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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
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
please show me where you can get the os for your homebuilt computer and a comparable number of applications (office suite, photo management software) with full firewire and USB support without having to reconfigure or recompile the kernel AND has a top-notch interface and my grandmother can use?
also, show me where you can build g4-speed comptuer with a dual head nvidia card and 128mb of ram for $400, and i'll buy one from you.
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
please show me where you can build your own mac for 400 bucks or less.
Yeah, I can go out and get a $400 car too - that doesn't make it a good idea. Also, does that include a top of the line (not generic compatible) sound and graphics cards? Firewire? 10/100 NIC? Software - oh yeah, you want me to spend days finding and installing Linux packages, that's great if you're already a Luser (Linux user) with tons of experience. Sorry, my time is worth more than that to me...
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
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.
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...
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"
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
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
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...
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.
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.
...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.
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
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.
that's great if you're already a Luser (Linux user) with tons of experience. Sorry, my time is worth more than that to me...
I seriously doubt *your* time is all that valuable, considering that it inserting a Mandrake 8.2 disk, clicking a mouse a few times, and getting a cup of cofee is beyond your capabilities.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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....."
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
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
Much as I like Linux, you aren't going to pawn it off as a short learning curve OS, though you can make it look like one for short simple demos.
So, let's see. WindowsXP HE retails for $150 at amazon.com (that's *counting* a $40 rebate -- normally I don't count rebates because I don't consider them fair game). Amazon also has Microsoft Word 2002 for $270 (again after a $40 rebate). So let's tack on $420 to your initial estimate.
We're up to $1140 so far and going strong. Your built system doesn't come with any tech support for your grandma. Now, I don't know how much that would cost, since you can't really get tech support per se separate from a system, but say over the next three years your grandma has to get professional help twice from the local computer store. That's usually $50/hr, though most problems are pretty quick to fix, and don't take longer than an hour. So $100 more. Then you don't have a one year warranty on all your parts with nationwide support. I dunno what to value this at...say, maybe an average of $50 of replaced parts.
So we have $1300 for a system that doesn't have a single provider (which means that the people providing different components will never take the blame for what's wrong), doesn't have all the parts tested together, and that we're ignoring assembly labor costs on.
Is this less than what Apple's selling for? Sure. Apple definitely charges a premium. But it's nowhere near what you're claiming.
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
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
That asside, if I could have talked my dad into buying a Mac, I would have. He just has too many legacy PC apps that he won't let go of, because he feels he's too old to learn anything new.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
*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.
Don't forget: apple.slashdot.org must also be a biased Mac site, and AtariAmarok, having posted on apple.slashdot.org, must also be a Mac fanboy.
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.
... 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.
The difference comes when you go to sell the machine in a few years because you want a newer one. Value of your $700 home built machine three years from now? Probably around $100. Value of the $1199 Mac? Somewhere in the $600+ range. Sure, the up front costs for PCs may be lower, but you're not getting as much for your money as it would seem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this less than what Apple's selling for? Sure. Apple definitely charges a premium. But it's nowhere near what you're claiming.
You can buy a new eMac for $1,099.00.
Built in 17" Monitor (up to 1280 by 960 pixels at 72Hz)
700MHz PowerPC G4
128MB SDRAM
40GB Ultra ATA drive
CD-RW drive
56K internal modem
Comes with OS X and OS 9, AppleWorks, all the iApps etc.
Great for Grandma!
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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.
I believe our Anonymous Coward friend was referring to the total elapsed time from the user filing the trouble ticket until the ticket is resolved, not the 5 minutes the tech spends to dig into the registry/install yet another microsoft patch.
cat
I think this thread is for you.
cat
OK and show me where you can build any other type of computer besides an x86 based machine.
And that's the point. For all the people making noise about how you have more options when you build your own box ... you are stuck with one architecture. Like Henry Ford used to say, you can have any color as long as it's black!
You can't built a Sun SPARC, you can't build an SGI, you can't build a Mac.
You can only build an "IBM clone." Some of us like to use something different.
Just an observation.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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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