[KLUG Advocacy] Linux Outpacing Macintosh On Desktops

[Robert G. Brown]

>>>>Sounds nice, but for the price of hardware. I can put together a really 
>>>>cheap PC. I haven't priced Macs recently but I'm pretty sure they run a
>>>>little more.
>>>It depends, you can get a "nice" Mac for not much money,  but still
>>>several hundred dollars more than you can a "nice" PC.  The Macs do come
>>standard with some features (DVD, etc...) that are extra on a PC...
>>Overall, the spreads between Macs and PC's are narrowing, and it seems that 
>>it is easier to add a number of things to modern Macs than it used to be...
>It is interesting, at least from my looking about, that the price of
>name-brand PC bundles has actually crept up a bit.  This has helped to
>narrow the gap.
True enough, but not the whole picture. Total lifecycle cost is an issue;
Macs are not commodity hardware, for a variety of reasons. 

>But Macs are still only a good deal when compared with
>higher-end PCs. 
This is their market... thry're not interested in competing against the
commodity PCs, only the upper-end units.

>And Apple is on a crazy
>release cycle for OS X,  the Mac nut I know has purchased Mac OS X three
>times since it came out,  so that has to be figured in.  

>Plus the price of M$-Office for the Mac (the ones I saw came with Apple 
>works).
Not a strong selling point, even to Mac enthisiasts (and if there's a Mac
buff here that wants to call me dead wrong, please... don't be shy! :)

>think the ongoing cost is still pretty high, and the upfront cost
>difference is still hanging out between 300 and 400 dollars. 
This is made up for rather quickly as Mac users extend their systems,
if you think of the time and effort required (now, BILL out that time!)
to add scanners, cameras, digitzers, and stuff of greater complexity to 
Mac systems or a network, the price spread is made up for rather soon.
This may be more than a little FUD, but it appears that the sell here
is that Apples are easier to extend and add to, when compared to You-
Know-What system. I've seen this sell in a couple of different forms, 
from TV commercials to adds in commercial arts magazines.

If you don't have to call a PC techie to add on a new accesory or feature,
and you save, say, 2 man days of techie and production time, you've paid
for the price difference right there. If all I have to do is plug something
like a digital camera or a phototypesetter or a really good printer and it
"just works", I'm still doing my job and not disrupting the day having 
someone come in and do it all (connect, download/install drivers, reboot,
test, reconfigure, reboot,...) for me. That [perception?] ay well be worth 
the price difference to a lot of Mac users, for any number of reasons.

>I haven't used OS-X much, but the Mac people I know swear by it, rather than 
>at it (OS 9).  I have used OS 9 units pretty extensively, and they make WfWg
>look rock solid.
I know the Mac buffs I've had contact with loved many of the earlier Mac 
environments. I'll have to ask them about OS 9 in comparison.

>My personal beef with OS-X is that it isn't X.  One can't run apps
>remotely.  The utility of ssh just dropped 90%....
Sux, man! If Apple went to real honest-to-MIT-X, they would be in much
better shape with the powah usahs, and no one else would be the wiser.

>...and let people harness the incredible heap of X11 apps.
This sword is double-edged, you know. There's a pile of X11 apps out there
I wouldn't want my worst enemy to be made to use; the diversity of UI's
(CDE, OpenLook, Athena and other widget sets, KDE, Gnome, etcetera) and
libaries to match... all this stuff is EXACTLY NLIKE what Apple wants to 
offer, a smooth, consistant and seamless GUI. Whenever I talk to Mac buffs,
this is what they rave about. Opening up the platform to almost 20 years
of everybodies favorite set of widgets will kill it faster than an inhaler
full o'cyanide.

>>I can also understand why a large organization would go with Wintel vs. Mac.
>>At that point, it's a question of driving unit costs down, and employing
>>people who work full-time maintaining things.
>The real issue with institutional use is IE.  And IE on the Mac is like
>IE on Solaris, it isn't, really.  An IE only site usually means
>IE-on-wintel only.  We have to use Windows in most places because the
>companies we deal with run IE sites....

This client-side dependence is the most dangerous thing, other than 
something like Palladium.

						Regards,
						---> RGB <---