amey01,
Rich is just plain right, and I'll side with him just about every trip of the train on this issue. I'll gladly admit that we both have "drunk the Mac kool-aid" but, hey, it tastes good, makes our lives easier, costs less in the long run, and doesn't give us "blue-screen migraines"...
I used to do install/maintenance/user support on mixed networks, and did it professionally for about 10 years. I worked for a mid-sized "beltway bandit" government contractor in the DC area in the '90's, and we had about 700 computers on--site, about 100 of which were Macs. We had 2 people who did support for the Macs--both of us were part-time support because we actually spent most of our time as production designers in the Graphics department. For the PC side of the network, NOT COUNTING our server farm admins, we had a full-time support staff of 45 PC techs. Full time. All they did was field calls, fix machines, re-install system software, and load drivers. And they had, on average, the highest "overtime" hours of any division in our entire company. When you figured out how many machines each tech support person supported, based on actual billable hours, the Mac techs supported about 105 computers per person, whereas the PC techs supported about 10 machines per tech. Ten times the support, and you didn't even get any other services from the PC guys, whereas the Mac techs actually spent most of their time doing other things which actually contributed to the income of the company, rather than presenting an operational liability.
I once did a white paper for our Board of Directors, and showed, conclusively, that if our entire company changed to Macs, even if we counted in the cost of buying all new computers and software, and re-training everyone to use the Mac OS, and converting and reconciling all our legacy data, it would actually SAVE our company over $1.2 million over the next 36 months, based on the massive reduction in support staff, the near elimination of OS-based downtime, and the greatly reduced time and effort spent on system updated, driver-chasing, and general system mis-behaviour. When our IT director got wind of my paper, he actually tried to get me fired because he said such an idea was a threat to the competitivity of our company in the marketplace". What he REALLY meant, once you got past the Orwellian double-speak of his memo, was that such an idea was a threat to his little technocratic fiefdom, and would put a bunch of his buddies on the street. Needless to say, this WAS a corporation, and in the end, the short-term bottom line won out. 10 years later, that company has been bought out by a large military-industrial monolith, and much of their IT department has been outsourced off-shore, and their whole server farm has been ported over to Linux boxes. Meanwhile, I'm still working with a Mac.
Windows is, I'm convinced, a highly unethical fiscal conspiracy perpetrated by Micro$oft, and it is being made intentionally buggy and crash-prone because Micro$oft decided a LONG time ago that they could make a LOT more money selling "user support" and "MCSE certifications" to stressed-out IT managers than they could by selling software that just worked as advertised.
Before I got my MacBook Pro in the fall of 2006, my last Mac was a Power Macintosh 9500. It was built in the fall of 1995, but I purchased it used in the summer of 1999. I ran that machine until the (non-factory) HD failed in the summer of 2005. At that time, it was running OS 9, and the then-current version of PageMaker, Quark, and Photoshop without a flaw. That is 10 years of flawless service, and it went through 3 MAJOR upgrades to the OS in that time. I bought it with System 7.5, upgraded it to System 8, then to System 9.2.4. The last 3 years I owned it, it ran almost non-stop, 24/7 because it was running SETI At Home in the background. I think I had to re-start it forcibly maybe once every 3 months or so, and usually that was because I was also running a big Photoshop file, and had a browser open, and was running Quark all at the same time, and it would just get over-burdened.
You can't even launch a Windows 2000 install CD on a 10-year-old PC, let alone get it to run with any sort of reliability. And THAT is what I'm talking about when it comes to long-term lifespan.
The new Macs use Intel processors, but they run a Unix core as their OS. Unlike Windows, the Mac OS is built from the ground up to be 1) networked, 2) run a GUI, and 3) interface smoothly with peripherals. What a lot of people--IT "gurus" included--don't seem to understand is that EVERY version of Windows until Vista was running a version of DOS as it's core, and ALL the slick Mac-like functionality--networking, GUI, file-sharing, etc--ALL that stuff is made possible by an impossibly convoluted patchwork of kludges, patches, and what amounts to the programmers version of rolls and rolls of coded duct-tape.
I've written OS's in assembly, C, and Pascal--I know what I'm talking about here. Bill Gates was a mediocre programmer, and his greatest talent is conning people into giving him money. His major innovative contribution to the computer industry was to design a business model based NOT on good coding, innovative interfaces, or ground-breaking technology, but rather by selling support services for a series of intentionally-defective products. He should be brought up on fraud charges, not lauded as some sort of tech guru. Everything Bill Gates and Micro$ost has ever done has been based on stolen ideas that they then tried to claim were their own. Even his first "product", DOS, was stolen from a professor at his college--it was part of an OS-design course, and he took it as "academic freeware", repackaged it and sold it to IBM.
Any technology that costs a company more to support than it's use generates in revenue is an evil and unethical product, and a treasonous fraud perpetrated on this once-great nation, and it's proponents should be rooted out and exposed for the parasitic drains on our economy that they are...
And if you want to know how I REALLY feel about Windoze as a tech-support person, a network designer, a professional end-user, and a consumer, I'll gladly tell you in another post...
