Reply #77: Even if Apple hardware were identical in reliability.., [View All]

[Tesha]

...(and just for the purposes of argument, I'll grant you that),
the TCO of the Apple gear is still *FAR LESS*.

1. Apple gear lasts longer in useful service. You can survive
more OS and application upgrades than with a comparable PC.
And contrary to some of the posters here, you can upgrade the
RAM and disks on most Apple gear with no trouble at all; we
usually upgrade ours once during its life.

2. Support costs are far lower; Apple stuff "just runs" with very
little need for support. Some of you consider that "too simple";
for those of us who make our livings from our computers, every
minute we spend dinking around with the computer trying to
get it to do something is a minute for which we're not
getting paid.

3. Apple gear is essentially virus-free with no effort at all on
the part of the users. No anti-virus to install, no anti-virus to
update, and no anti-virus to run, sucking up those precious
CPU cycles. Some will say that's because Apple's market
share is too small for the virus writers to bother with; well,
aside from the fact that such folks are living in the past (when
Apple's market share actually was small), I say "I don't care!";
the end result for me is still a virus-free machine with no work
whatsoever on my part.

Seriously, non-Apple users become Apple users all the time,
but hardly anyone ever willingly goes the other way.

Tesha

(Where, in our shop, we run Mac OS/X, Windows, Solaris, and
Linux and have in the past run several other systems.)