Replies

Agreed it is another issue entirely... it is next to impossible to justify spending 3-4 times the cost of a PC per desktop for a MAC. When you can get machines from dell for ~ $500 a pop spending 1000-2000 per MAC just doesn't cut it.

About 3 years ago my company issued an edict that everyone had to use a PC. I managed to bootleg a Mac & now I have one of each on my desk.

Every morning when I turn on the PC there is a message that the IT department is going to "push" yet another update onto the PC. This always takes 5-10 minutes and maybe one day out of 5 requires a restart.

Now I turned the machine on because I wanted to use it, not update it. I guarantee you the company looses 30 minutes a week for every computer on this update thing. That is 25 hours per year. Given what they bill my time for, our customers should be clamoring to donate a Mac to me.

Real costs of professional employees are $100 to $200 per hour. You can not justify saving $500 to $1000 on a computer when you are going to throw away twice that much per year on lost productive time because of the choice you made.

And I haven't even begun to think about how much Sobig and Blaster cost us. Whole company email system down for several days. My Mac was immune to both.

CurlyDave,

Let me explain IT to you from the management side of things... no matter how efficient it ever is, its simply viewed by management as an expense, period. Your 25 hours a year, which I find quite difficult to buy, but I'll give it to you, still will not counter the huge cost of all new equipment, trashing of existing licensing agreements, purchasing of all new software and licenses, conversion time between formats etc..

Think about it if it takes say 5 seconds to convert formats per file between PC and MAC every time you have to exchange a file with the outside world, for whatever reason, it winds up being far far more time than your few minutes a week. You gotta play apples to apples.

I have nothing against Mac, I really don't particularly now that they are on a UNIX based OS. However Mac has now, always has, and always will have the weakness of proprietary hardware, its what kept Apple from growing in the 80s and basically why IBM owns the market today. Jobs was so obsessed with control that he fought against any sort of clone or 3rd party hardware.... had Apple adopted the hardware standards (like the PC world did) it may have made roads into the business on a large scale... they didn't, they lost... Game over.

You go to your Boss and say, he 95% of the world works on this platform, but I think we should be the odd man out and use this other platform... and I don't care what that platform is, whether it is OS/Hardware or a Widget... reality is businesses don't work that way... As someone who has spent his life in software and IT I can tell you right now, I spend far more time per person with a funky file format they "NEED" to open than I ever do on an OS upgrade, regardless of the OS, whether server or desktop PC.

Every time that happens I guarantee you not only hours of the professional needing the file data are wasted, but hours of an IT person trying to help them are wasted as well... 1 format problem alone will make up 25 hours worth of cash in a heartbeat.

That's the reality of the world. I am no fan of windows, but its the business desktop standard... and as long as Mac's are charging 1500 - 2k a pop for hardware, it will stay that way. In fact as long as they keep that proprietary model, you are more likely to see something like Linux make bigger inroads into the Business desktop world than MAC. That's just reality.