" before Steve Job's return and the iMac. A lot has changed with Apple in 6 years. Pity Cheryl Currid hasn't updated her information any.
"On the Internet, no one knows you're a minifig....."
technically, apple does build PC's. keep in mind that PC was once a term that meant Personal Computer (so very long ago...*sigh*). It's only since the death of O/S2 and the dominance of Wintel boxes that PC came to mean non-Mac, even though the Mac was one of the first real PC's that the general public could latch onto.
werd to yo motha, muh nizzle.
With YOU, maybe. But, then again, you are not Gartner's target market. Gartner's claims are very specific. You have chosen to apply them in a very general manner that Gartner did not suggest or intend them to be applied. This makes *your* credibility the one that is suspect.
Interesting that this comes to light in a "Macintosh evangelism" site, not from a place devoted to helping business run more efficiently.
Uhm, the "Mac Evangelism" site was merely pointing out the results of the study, how horrible of them. In fact, they pointed out a study by the Gartner Group, which is a business "devoted to helping business run more efficiently." Its their bloody job. Your point was?
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
Okay, I agree with your point. Linux isn't appropriate for Joe User. Of course, I don't think that Windows is either, but whatever. Anyway...
I have a Canon -- can I plug that right into a "Linux" computer and have the photos copies off automatically like in Windows an on the Mac?)
Yup
May we never see th
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!
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
Yes, if tinkering with your computer is the point of the computer, then a PC is much better for you.
Two words: MacsBug and ResEdit. Free Windows equivalents? Nope. The Mac is a sweet power user's computer.
And Apple was the company to build the most kick-butt hardware hacker computer ever -- the Apple II.
May we never see th
Until recently, the Mac OS has been a limiting straitjacket 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.
Whereas now Windows boxes have the command.com shell and Mac boxes have the more powerful csh, and Windows boxes are the limiting straitjacket made all the harder to use by the lack of a good CLI.
May we never see th
The vast majority of IT departments find that the Mac platform does indeed cost a lot more and is less versatile.
Uh...the vast majority of IT departments don't have a clue how to use or maintain anything but Windows.
Incidently, a prof of mine that does consulting (a bit Solaris fan) specifically said that he'd build an MS setup if he could instead of a Solaris setup because the cost to maintain small systems was so much lower. Why? MCSEs earn peanuts compared to a skilled UNIX admin, and you can just hire one of 'em and toss them an instruction book.
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
You know, labs funded to do studies don't *falsify* results. They just ignore all the cons, and trumpet the good results.
Also, the fact that Gartner, a major industry player, happened to have Apple as one of its many clients seven years ago is a pretty weak attack on the study.
May we never see th
This is Apple we are talking about. If they cared about standards, they'd be building PCs.
Widely-used has very little to do with standardization, as our friends at MS are testament to.
May we never see th
He's saying that the device speaks low-level USB, but doesn't support its HID profile. So it happens to use the USB bus, but doesn't implement all the things it should.
This isn't new at all. Many of the devices you plug into your computer over USB or ATA don't support everything that they really should, or break some rules. You just tend to avoid the ones that don't do as good a job, if you can.
May we never see th
My Kodak DC-5000 works without any additions on my Mac...let's not get into the fact that Linux doesn't suppor them at all
At least the DC-5000 works fine in Linux.
May we never see th
Yes, with custom software. Why should I have to install software just to get pictures from my camera? Doesn't make sense to me...
I don't know why you're calling it "custom" software -- it's hardly secret or propriatary or specially done for you. There's software somewhere driving the Mac OS stuff. Yes, it's bundled with the operating system, but if you run down to the store and pick up a copy of Red Hat, gphoto comes with the thing as well. It's not like you have to even download the thing, and it's installed by default.
May we never see th
*Sigh* Okay, think about this one for a second: the iPod, by default, will sync its playlist with the one on your computer. OF COURSE it's only going to sync with one! What did you want it to do, keep separate lists and separate files for every computer you plug it into?
There is still the option to transfer files manually. It's a preference. You can change it. And you can still use it as just a FireWire hard drive.
Really, don't say something's "crippled" if you haven't thought it through. I doubt the majority of people have more than one computer.
Then don't use an Imac. [sic] Get a G4.
So it's actually a struggle between frustration and arrogance ? ;-)
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):
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.
On the other hand, for about $25-$30 (depending on cupons), I can drive onto one of those quick-stop oil-change places (eg: Valvoline Rapid Oil Change, Jiffy Lube, etc. In my case, I go to Valvoline), and have it all taken care of while I sit and listen to the radio for 10 minutes. While they are at it, they top off all my other fluids for free (washer, break, etc), give the whole car a once-over for maintenence issues, and check their database against the milage on my car for any routine maintenence reccomended by the manufacturer.
Yes, they do try to sell me their over-priced air filters and PCV joints. Everybody knows that this is where they make their money. However, that small annoyance is a small price to pay for all the time and effort they save me, and having somebody remind me when it's time to chance belts and shit. I spent $20K on my vehicle, so I don't mind an extra fifteen bucks now and then to keep it running well for at least the next decade.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Wow. That's a lot of money and time. I buy oil filters in packages of 5 (1 = C$2.79, 5 = C$7.79), and I always have about 5 gallons of oil kicking around at C$8/gallon (4 cars). The oil doesn't get on your hands if you simply use rubber gloves. Total cost: C$9.56 + 10 minutes. No cleanup needed, I just put the gloves on the bench ready for their next use. The next day I drop the oil off to be recycled at the garage on my way to work, which simply has a dumpster for oil, which they then recycle properly at no charge.
The belts are easy to check, just look at them. Didn't your father teach you how to tell when a belt is bad?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I know how to do all that, but the point is that for a few bucks, I don't have to. I work hard for a healthy wage when I work, and I want my free time to be just that: free.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
... 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.
For me, it not about cost savings - it's about time. If you stocked up on supplies and used the 5 quart jugs you get from trucker part stores to buy your oil and use as containers for used oil you could save yourself a lot of time. I'd much rather spend 10 min doing it myself that waste 30 in some lobby. I'm *highly* paid, so, for me, it an issue of time.
There are mobile oil changing companies that will come to your house - they would be the ultimae in time savings.
Even my chouice of syenthetic save me time - I have 180,000 miles on my American car, and I havent has any trouble yet. I haven't even had to change the timing chain - that was suposed to go 80,000 miles ago and it still is solid.
YMMV.
So learn to do it yourself efficently and save yourself time. Or not, depending on your view of the after-life. I have no set beleifs that there is a time after this one, so I tend to veiw time sinks with a bit of distain.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
if you're compiling something,.. if you're running productivity software, it is simply not the bottleneck.
Somebody here has never used a computer with a fast hard drive. If you're compiling anything significant, your hard drive is a bottleneck on a modern machine. I don't care how fast it is, there's no single disk that is not a bottleneck these days. Lots of productivity software gains huge performance boosts from faster disks. Anything that uses databases (e-mail apps, financial software), and any graphics or media applications benifit from a faster disk.
30% you say? A good 10000 RPM SCSI disk will probably give you a 500% increase in load and search times when opening a mailbox with 1000 messages in it, and could cut compiling time in half for a large program.
You don't have to sacrifice speed to get a quiet machine. Just put it in a closet. Also, you'll find that commercially built machines are quieter then home built models. I have yet to see a home modded quiet case that compares with what you can just go out and buy from Apple or Dell. If quiet is what you want, it's worth the money. They don't cost much more then home built machines anymore. Really.
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.
No, it won't. But you won't have to fill the BMW up at the next gas station. Zmai
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. Whoa, hold up dude... Windows ships with JScript and VBScript support that you can use to replace batch files. I agree with the rest of your opinions here, but the scripting one is just plain wrong.
The previous poster is right, you must not have much experence with really good drives. They won't help speed up everything, but it's amazing just how much they do help.
I've seen a bundle of 7200 RPM drives fail in my dorm so far -- not a 5400 among them.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I find it ironic that the Mac is still derided as a toy, when the only thing PCs still remain even remotely better at, and the only Windows advocates can brag about, is playing more video games.
Which saves time over the Mac way of doing things... wait 45 seconds - maybe a minute - for it to boot, tack on the horrendous time-consuming task of logging in(there's another 30 seconds of your life that's GONE), double-click on the application icon(by now you've undoubtedly gone gray and had your teeth replaced) and there it is.
Of course, then you might be asked to change a few preference fields. At this point you should just give up, concede defeat to Father Time, and wait for the cold, clammy hands of death to take you into their embrace.
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.
10 minutes in-and-out, as an absolute maximum (the can usually do it faster than that), and I can spend that ten minutes balancing my checkbook or reading an O'Rielly book or something, while you spend your 10 minutes doing the actual task of changing the oil. Which of us is losing more time again?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yep. Because my grandmother/dad who uses this stuff to make money wants to deal with:
"gcc -O2 crw.c -lm -lpng -lz" or "gcc -O2 -DNO_PNG crw.c -lm".
For the Canon EOS-1D, you'll also need this Lossless JPEG Decoder, which I adapted from ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/multimed/ljpg.tar.Z . Untar and run "make".
Convert EOS D30 raw files to 48-bit PNG.
Faster than crw.c, but no longer maintained. Compile with "gcc -O2 eosd30.c -lpng -lz"
Show the heap structure of CRW files.
Simple reference parser for exploring camera data. Extracts the JPEG thumbnail, if the image has one. Compile with "gcc heap.c".
Decompress raw CCD data to standard output.
Simple reference decompressor for curious folks. Here's a simple program to convert that raw data to an 8-bit grayscale image.
Old version of "crw.c"
Supports four cameras at compile time. Compile with "gcc -O crw_v1.c -lm".
Frequently Asked Questions
I don't have a C compiler. Could you send me an executable?
OK, but I have to charge for this service. The fee is $20 for a Linux-x86 or Solaris-SPARC binary, $35 for a Windows EXE file, or $50 for a Windows EXE with EOS-1D support. You'll get the latest version, which you can use and distribute without restriction.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Let's go through that list of his, shall we?
* Write letters and things for work using MS Word (Office v.X for the Mac)
Like it or not, MS Word is the defacto word processor. However you're free to use AppleWorks (which handles Word docs fine), OpenOffice, StarOffice, etc. or even just pop-open the terminal and use vi or emacs.
* Edit photos and other graphics in Graphic Converter (haven't gotten around to upgrading to Photoshop 7 yet).
Why use anything else when you've got Photoshop? If you want a free (as in speech) tool, you can install the GIMP as well. If you're looking for vector graphics, Illustrator and FreeHand are both carbonized and run quite well under Mac OS X.
* 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.
Or just dump the photos with Apple's included Image Capture utility (which supports nearly all namebrand digital cameras) as JPEGs, TIFFs, etc. and use whatever program you'd like.
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)
Or FinalCut Pro, which is is by all counts, a major player in the offline editing niche, seriously threatening to unseat Avid because of a better price:performance.
Write e-mail to family and friends in MS Entourage (similar to Outlook Express on the PC, with a built in contact manager)
Or any number of email clients, gui and command line ( pine, elm, mutt -- yup, it's there if you want it)
* 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.)
and I'm currently feeding my Civ3 addiction while waiting WarCraft III.
Use the open source, spyware-free OpenAG client to troll AudioGalaxy for MP3s
Bah. This is the only point where I disagree with the original poster---I much prefer Sputnik, another spyware-free OpenAG client.
Organize and burn them to CD using iTunes
Or if you want more MP3 burning power, buy Jam from Roxio and create CD masters.
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
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.
iPod Hacks.com
Most users (and ditch the myopic /. self-indulgent perspective -- we here are *NOT* most users) are "afriad" of their machines. They don't want to "break them" (all your Aunt Tillie needs is one corruption of her machine by installing some corrupt or bad software and she will swear off installing new apps (althought the same lesson never seems to get through about opening exe's attached to email)). Up until a few years ago, the only app most WIndows user knew were spreadsheets and word processors. (Uh,... and minesweeper and solitare. ;) NOw that the internet is big, people are learning about email, browsers, and whatnot and are getting less afraid of "breaking their machines."
And, Granted: Windows is getting easier to use, but that still doesn't make it as easy as a Mac.
But, OTOH, the one thing I didn't mention is that Mac users as a whole tend to be creative minds, while PC users aren't. (Windows users tend to be more along the lines of office drones -- keeping in mind that the computer is no longer the exclusive domain of the geek, and in fact the number of general business users SIGNIFICANTLY outnumber the geeks.) Creative people would be more inclined to experiment, thus that would tend to skew the data a bit.
So I think the broader usage of apps is in (large) part due to the ease of use and also affected by the fact that creative types tend to gravitate to the machine.
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
No PC's are cheaper...much cheaper...so cheap in fact they should not be sold! hehe
It should also be noted that every Mac now sold ships standard with Perl(5.6.x), which has a pretty strong track record as a scripting language.
If we didn't have a parallel port, what hardware would we use to make flashing LED plugins work with winamp?
lol...
-Tolerate my intolerance