As the Mac turns 20, has the PC caught up?

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Most People buy on price now, not TCO.: Windows typically has no decent software.

Most people do not buy on TCO, they see "mac = 2100 bucks, windows machine 1100 bucks" (recent prices for similarly equipped machines at Fry's).

And psche' is not a very good example. The people that I know who owned porsche's all had to get rid of them because they have incredible ongoing costs. You look sideways at a porsche and you just dropped a grand for repairs or maintenance. And they need some kind of maintenance or repair every 3-4 months (if you are lucky).

I think you are overselling the case on windows being hard to maintain. It is mostly plug and play these days. I maintain 4 pc's with different graphics cards, two printers, win98se, win2k, winxp, winme.

In the last 12 months, I had serious issues on one of the pcs. That was from a lightning strike.
Reinstalling the OS and applications took 11 hours of which I had to pay attention about 1 hour. Most of the time was redownloading patches and everquest patches.

Video editing is much more of a chore on the PC. You have about 33 capture and edit products but none of them works quite right without a big learning curve and some of them never work right.
I finally bought the ADVC-100. It's a dream and pure hardware.

Graphics editing is pretty easy and there are some good packages. Printing and scanning are trivial on windows now. Business software is very solid and increasingly free because of the open source movement. But again- it's not all 100% integrated so you spend some personal time to learn what you need to do.

Lower TCO is nice but it depends what you base it on how it affects buying behavior.
If it is lower TCO because you value your time at 30 bucks an hour and you need to put in an extra 20 hours to get it to work, then its 'psuedo' TCO.

Let me put it this way.
Windows: $1100 + 80 hours of your time + 200 bucks of software- problem solved.
TCO at $30/hour $3700.

Mac: $2100 + 10 hours of your time + 0 bucks of software.
TCO at $30/hour = $2400.

Strong case for the Mac.
Problem?
Wintel- work 36 hours for someone else and you own it. You spend your personal time which you were not being compensated for anyway to get it to work.
Mac-work 70 hours for someone else and you own it.

You have to do *real* work for almost twice as long to own a Mac.

Mac has a lower theoretical TCO- but people do not buy that way- they buy based on how much hard cash comes out of their pocket before they can play with the toy.

Anyone who is not working 80 hours a week is more constrained by real cash than they are by free time. So they weight real cash higher than free time spent noodling.

OTH, if it is a business, they -are- paying the employees for time and if the mac is better, then it makes sense to get it. Unless again- they have cashflow to cover salary but low resources for equipment.

So a weighted TCO might be...
Windows: $1100 + 80 hours of your time + 200 bucks of software- problem solved.
TCO at ($30/hour)/10 = $1540.

Mac: $2100 + 10 hours of your time + 0 bucks of software.
TCO at ($30/hour)/10 = $2130.

Suddenly the mac is a lot more expensive with "free" time not weighted at its full value.

I agree the mac is higher quality but if all I am doing is light picture editing or word processing- that quality doesn't matter.

And again- porsche is a really bad example- very expensive vehicle to actually own even if you get it for a cheap price.; Posted by: maxo_z Posted on: 01/23/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use