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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
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?
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
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.
Actually, since '96 when the first PCI macs were released, namely the PPC 7500/100mhz and every significant desktop mac since then, has come with a removable CPU chip, lots of empty RAM slots and 3 to 6 PCI expansion bays, and extra room for mobo L2 cache RAM, additional video ram, empty drive bays and all that good stuff. Plus the 7500 pioneered the whole concept of upgrading your mac without touching a single screw.
I've owned my 7500 since early '96.
I have used it as my computer back in the dorms. It came with a built-in video capture card.
I've used it to watch TV: back in the dorm, i had a vcr but no tv. i'd plug the antenna cable to vcr tuner input and plug video and audio output of the vcr to ppc 7500's video input and stereo audio inputs (y-cable). I'd watch basketball games and take screen grabs. fun shit.
i've used it to actually capture video: I'm the one who digitized every single student movie clip from that site using this puppy.. It was running MacOS 7.5
Then i turned it into a full-time co-located server at an ISP in beverlyhills, where it would host a slew of web sites. it was running MacOS 7.6.1. It stayed there and worked very nicely for about 3 years after which i finally took it back home.
Meanwhile I had upgraded its processor chip from an old PPC 603, to the very first 250Mhz G3 chip. I boosted its RAM up to ~200MB, while it could in theory hold up to a GIG of ram with its 8 slots. I added an Ultra2 LVD SCSI card on one of my free PCI slots and an extra internal 10gig 8.5ms access-time Ultra2 SCSI cheetah IBM drive. i picked both of those by comparing prices on pricewatch.com.
I also added another Ultra SCSI-2 controller on another pci slot cuz i had planned to chain external scsi drives at some point but never followed-thru.
And of course i did all those upgrades without touching a screw. things worked as advertised.
Today, i could still stick a G4 processor in this thing. It's now running LinuxPPC Q4 2000. It sits at home where it's serving some hobby websites of mine off of my DSL connection behind my linksys router.
One thing i'd like to mention is that ever since i've bought this computer, 6 full years ago, it has been on 24/7/365. I've crashed it many times while dicking around with the OS and some server software but never managed to corrupt any of my hard drives.
As of today it is still happily cracking RC5 keys for distributed.net.
I might whipe out the drives and install Mandrake Linux PPC once it has matured a bit.
Can't upgrade a mac eh? right. and that's a '96 model. Today Apple has VGA displays, USB peripherals, ATA controllers. PCI expansion slots, and support for industry-standard video and graphics acceleration cards. Aside from things directly-tied to your motherboard, i'd say you've got a pretty wide choice of upgrade options.
So now you complain you couldn't build it from scratch in the first place? Well lemme put it this way:
At least, when you buy your mac, you KNOW, *everything*, and i do mean *everything* just WORKS out of the box. That gives you a baseline of a stable reference system. A powerful one. With all the features a geek could ever dream of. (and i'm pretty picky ) (and not a gamer, okay).
Countless friends of mine have mail-ordered all of their PC parts from all over the states, spent NIGHTS putting it all together only to find out some driver is not compatible with their specific configuration.
heh.
Aside from hardware considerations, in my mind, OS X *alone*, is a good-enough reason to buy a mac.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
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
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