can I unpick a bit of the hairball?
Mac OS X: 642 (643)
Windows XP Home: 557 (605)
642/557 = 1.15.. Now tell someone here that [stock/fund/ETF] is going to do 15% better, or 6% better (643/605).. will they say "nah.. it's about dead even.."?
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/01/miniapplesandoranges/
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CFB, you skipped over my anti-virus subscription q. .. I'm still curious about that cost factor..
And this just blew my mind:
I guess the good news is that if you buy a current Intel based mac, you'll probably be able to run Vista on it at some point ... Pretty expensive iron though.
Run Vista!? WHY?
Why would you pay extra to run Vista on a Mac? Seriously, what would be the attraction?
If anyone's smoking something...
Sure.. if I had a special need like the astronomy buff.. absolutely.. but if that were the case,
you're right, I'd most likely not buy the "expensive iron".. people don't buy Macs for the hardware, they buy it for the software; at least I do.
Historically the Mac OS has been better, which leads a small group of diehards to shell out a few more bucks for the hardware. Conversely the lure of cheap hardware saddled people for years with a broken OS. Different business models and Bill won Round One bigtime, but I'd argue that he did so on the sweat and blood of innocent users.
True Confession time: I was IN LOVE with Xerox Ventura Publisher, which only ran on a PC. I was crushed that it went away. Everything else [insert vulgar phrase here]. I whored around with them all: Pagemaker, Quark, Frame.. Interleaf running on a SPARC station, even.. (hint: whatever you do, don't turn it off!). But VP was the real thing. (sigh!) It was stable, elegant, incredibly precise, did exactly what it was supposed to, and prevented the user from doing stupid things. The Mr. Right of software.
I'm a Mac OS fan, more than an Apple fan. As a going-away gift my partners gave me a top-of-the-line iPod. I used it for about 1/2 hour. I'm not crazy about iTunes and MP3s.. in fact the coming computer wars are going to over DRM.. and they might make the Mac-box/PC-box wars look like just a skirmish.
Too early to tell, but likely the boxes/OS will matter less and less as there's more of a shift towards web-based computing and content delivery. It could pan out that Microsoft, with the heavier autocratic hand, will impose its yoke and win Round Two in the same way that it won Round One.. no holds barred. OR Apple (maybe) or somebody else (more likely?) will offer users a better experience down the road. Having passed my peak years of music/movie/TV consumption and getting old and cranky about having to diddle with new technology.. I'm a poor judge of the direction of the New Wave. [Yeah, in theory I'd like to put together a homemade HD movie and distribute DVDs to all my friends. My Mac mini came with all the stuff to do it. But could I be bothered
Nahh.
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