[Dan Frakes]

SNOHO said:

It would be nice to see more RAM and bigger disk. Did you ever look to see how much more power is consumed by those items? How much battery life are you willing to sacrifice? More RAM = shorter battery life...

An extra 2GB of RAM on a MacBook Pro doesn't reduce battery life dramatically. More important, if you don't have enough RAM, the OS reads and writes VM swap files from and to the hard drive much more frequently, and the hard drive uses much more power than RAM. So if you use RAM-hungry apps, more RAM will often provide better battery life.

[mdawson]

The inherent problem with these “cost” comparisons is that they are market price comparisons and it is long overdue for journalists reporting on this matter to begin educating the unwashed masses to the difference; that is of course assuming that the people writing many of these stories know the difference given the content of some of these pundit pieces. When you buy a computer that is not the cost, it is the selling price. Cost is far more complex and is incurred over the life of the machine.
bq. cost = P~sale~ + COO – ROI
where P~sale~ is the price to buy the computer, COO is the cost of ownership and ROI is the return on investment. The cost of ownership also has several parameters:
bq. COO = P~software~ P~security~ L~productivity~ + L~downtime~
where P~software~ is the total price of any software that needs to be purchased, P~security~ is the price of security software, L~productivity~ is loss due to reduced productivity and L~downtime~ is loss due to downtime. For business/professional users losses are monetary, but the for the home user, downtime and loss of productivity mean time is wasted that could have been dedicated to accomplishing something else.
Even if Mac laptops have a somewhat higher selling price ceteris paribus, Macs have a significantly lower COO and significantly higher ROI. GISTICS established that fact back in 1997 and the Apple of then was a far cry from the successful Apple of today as is the Mac and Mac OS of today compared to then. As GISTICS concluded 12 years ago, purchasing a Wintel PC is fiducially irresponsible as such purchases are based on a myopic definition of cost.
Now, it must be recognized that Apple is just one company and does not make the ideal machine for everyone. Apple tried that and it was not in the company’s best interest to continue offering a confusing array of products. Many Wintel OEMs attempt to do this very thing and they do so poorly. Dell’s Website is a perfect example of too much choice and those choices are not handled consistently; any given Dell PC may or may not be user configurable and the absurd number of models results in excessive product overlap.
Secondly, there are areas where Windows is the better operating system choice because certain markets (e.g., vertical corporate software, gaming, etc.) are highly unlikely to be weaned from Gates’ teat. Of course, Apple does not court the enterprise market and their marketing toward gamers is hardly strong.
With these factors taken into consideration, for anyone falling outside of the markets to which Apple does not cater buying computer based on the shelf price reflects a buyer that is none-too-bright. Computers are not groceries, but are large ticket items that, given their typical usable life, are effectively short-term investments. Therefore, what one gains from the use of the computer far outweighs its price.
If a business has high-end technical employees that run complex processor-intensive tasks and opts to buy sub-$1000 consumer-/business-grade computers from Dell instead of the workstation class systems their technical staff needs, the few thousand dollars in “savings” are not going to make up for the losses due to reduced productivity that can add up to 6+ figures. The same goes for the home user. My Power Mac G5 is over 3 years old and still serves my needs. If the OS did not matter to me, I could have purchased a cheap Wintel tower instead of saving up for a year plus to get the G5—and wishing I had waited another two weeks as the dual cores were introduced two weeks after my G5 was delivered—, but you can best believe that I would be well into needing to replace that Wintel PC by now; it is also unlikely that that Wintel PC would have been able to run Vista in full.
Since receiving my Power Mac the benefits of owning a Mac outweighed the price of entry for the system I chose:
* While in grad school I could run UNIX natively and connect to the university servers to run SAS using the real X11; doing so on a Wintel PC would have required an academic license of Exceed at $500.
* By choosing a Mac, the pro system in particular, my backup drives are connected via FireWire and have guaranteed higher throughput. That connectivity I more important when I am transferring large amounts of data to another drive temporarily attached to my Mac. USB 2.0 simply cannot compare.
* No loss of clock cycles to anti-virus software running in the background or having to deactivate/re-activate said same when I install software.
* Having an unobtrusive operating system that does not feel the need to get in my way while I am working.
* When footage of experiments needed to be edited I was able to attach the department camcorder to my Mac with FireWire and use iMovie. My faculty advisor tried in vain to find decent video editing software for our lab PCs and his budget did not allow for spending a few hundred dollars on software that will have occasional use. iMovie did everything we needed for free.
Simply put, my $3000 investment has more than paid for itself in what I have been able to accomplish unimpeded these past 3 years and shall continue to do for the next 1 to 2 years until my needs exceed my current system. (Finally being able to afford a copy of Vectorworks/Renderwors to upgrade from my 8+ year old Classic version will likely be the event that takes me over the top sooner rather than later.)

[WarrenS]

I sometimes get picked to help out a cousin or friend to shop for a computer. Most of the time i recommend a mac, often I recommend another brand. Price and reliability are the 2 factors most people use to make major purchases. Many times after i explain some facts about Dell or Sony computers and compare them to a Mac the mac wins.
If you only have 600 dollars to spend, you are not going to get a Mac.

[Joe2005]

The James Martin Article while trying to be balanced was somewhat off the mark. He compares
a 2000 dollar Business PC to a consumer or Pro Level Mac.

Unfortunately business PC are not marketed or configured to consumers, they usually have smaller hard drives, limited graphic choices and are usually purchased in large quantities by cooperate I.T. departments. They also seem to be priced much higher than the consumer versions form the same companies.

A more fair comparison would have been to match say..a 15 inch Macbook pro to a Dell Studio XPS 16 series lap top.Unfortunately this would have made the price chasm between the Macs and PCs even larger . it would have also pointed out the bigger level of options n the PC side of the equation.

I love what Apple does, but I've always known that you pay much more and to a certain degree get less when you go with Apple.

[Joe2005]

When purchasing software, hardware and other items in the corporate world.ROI is something that is heavily weighed in the final decision to purchase something or not.

Generally speaking.. going with Windows PCs/servers has hsitoricly proven to be more cost effective in the short and the long term.

[OldManDotes]

An honest price comparison will include the following extra-cost items on a Windows machine:
Office 2007 Standard: $115
McAfee or Norton 1-year subscription: $40 (or more)
Now, assuming that's all you want that comes standard on the Mac (iLife and no need for third-party "Internet Security" packages that are only 15% effective anyhow), you still have to increase the price of the Windows PC by $155 to be somewhat comparable. If your time is worth anything, plan on spending substantial wasted hours on "Windows updates," blue screens of death, false positives from the AV, etc. I figure those are worth at least another $240 annually, so the total cost of owners of a Windows PC for the first year alone is $395 more than the sticker price.

[Dan Frakes]

Joe2005 said:

Generally speaking.. going with Windows PCs/servers has hsitoricly proven to be more cost effective in the short and the long term.

I've seen a good number of studies showing that while Macs may be more expensive initially, the overall (long-term) costs are often lower, especially when you take into account the costs of maintaining the systems and the costs -- both direct and in terms of lost productivity -- of dealing with malware, spyware, and the like. So we'll have to agree to disagree here. I don't think it's anywhere close to being as cut-and-dried as you're making it out to be.

[warlock7]

WarrenS said:

If you only have 600 dollars to spend, you are not going to get a Mac.

If you only have $600 to spend, why not wait? Or, better yet, why are you buying a computer in the first place?!?

[mdawson]

Quote

Joe2005 wrote:

>

Quote

When purchasing software, hardware and other items in the corporate world.ROI is something that is heavily weighed in the final decision to purchase something or not.

Wrong. Most businesses are extremely myopic and have a ?go with the lowest bidder? approach to purchases. In larger businesses, computer purchase options more often than not come down to a long-standing anti-Mac bias that results in Macs not even being considered when they are the best tools for the job. Millions of stories have been told by people in fields where the Mac is the industry standard having to fight to justify their equipment because of company?s IT departments anti-Mac bias. A cost analysis is never conducted when it comes to hardware purchases; price almost always dictates what gets chosen regardless of the benefits of paying a little more.

Quote

Joe2005 wrote:

>

Quote

Generally speaking.. going with Windows PCs/servers has hsitoricly proven to be more cost effective in the short and the long term.

As I stated earlier, GISTICS conducted an independent study in 1997 of more than 30,000 professionals in more than 10,000 firms using Windows, the Mac OS and UNIX. GISTICS definitely concluded from their findings that, ?clearly, for the profit-oriented firms, deployment of Macintosh technology constitutes a fiduciary responsibility.? The GISTICS ROI Tech Brief that I cite was published in the summer of 1997 at a time when Apple?s future was uncertain, there was a significant difference between a Mac and a comparable Wintel PC and, the Mac?s operating system was far less stable and robust. If Macs cost less then, then they most definitely cost less now.

Historically, Wintel systems are cheap upfront purchases and that is where the reduced cost of a Wintel system ends, period.

[zimbop]

Right now I think that Apple should go for market share in hardware while revenues from iphone and itunes are buoyant. The user base is growing because people who do switch, stay switched, and become good advertising. There was probably never a better time in Apple's history to grow the user base. In exchange for lower margins they would achieve higher sales. In their position I'd be tempted to see some explosive expansion.

[Joe2005]

That was 11 years ago,I find that hard to believe, Macs are so much more money I cant see any I.T. manager justifying the purchase price.

Whers the support, where are the roadmaps that's needed to plan future infractructure upgrades and changes...Macs are nice but not worth the money.

Windows and certain flavors of Linux/Unix rules I.T., and I see nothing here that will change that.

I think the ship has sailed for the Mac in the I.'T. field.

[mdawson]

Quote

Joe2005 wrote:

>

Quote

That was 11 years ago,I find that hard to believe, Macs are so much more money I cant see any I.T. manager justifying the purchase price.

And I explicitly stated that the report is 12 years old and why the findings are relevant today. What you ?believe? is irrelevant, GISTICS proved that Macs cost less. How much money did corporations have to waste on Y2K alone?

IT managers cannot justify the buying price of a Mac because they are biased against Macs to begin with and do not make purchasing decisions based on real cost, because a big part of the cost of a computer in enterprise is the IT staff requirement. Even when there is no IT bias, which is extremely rare despite growing enterprise interest in Macs, like any other department, IT answers to corporate officers that clearly cannot distinguish between price and cost either.

If the ship has sailed on Mac in enterprise, it is because IT departments have successfully locked their employers into a single platform with vertical products.

[mdawson]

Quote

zimbop wrote:

>

Quote

In exchange for lower margins they would achieve higher sales.

No, in exchange for lower margins you lose the iPhone, the iPod, OS X, AppleTV and everything else Apple does outside of PC sales. Where do you think the money for Apple?s R&D comes from? Companies like Dell, Gateway, et al., can sell computers at low profit margins because they do not actually design anything. Companies like HP and Sony can do the same because they have been in business much longer than the personal computer has been in existence; PC sales are not their bread and butter.

[charliechan]

....actually my dealership charges less to change the oil than Walmart. And I don't have to argue with them over warranty repairs since they are the only people touching the car. (some dealers over charge... but the gross over generalization that was true in the past is not a fair thing to perpetuate now)