Slashdot Mirror
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
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?
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.
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
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"
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.gart ner.com
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.
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.
Well first, its highly unlikely that the browser is using anything but good old TCP/IP, so mentioning AppleTalk is somewhat irrelevant.
Secondly---since you have mentioned it :-)---like many other things that are well known, AppleTalks 'chattiness' relative to other protcols "ain't necessarily so".
As an exercise, take a look via tcpdump at what is actually happening on your LAN (more difficult now everybody uses switches, but it will give an idea). Don't just assume, don't just theorize, measure!.
See the flood of NetBIOS messages. Look at the Novell SAP torrent. Shudder as page after page of NetBEUI broadcasts flash by. (What you will see depends on what protocols are present on your LAN of course). Tell me again about chatty protocols?
But wait---now look to see just what percentage of the available LAN is consumed by all these chatty exchanges. 1-2%? Ask yourself---does this chatter actually matter anyway?
I'd never recommend AppleTalk over TCP/IP, since AppleTalk has a number of scalability problems and is just not appropriate for modern networks, but I'm so sick of the 'chatty' AppleTalk myth.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Boy, do I ever agree.
GeForce 2 MX -- Okay, I have a Matrox G450 that I'm very happy with. Up until very recently I had a G200 that worked fine -- I upgraded so that I could have more video memory to cache pixmaps in. Frankly, I think that anyone buying bleeding-edge 3d hardware is a nut, and paying badly for it. If the current games require $350 video cards, I'll play older games, thank you very much. My PII/266 plays Half Life (and expansion packs), Jagged Alliance, and zangband nicely.
5400RPM drive you must be joking. I'd pay *more* for a 5400 RPM drive than a high rotational rate drive. Let's take a look at the pros/cons:
Pro:
Quieter
Cheaper
Lasts Longer
Cooler
Con:
Runs at at 75% the speed of a 7200 RPM drive.
And I really don't care about the single con. Why? Because the hard drive is almost never the bottleneck affecting you. If you're downloading something, if you're compiling something, if you're playing a game, if you're running productivity software, it is simply not the bottleneck. (If your system is paging like mad, it means you should either switch to Linux and/or purchase enough RAM to keep the stuff that should be in memory in memory, not try to run your hard drives a little bit harder.) The only time an ordinary user runs into a hard drive bottleneck is when copying (not installing, which is often limited by the CPU not being able to decompress stuff quickly enough) files. And, of course, there's the people running serious servers. You know who you are, and you're running RAID and you don't care about paying the extra money.
From a user perspective, a 30% increase in speed is just *barely* the minimum level necessary to produce a perceptable difference.
Recent 5400 RPM drives are *much* more reliable than recent 7200 RPM drives. I've seen a bundle of 7200 RPM drives fail in my dorm so far -- not a 5400 among them. 7200s get toasty when you're working with them -- that heating and cooling is not good for the drive. The big thing I want hard drives to do is to store my data and not wipe it out. The agony you go through in a single hard drive failure is much worse than the benefit you get from a 30% speed increase during the 1% or so of the time on your computer that you're actually working with the disk.
Finally, I'm really big about running a quiet computer.
Unless you really don't like single buttons, Apple mice and keyboards are pretty nice hardware.
That being said, I *do* wish that Apple sold with paper-thin margins instead of disgustingly fat ones, but that doesn't mean that they make bad products. They sell a good system, but you have to throw down more money for it -- I'd rather throw down the same amount and get the good system.
May we never see th
The "office of Macs" is one step down the line toward supporting an office full of dumb terminals. When you have machines which are much more limited and harder to do a variety of different things with, of course support is easier
Aside: I kind of think having an office of dumb terminals would be cool. I remember many late nights years ago hacking away on VT220s.
That being said, the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes is pretty tough to defend. The MacOS has a native, modern and free-with-the-OS scripting language -- AppleScript. Windows has the limited, ugly-as-hell and slow batch file system.
A nice new Mac comes with a rather large number of very powerful UNIX utilities. The Windows command line utilities are poor, very limited copies of the Mac's tools.
Ever edited resources? On the Mac, the power user can hack up his applications to do all sorts of interesting and useful things -- but there's no reasonable equivalent on Windows (Windows resources are rarely used and the editors archaic and poor).
I remember downloading for free from Apple a free resource editor (ResEdit) and free system-level debugger (MacsBug). Microsoft doesn't give you anywhere *near* the tools Apple hands out for free to get at the guts of your system. Hell, the best thing MS puts out is regedit. Whee.
So I'd be interested to hear how you're going to defend the claim that Macs are more limited than Windows boxes. For a power user, Windows is the most limiting currently sold OS that I know of -- certainly much more so than the MacOS.
May we never see th
Have you ever seen what kinda traffic that the Mac network browser generates?
Yup. A lot. Much like the Windows network browser generating a bunch of SMB traffic.
seeing as most Mac users don't know jack about proper computing they screw things up CONSTANTLY
This differs from the Windows world how again?
I tend to find that Macs are easier to fix than Windows boxes, though. Break your Mac? You've got some sweet troubleshooting tools from Apple. I haven't had a Mac for a few years, but the Extension Manager was a great little program. Windows doesn't give you anything nearly as powerful. Plus, you can boot into a fresh, clean copy of the MacOS right off a CD if you (and mind you, this is *very hard to do*) manage to get the thing into a state where it won't boot...the only thing MS gives you from booting off the CD is an install-only environment (and now, the rescue console, which is a pretty piss-poor environment for actually fixing things).
not to mention when they email out 40 meg Photoshop files
As long as this is over a nice peppy intranet and you aren't Scrooge when it comes to mail spool quota, I don't see the problem.
May we never see th
Uh...this is completely ridiculous.
With a PC, you usually get better complete hardware. Like a disk drive with an eject button.
Um...the PC design is significantly inferior and a bad design choice that unfortunately legacy issues have prevented anyone from fixing. See, there are two states the computer might be in when you want to eject a disk. Either it wants to spit it out or it doesn't. If it doesn't want to spit it out, it's writing to it. That means you shouldn't eject it anyway, period, or you're going to be damaging the disk and maybe the drive. If it does spit it out, then you can eject just fine on the Mac via software. Also, if you haven't noticed, Windows boxes have absolutely godawful performance when writing to a floppy. It's because they *cannot* queue writes -- all writes must be synchronous, since the disk could be ejected at any time. On the Mac (and optionally Linux, though you're running a risk that someone's going to push the eject button while the thing is still mounted), you can complete writes quickly and then flush the cache over time.
Why do you think CD-ROMs and other modern drives all eject via a software mechanism instead of a hardware mechanism?
PC's? You get ports for standard parallel and serial devices. Oops. Bargain basement inferior Mac forgot them.
Actually, Macs had their own formfactor serial port (which, BTW, had significantly higher throughput than the PC serial port). Apple just started migrating to USB earlier than the PC, and is significantly ahead in moving to a modern architecture -- new Macs do not and have not for some time had these ancient ports out of box. In a year or so, PCs will be doing the same thing. Maybe one in ten thousand people work in a research lab that does CE stuff and want to interface with some controller circuitry -- and they can get a serial card.
As for parallel ports, you're looking at an ancient, slow, and disgusting freak of nature with expensive cables that should have been killed off long ago. Anything that requires a parallel port is much better off on USB.
May we never see th
If there were any truth to it, the study would be all the rage in the IT journals...
Riiight. Think about the IT industry for a moment. Most of it consists of semi-skilled workers who know nothing but Microsoft software. No one, and I do mean no one, is going to make their skillset useless by recommending that the Mac OS replace Windows in their workplace.
May we never see th
If you're using a non-stable kernel, good luck to you! Personally, my data is far more valuable to trust to something like that. When the 2.6 kernels come out you may have a point. Otherwise, try again.
And "greatly improved" doesn't mean much. I can take just about any Firewire device on the planet and it works with zero configuration on my iBook. Support only means it will function. OS X does much more than "support" Firewire and USB.
I use Linux alot, on both Wintel and PPC architecture, but it takes a whole lot of time, effort, and study to get to the point where it's as easy to get working as OS X is. As the tired old adage goes, "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing."
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.
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.