sjfcontrol wrote:(Maybe the reason you've been unable to move people to the dark side, is because Apple actually has the superior product.)
Exactly. What a lot of the champions for PC over Apple fail to recognize is the vast majority of Apple buyers
have previously owned or been forced by job circumstances to work on PCs. It's not like they haven't had a chance to make an informed decision. I owned and/or worked with PCs from Windows 3.11 (before that I was working on a Dos shell system) through Windows XP. During the latter half of that time, I also worked with Macs because of certain of my job duties. So I was intimately familiar from a
user standpoint with both platforms. When it came time to buy my first laptop, it was a no-brainer to go with an Apple product.......not because they were "cool," but because they were easier to use, less likely to get viruses, and for absolutely certain more stable.
My wife, who is as low tech as anybody I know, struggled to understand the architecture of how a computer works. She's just not equipped for it. She could NEVER understand or remember how to do things on our PC, and was forever interrupting me to ask me how to do the most mundane tasks. She took to Mac OS like a duck to water. That says something right there. Mac OS cured her of her fear of computers....the fear that she would "break it" if she clicked on a given button or something.
So, you can argue network compatibility, cost, software, whatever the PC techies like to argue, but in real practical terms for everyday people who are not techies, the Mac is just plain the superior product.
My own IT guy, who is very much a PC man at heart, told me the other day that "with Windows 7, the PC is now every bit as good as a Mac." I didn't ask him for the opinion. He volunteered it. If Mac is the standard, then the comparison needs no explanation. (And by the way, I am unimpressed with Windows 7. I had the opportunity to use it on a client's laptop recently, and it is just as "clunky" as any previous version of Windows.) I remember back when Windows 95 was supposed to be the cat's meow. The graphic designers in the art department I supervised were joking that Windows 95 was just Apple '88 warmed over. I'm not a hardware guy, but if a computer is defined by its operating system, then Microsoft has been playing catchup to Apple ever since MS first released Windows......and not doing a very good job of it.
To me, it's not about my identity as a computer user. I don't give popcorn fart for whatever anybody thinks of my choices and how they think those choices define me. I could care less. I'm not one of those guys who drives around with the little Apple logo sticker with the bite out of it stuck in my back window. But as a small business owner who can't afford to call the Geek Squad every time an issue comes up, I need a STABLE platform that is fast, that runs my graphics software better than a PC can run them, that can multi-task and then close applications without leaving the RAM cluttered with snippets of leftover code which takes up room and slows the machine down (eventually requiring a reboot), and that can easily be configured by a guy like me to connect to and communicate with all the other computers in my home and office.
Can PCs be made to do most of those things? Yes.....although you will never convince me—after two decades of using
both platforms to manage graphics files....not gaming, but pre-press/design graphics—that the PC is as good as the Mac in that regard. It just isn't. (I'm not a gamer, so I don't care one iota about that end of the market.) Why is that so? I don't claim to know enough about hardware to base my statement on that aspect of it. My opinion, for what it is worth, is based entirely on user interface. Apple has it figured out and has made a high art out of it. Microsoft has not. Apple OS is like the Duisenberg to Henry Ford's Model T. You can have that Model T in any color you want, so long as it's black. Both will get you to the market and back, but the latter requires you to carry a wrench and a shop rag in your back pocket on the way, while the other just doesn't need any maintenance. Now maybe that's an issue for guys who really
like doing maintenance, but I don't, and neither does the approximately 10% of the computer buying market that understands that dynamic. I'd be willing to bet that a significant chunk of the remainder would switch if they just understood that single dynamic. God how I wish my mother had just ponied up for a Mac and had spared me the countless hours on the phone, late at night, being her personal tech support.
In the printing business I used to work for before I became self-employed, we used Macs to run our graphics suites, and an NT box to run the RIP for outputting film/plates/etc. The NT box excelled at that one thing, but its user interface was atrocious and clunky. Therefore, using it as anything else than a rasterizing image processor was nothing more than an exercise in frustration.
Business apps? I can go spend $200 (or whatever the going rate is now) for a copy of Microsoft Office, or I can spend $79 for a copy of iWorks which will let me read and write to Office file formats if I need to. Yes there are other business applications out there which are written specifically to run on Windows boxes which are industry specific or corporate proprietary suites, but those don't affect me, and they don't affect the vast majority of small business people and home users. Operating system upgrades for Mac OS cost $29, and installing them is easy peasy even for the uninitiated. For all I know, there may be such a thing as the App Store for PC's, but Apple pioneered it, and it makes it really easy for users to purchase and easily install useful applications that have relevance to their lives and their needs, both for business and for personal use.
Did I spend more for my latest purchase, the 27" iMac, than I would have for a PC of near equivalence? Yes, I did.....but the thing is a rocket ship. Will I have to spend money on it to keep it running just as fast and just as stable 4 years from now as it does today? Not according to my experience. Is the Apple store kind of cultic and irritating? Yes it is, although I don't share Sheldon Cooper's disdain for the "Apple Geniuses," all of whom I have found to be courteous, friendly, AND very knowledgeable.
Support? It just doesn't get any better than Applecare. They even fixed my 17" MacBook Pro after I dropped it, AFTER the warranty had expired, and they did it for free. FREE. Including a whole new case to replace the one that was bent by the fall.....and they did it knowing that it was all my fault.
My Macs, including the 4 year old above mentioned MacBook Pro which I am typing this on, get rebooted.....I don't know....maybe once a month? Maybe longer between reboots. THEY. NEVER. CRASH. Not ever. At least not mine. I suppose that you can induce a crash with any computer, Macs included. But under what I would call very regular business and personal use, that has been a non-issue for me.
Is it ALL sweetness and light? No. (It never is.) I have had one major failure of a Mac. My 5 year old 24" iMac finally dropped the drive this past December/January (I don't remember the exact date)—but that was after 5 years of constant and heavy usage. Fortunately, I had all my Time Machine backups on an external drive. I had Apple install a new 500 Gb drive in that machine and gave it to my wife for her desktop use, and I bought the 27" iMac (16 Gb RAM, 1 Tb drive, +extras) for my production machine. I recovered all my software and data from Time Machine and was good to go.
But over all, as an end user, my Mac experience has been FAR more pleasant and problem free than all the years of using Windows machines ever was. They simply don't campare.
As in all things, YMMV.