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To: jimtorr
MTBF is meaningless when applied to such a small sample.

I think that's more or less what I said. You were the one who drew a conclusion (Mac more reliable than PC) based on two failures per year in a population of 10. (Sounds high to me, btw.) Accepting your data, one can conclude with moderate confidence that the Mac is probably not significantly less reliable than the PC, which is all I said. From the tone of your original post one might infer that you believed the Mac to be significantly more reliable than the PC.

My last Mac (RIP) was SCSI-based and in the last couple of years SCSI peripherals (including printers) became increasing scarce. And my last Mac OS (I "upgraded" to - I think - OS-X) was kinda buggy and ran slow on my Performa 6400CD. I'm sure a lot's changed since. When my last Mac was new - Performa 6400CD (120 MHz - G3(?) 64 MB RAM, OS-7) - it was clearly better in terms of user interface than my 90 MHz - Pentium, 32 MB, Windows 3.1 machine. And a lot more expensive.

I really do want Microsoft to have serious competition. (Hell, as long as it was American competitors, I'd want them dead.) Especially in terms of security. The security patch du jour approach gets old fast. But the Mac marketing strategy that I intersect with seems to be heavily weighted to the bells and whistles over substance.

Besides, if I were a CIO, I don't know if I'd gamble on going with a company that might not be there tomorrow. They used to say that nobody ever got fired for chosing IBM. (This was back in the 60's - '70's.) They might be pricey but their service was the best, they never left you stranded.

109 posted on 08/31/2003 10:40:17 PM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (Uday and Qusay and Idi-ay are ead-day)
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets
And my last Mac OS (I "upgraded" to - I think - OS-X) was kinda buggy and ran slow on my Performa 6400CD. I'm sure a lot's changed since.

You certainly did not upgrade your Performa 6400CD to OS X... it won't run on that computer. Minimum requirement for OS X is a G3 process running at least 300MHz with 256Megs of RAM.

I suspect you upgraded to Mac OS 8.0, which was buggy until 8.1 was released a couple of months later (for free). OS8.5 was also buggy until the release of OS 8.6 just a month later (also free). OSs 7.6, 8.6, and 9.2 were the most stable of the "classic" Mac operating systems until the release of OS X.

By the way, can you name the "bells and whistles" you say overweight the substance of the Mac environment?

112 posted on 08/31/2003 11:27:41 PM PDT by Swordmaker (Tag line extermination service, no tagline too long or too short. Low prices. Freepmail me for quote)
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