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HAL,

Look arguing that Macs are better than PC's, more cost efficient or whatever is a DEAD argument. Every so often some author writes a Macs are godlike article, and the Mac fans jump all over it like moth to a flame. Its been going on since 1984 or so, and guess what, the business world is still Wintel.....

Apple lost the battle for the business PC 20 years ago, its not going to change. And no you don't make up the BILLIONS if not TRILLIONS of dollars in invested infrastructure and software etc by simply changing to a Mac... it doesn't work that way. And you don't have the same amount of proprietary hardware in a PC as a MAC... that is a flat out proposterous statement...

Say I want to put in a second video card in my Mac so that I can have 2 monitors displaying 2 different things at the same time... say one for me, and one for a presentation, or one for monitoring and 1 for my input... or say I want to hook up 6 different monitors to 1 Mac all showing different screens say for a monitoring wall in a MAC.. you are going to sit there and tell me I can go to the store down the corner pick up a few off the shelf cards, plug em in, get some drivers and boom its going to work? BE REAL!

Mac's are proprietary systems, and fight tooth and nail to keep any sort of clone or open architecture out as much as possible.

Companies won't phase out OUT OF DATE MAINFRAMES WITH CODE BASES THAT WERE WRITTEN IN 1980s for newer equipment provided it still does the job, and believe me lots of enterprises have lots of old systems with lots of old lines of code that NO ONE working in the company knows exactly what it does, and they aren't going to change those things, they sure as heck aren't going to retrain an entire workforce, replace thousands if not tens of thousands of computers and millions if not Billions of pieces of hardware just because some Mac fan says they can save money doing it.

You are truly living in dream world if you think switching an entire enterprise to a new hardware and software architecture is going to net any company any sort of ROI of any measureable significance, before the hardware is obsolete! Even if they could cut their IT staff in half (which they can't) it still won't counter the investment costs in 5 years! The argument that say PNCBank is would save money if they suddenly replaced every Windows PC in their organization with a Macintosh is laughable.

The sheere hardware replacement cost alone would make this rediculous, let alone the costs of the hundreds of thousands of pieces of software they own that run on that platform... and I don't care what emulator you have, believe me, there is a lot of custome code that is not going to run in any sort of effective way EMULATED.... Not to mention all the proprietary code and software an organization of that size has running doing various bits and pieces that would need to be redeveloped for the MAC OS... You are living in dream world, and have no idea of the costs or challenges of running enterprise IT.

You may have your feelings about your little desktop, but that one little node doesn't remotely represent the whole, and it is beyond naive to think it does.

Mac for business is a non starter... been hearing this stuff for decades, and its not going to change. I am personally glad MAC went to a Unix based OS... and they have some interesting things, but they are not at any time now or in the future going to be more than a home market/dorm room toy, with some minor footprints in some specialized areas... and never more than 10% or so of the entire PC market... that's reality.

I have machines that have been running SERVERS for YEARS without any downtime! And they run FreeBSD, but do I sit here and say hey, freeBSD should be the OS for the business world, because its free, Unix Based, and is open source and open architectured? No, I don't... I am glad you like your Mac I really am, but its dillusional to think that large enterprises are going to switch to MAC on any sort of scale for the desktop.

Say I want to put in a second video card in my Mac so that I can have 2 monitors displaying 2 different things at the same time... say one for me, and one for a presentation, or one for monitoring and 1 for my input... or say I want to hook up 6 different monitors to 1 Mac all showing different screens say for a monitoring wall in a MAC.. you are going to sit there and tell me I can go to the store down the corner pick up a few off the shelf cards, plug em in, get some drivers and boom its going to work? BE REAL!

Yes. Every Mac since the 6360 PowerPC comes with industry standard PCI slots... one of the other PowerPCs, the 9000, had six PCI slots. Even some of the earliest Macs could do what you are describing, easily, with the software to drive it already built into the operating system.

The point being made is not that companies should shift to Macs in some massive move but rather that savings could be made by incrementally shifting as part of the normal replacement of equipment.

You display your ignorance of the Mac computer when you cling to the long abandoned proprietary peripherals and files myth... every Mac, built in the last six years, uses off the shelf Hard drives, CD, CDRW, DVD drives, memory, USB devices, Firewire devices, etc. Others who claim the need to "translate files" from PC formats to Mac formats are also completely out of date as the Mac can easily open all of the most used PC file formats. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X is a BETTER implementation of Office than Office XP... and files are identical. What's more, Appleworks will open Office files with no problem, so you don't even have to purchase MSOffice for Mac.

You know, the author of the article, Robert X. Cringely, is NOT a Mac fanatic... he has been writing in the computer field since the early days and was one of InfoWorld's first columnists. He IS, however, more knowledgable in the field than you are.

Say I want to put in a second video card in my Mac so that I can have 2 monitors displaying 2 different things at the same time

Macs have been doing that since around 1988. I have dual monitors at home and work, and now find any single mointor system too confining.

you are going to sit there and tell me I can go to the store down the corner pick up a few off the shelf cards, plug em in, get some drivers and boom its going to work?

Not exactly. For starters, any Mac tower made in the last few years already has a dual-head video card, so there's no need to buy anything. If you have an older Mac like mine, you can pick up an ATI or nVidia card (yes, they make Mac versions), plug it in, attach a monitor, and go. There's no "install drivers" step because OS X already includes them.