I’ve never had experience with Macs in the corporate environment, but I find your comments odd. I have had a Mac Titanium PowerBook G4 since Nov. 2002, and I’ve never had a single issue with it. Yes, there is the rare crash, but a quick reboot and I’m back in business. I’ve updated the OS twice from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger with absolutely no problems. I’ve never had to reformat the hard drive or have to recover a major hard drive crash. I can’t wait for Leopard to come out so I can upgrade to a shiny new MacBook Pro.
Comparatively, I’ve had two Gateway tower PCs that have been nothing but trouble. I’ve had to replace hard drives 4 times and one of the two monitors died on me. Gateway tech support’s answer to every problem was always to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. I’ve been through that drill countless times and have lost tons of valuable data. Not to mention every time I turn the PC on, I’m greeted by endless pop-ups nagging me to update something or other. Updating all the anti-virus and security software over and over can take several hours every month.
OK, I know Gateway sucks and they are practically irrelevant in the PC market now. But we use Dell at work, and those have been far from trouble free. I remember our whole department got laptop upgrades a few years ago, and almost 50% of them were DOA or had major hardware (hard drive, screen, dock, etc.) failures within the first few months. I was one of the “lucky” ones who didn’t have any major failures, but my laptop never seemed to run right either. It was a total pig running basic software, it would take forever to “initialize the network connection” every time I turned it on, etc.
So I’m totally baffled by your experience with Macs. Exactly what kind of maintenance do they require?
Its not about brand or OS, really. All computers can and will have problems.
In a home environment there’s really little bad to say about Macs. They are good machines.
But in a corporate network they require much more care and feeding than an XP machine. Everything they do is more complex because they just don’t play nice on IP networks... Especially with a Windows AD architecture. Its almost like there is some ghost of that hideous appletalk living somewhere in the machine. :-)