Replies

I use PC's at work and I have a Mac at home.

There are 10 PC's used by 4 people in my office, and I know that 2 of them will break every year. That's quite a contrast with my Mac at home. It is 4 years old now, and I've never had any problems.

I would love to have a Mac on my desk at work. In spite of what most people say, it is easy to make a Mac fully compatible.

My Mac's rock. Never had problems.

If I want virus problems I open Virtual PC and dowmload .pif files.

There are 10 PC's used by 4 people in my office, and I know that 2 of them will break every year. That's quite a contrast with my Mac at home. It is 4 years old now, and I've never had any problems.

You're statics show that the mean time between failure (MTBF) for the PC's is 5.0 years. You would have slightly less than 50% percent probability of experiencing a failure of your Mac if it exhibited the same MTBF. The best one can conclude from your experience is that Macs probably do not have a significantly higher MTBF. It could be significantly lower (lower is better), wait twenty years. Also usage at home my not be as demanding as at the office. Can't tell.

I've had two Macs and four PCs at home. My wife's an elementary school teacher and the town's school department had a "pass down" system where new hardware would start life in the HS be passed down to the lower grades, so that in 1990 the kindergarten had Apple IIG's. (Kewl machines, really). Anywho, I had to keep Macs for compatibility. These days the schools are mostly PC based.

In my experience, dollar for dollar, I could get more functionality based on initial investment in the PC. In addition, peripherals and software were also cheaper and more available. Since I was the IT department, I fixed my own problems and my wife's. I had to keep learning enough Mac to get her out of trouble. (Same as aol. I only use it when my wife gets into trouble.)

My impression is that prior to '95, Mac was easier to get started on, but it ate up a lot of resources with the interface and cost much more to purchase. Since Window's '95 they are about comparable. There are some nice widgets out there for the Mac, but probably more for the PC. BTW, I've programmed on the Mac, PC, unix and VMS. (I made a living for five years knowing only two things, VMS Fortran and Huygens principal.) I consider my self an analyst who uses a computer, not a programmer, although I did deliver about ~40,000 lines of unix application code in the years after the market for Huygens dried up.) I suppose I prefer the PC, just because that's what I'm most familar with these days.