As an IT consultant, I love those $400 PCs.
They generate an average of $1200 in support fees (i.e., money that goes in my pocket) per year. Per machine.
Don’t want to see me on a monthly or weekly basis? Don’t buy a PC.
I don’t recommend that people buy those. But they always seem lured in by the $399 price tag and they don’t listen. Then they complain about the bill.
‘As an IT consultant, I love those $400 PCs.”
At $400 you get the performance that most business users need. Its not the $400 PC that keeps you coming back it the lack of standards and unsophisticated users.
$400 PCs are great if thats what you need. Why spend $2000 today unless you have to.
It’s like buying a Smart car and then popping the engine doing 80 in the fast lane.
Oh, knock it off... A $400 PC is last year’s $1600 PC, so if last year’s model didn’t crash last year, it ain’t gonna crash this year. The difference is Apple keeps obselete machines off the market by using licensed dealers.
Now, if you’re going to buy the latest computer, I’d recommend an Apple. But for most people, getting a $400 year-old model every four years is as good as getting a $1600 brand new model every five... and a lot cheaper.
Next year, you may have a point: Microsoft seems intent on keeping obselete computers off the market by refusing to sell new XP licenses; only the newest, most powerful machines will be able to run Vista well. But that’s a wad Microsoft will only be able to blow every few years.
A small title loan insurance office had just moved to a new building. The manager had been reading some PC magazines for a few weeks, and decided that she knew everything she needed to know about setting up a network of 5 systems and the Internet. She went out to Sams Club and bought 5 computers at $350 each (including 15" monitors), and had the Internet installed on site. Within 4 hours every computer was completely infected with all sorts of malware. When I arrived on the scene, after just one look at one of the computers, and the fact that they had a cable modem and public static IP addresses on each computer, I told her that the only way to guarantee that the computers would be "clean" would be to a) buy a firewall/router and b) that each computer needed to be wiped and had the OS completely reloaded, staring over from scratch. She insisted that I try cleaning her computer, since it had something on it she wanted, so I estimated that it would take at least a 3 hours at $75 an hour to recover her data. And that I'd be happy to show they how to reload their workstations.
She actually decided that it would be cheaper and faster to just give those 5 systems to charity and buy another 5 computers from Sams Club!
Mark