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"Apple Tax" Report Backfires On Microsoft
Ian Lamont writes "A Microsoft-sponsored report that describes a hidden "Apple tax" has fallen flat among the technology press. Roger Kay's report (PDF) compares various PC and Mac configurations, and claims an all-Apple household's costs would add up to an extra $3,367 over five years. Tech columnists and bloggers have slammed the comparisons and claims made in the report — even Mac-baiter John C. Dvorak calls it propaganda. However, some Mac fans still see a pro-Microsoft press conspiracy. Even if the comparisons are questionable, Kay's report and the accompanying television ads have clearly struck a nerve among the Mac faithful."
Meanwhile, Linux users everywhere are scratching their heads.
Meanwhile Linux users everywhere are scratching their heads.
No, no we are not. We're used to this shit from Ballmer and Co. Surprised that they turned their sites on Apple with it?
No, I've bitched about this before and I'm sick of hearing about "hidden costs" that you don't pay when you install Linux or OSX or whatever but that you pay later. Or the cost to train to a new OS being a "hidden" cost because Microsoft starts these reports with the assumption that everyone already knows Windows XP.
I'm not scratching my head, I'm sick of it. And I hope that this finally causes people to realize that you can only assume the price of what you initially pay for software because they all have flaws and problems down the line. It's a futile exercise to try to itemize that in a cost list because--surprise surprise--you're often subjective and biased when you do it!
Microsoft conveniently ignores these "comprehensive" reports when they ask you to upgrade to Vista despite all the retraining and migration problems you will have.
My work here is dung.
Imaging that. Charging more for a better product!
That's not the point he's trying to make. He's pointing out that even if the products are better, not catering to a demographic that wants lower prices, and is probably willing to accept lower quality, means you allow competitors to gain a foothold.
I'm still waiting for the IPod bubble to burst. Been waiting quite a while now...
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Imaging that. Charging more for a better product!
If it is, or is not better, or is or is not worth the price is meaningless. For the vast majority of uses, there are cheaper alternatives that are good enough.
Paying an extra $500, if you're only buying one or two computers, may not seem like a big deal. But when you are planning desktop deployments for your company and looking to order hundreds or thousands of desktops, it starts to add up. Now you're spending a lot more money and in mast cases the users won't need "better" they just need "good enough". If you care about you're employees, that savings on the desktop could be used for something that would have a greater increase in productivity, such as ergonomic chairs or a well stocked break room.
Then you have to worry about seamless integration in your infrastructure. Fact is, Macs still don't make sense outside the home in most cases.
Dual Opteron < $600
Several Linux distributions work just fine just as installed. They don't need anything beyond what you might have to do if you were installing windows fresh.
We Linux users like to 'customize' but its not required.
My time is worth $25 to $30 an hour, but I can adjust, download, customize and registry edit just as much on Windows as I can on Linux.
That's just because MY cigarettes are less harmful to the environment than YOUR SUVs. And MY gun kills fewer people than the greaseballs YOU are sucking down.
So, of course, SUVs and fast food are to be banned, cigarettes and guns are good.
Since you (or someone else at least) will demand exactly the opposites, all four industries are doing ok. Welcome to hypocrit capitalism.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So there isn't really a conspiracy here, but there is an undercurrent fighting against the pro apple news. The loudest news about apple is pro apple, but only a little less loud is the anti apple news and complaining that said devices aren't perfect. How many people here on slashdot railed against the Mac because it didn't have a command line for so long? Or rail against the iPhone because it's not 100% open or doesn't support Ogg? These are valid arguments, but as people speak out, the almighty dollar takes over, and some journalists pick up on this sentiment and look to make money off it. They establish their niche in reporting and, often, becomes as dogmatic as the pro apple news, and many times stops providing any real content and just keeps finding more ways to say "apple sucks."
You might think "well duh, of course there are two sides to the story why are you saying this" but if you are swept up in the bipolar press, you aren't realizing there is a third voice, very quiet and very small. Those are the moderates who are actively trying to be objective and are somewhere in the middle. But in just about all news these days, not just tech news, objectivity doesn't sell very well, only the extreme viewpoints do.
Of course, all of this does not include the fact that Microsoft has a vested interest in getting as many journalists on their side as they can and if they could would bribe anyone and everyone into believing their OS is best. There is a small, anemic conspiracy there, but that's not Apple specific, that's Microsoft trying to fight against any and all competitors. They've done this with Linux before too.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Depends. In some places, we have truth in advertising laws. If you say something about a competitor's product, it has to be true. Apple had to withdraw some adverts because they made unsubstantiated claims about Microsoft products, and Microsoft should be held to the same standards. If they claim an equivalent Mac is more expensive, then they need to be able to justify this. Comparing a Core 2 Dell against a Xeon Mac is not a fair comparison, as the article in El Reg demonstrated; the Dell with almost identical hardware (slightly smaller hard disk) was $500 more expensive. This is not just spin, it is outright dishonesty.
The previous Microsoft adverts were much better. They didn't try to claim that they were cheaper, they pointed out that there were a lot of niches where Apple has no equivalent product. This is entirely true. My last two computers have been Macs, but if I look at their current product line I don't see anything that fits the niche that I fit in.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hmm, given that there *is* a lot of open source software available for Windows, I'm surprised someone hasn't come up with something like apt-get for it (or maybe even ported apt).
Unless anyone knows differently.
Really? Dell usually arrives within a few days and fixes the laptop in your house. That means no mailing. And assuming your laptop is just broken but still usable it gets you extra usable time. Plus it means you don't have to move your HDD (no idea how hard this is on macs .... thinking the Air).
And the very real: ...tax.
Losing all your work because Windows Update restarted in the middle of the night and you'd forgotten to save and who the FUCK DECIDED TO MAKE THAT THE DEFAULT OPTION?! "YES, PLEASE COMPUTER, PLEASE RESTART WHENEVER YOU FUCKING FEEL LIKE IT HAVING DISPLAYED A POPUP DIALOG FOR 5 FUCKING MINUTES. AND PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT DIALOG MINIMISES ANY FULLSCREEN APPLICATIONS OR GAMES I'M CURRENTLY USING, THAT'S REALLY FUCKING GREAT" I DON'T MIND YOU DOWNLOADING UPDATES IN THE BACKGROUND, AND I'M SORT OF GLAD THAT YOU'RE SET TO UPDATE BY DEFAULT, BUT WHY, FUCKING WHY, DO YOU NEED TO RESTART EVERY TEN FUCKING SECONDS?....
Sorry, got a bit carried away there (having left my computer on with a Photoshop document I'd spend 4 hours on without saving yesterday, only to find my computer now has a security patch for software I never use and a distinct lack of my work.)
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
Or maybe they were just forced into that moniker by Apple's "Mac vs PC" ads. If you really need this to be a conspiracy you should probably start with Apple.
Actually, this is not true. We did this evaluation recently, and ended up going with Macs for our employees. It has had the added, unexpected, benefit that our employees who switched are stupidly happy now.
Anyway, in the past, we've gone with WinXP machines for the reasons you mention. They're dirt cheap, the hardware is pretty reliable (you can get great deals from HP when buying in bulk, and their machines are a pleasure to work with), and the software... well, it functions anyway. Macs always came out more expensive, but not significantly so.
The crucial thing that always tipped the scale in favor of MS was: legacy application support. We have a number of legacy apps-- some are more than 10 years old. XP mostly handled these apps OK. With Vista-- they simply do not work anymore. Unfortunately, they were written well before my time, so we do not have access to code, and the original developers have now moved on to other things. We're stuck with them until we replace them.
So we're now faced with having to run them inside a virtualization environment until we can replace them. Heck, if we're going to do that... why stick with Windows?
We looked at Linux, Vista, and the Mac. Linux seemed like a great option, and maybe in the future, it will be, but there were some dealbreakers, since it would require quite a bit more IT overhead to get going than, say, a Mac. Vista was disappointing, and frustrating to use, even for IT folk. Now, the Mac... it turned out to be quite easy to get going! We have it integrated into our AD. We've so far opted not to go with schema changes, but setting up Macs has been a breeze, and deploying them has been even easier than deploying Windows. No problems with SATA/IDE/driver problems-- the same disk image can be applied to ANY Intel Mac, and the image deployment tools come built-in! User templates can be set up just as easily as they can with Windows, and Macs can use our existing CIFS shares. SSO works!
When we compared the price per machine (including software) between Windows and the Mac, the Windows machines were marginally cheaper (like $25 per machine)-- UNTIL we mentioned this to our Apple rep. She dropped the price for us, and we ended up with a package that was cheaper than the Windows machines.
Add on the fact that administrating these machines is easy (no AV required!), we can do SSH and remote desktop out of the box, and for us, using Macs has been a clear winner.
We'd go with Macs again, and this is despite the fact that I have previous ranted here about how Apple's enterprise support sucks. Their AppleCare program for consumer-level stuff is actually pretty good.
For the record, all of my personal machines are Linux or OpenBSD. No Apple or Windows machines (not including my iPod).