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I can't wait until a non-OS laptop comes out with a keyboard, screen, broadband access, and Chrome.
Another factor could include iMovie/iDVD for media authoring.
environment. And who uses Access? And Quicken exists at the same pricepoints
on both. Quickbooks exists on both... I don't see your point. :)
I am a Mac user - but I think your overall summary is a little skewed.
As I type this comment on my MacBook Pro, I couldn't agree more. We recently moved our company from PC to Mac, and things work better and people are generally more satisfied.
One thing: I tried to go to iWork, and I really liked it (I still won't touch PowerPoint under any circumstances in favor of Keynote), but if you manipulate a lot of Word docs, saving in Pages, then exporting, can be cumbersome. I probably open, edit and save 20-30 Word docs a day, and switched back to Word for Mac just to avoid the extra step, which can be a pain. If you don't work in and out of docs that often, Pages is superior.
Thanks for showing the CFOs what the rest of us suspected (or hoped was true!).
Doyle Albee
www.metzgerblog.com
that, an annoyance. And for me, it's just part of my workflow now. Pass the
post on to any CFOs or IT Managers you can think of who need to have their
thinking changed.
Maybe if they are in the non-profit space. But Acrobat is justified as "cost
of doing business". Plus, it's the geekier who know about those options and
the decision makers are not usually the geeky among us.
IMAP capability does not give you fully-featured Exchange features. Exchange is a groupware solution, as you know. Turning on IMAP merely means I can get email, it does not mean I get my calendar and its appointments. In some sense, that's a business FAIL.
As Rob said, there are many other free alternative PDF creation products available for Windows--including a fairly well-featured open-source product.
iWork doesn't compare to MS Office 2007 in a business environment. If one were to get a Mac in a corporate environment, they'd likely still buy Office for any interoperability with, say, everyone else at the office. So that nixes that software...plus licensing agreements should make the price of Office much lower for a corporate user.
Adobe Acrobat. Like everyone said here, on fewer than 1% of PC is the the paid version of Acrobat installed. Microsoft got sued by Adobe for having free (and awesome) PDF creation utilities built into Office in 2007, but they put it in on their anyways with a web download. It has extensibility that's superior to the built in PDF writing on the Mac, too. For advanced PDF manipulation, both PC and Mac users would have to buy the identically priced Acrobat Standard or Professional for the Mac/PC.
Also, Dell offers onsite Next Business Day support, but I don't believe Apple does. Correct me if I'm wrong. If one doesn't have a support contract for servicing their machines from an outside provider, this is a BIG BIG deal in businesses. I don't want to spend half my day and schedule time with Apple Geniuses onsite...then wait for the part, etc. I've done this and it's not fun. Dell shows up the next day with the part or ships it, plain and simple.
Also, in a corporate environment that already supports PCs, they have standard SLAs with a separate MNS shop or through in-house tech support, which may or may not support Macs. So it should be a negligible cost to add a PC to the network, but may be a significant cost for a Mac if no one else knows how to support it. The support costs of integrating Macs + PCs that is often overlooked can be high. Not a fault of the Mac, but a cost nonetheless.
The common argument to this is that one can install both Windows and Mac OS X on a Mac. But now the TCO is no longer an argument.
If one buys a Mac it should be because they prefer a Mac or software that's only available on a Mac, plain and simple. But in an environment that's predominantly PC's, it's definitely not a cost saving.
solution. That said, most 'no' answers are based on the pricepoint of
hardware and in many cases, the TCO is actually cheaper and should be
considered.
The real deciding factor should be the employee's productivity on one vs the other. If I can get a task done in 4 hours on a PC or 3 hours on a Mac, and I do that task 4 times a week, and you pay me $50/hour, that's $50 x 4 x 52 = $10,400 a year in employee productivity saved/regained. Same would go if a PC was faster for the task.
The cost of hardware/software usually pales in comparison to the cost of personnel. If your technology decision-maker is so damn myopic that a couple hundred bucks on hardware is the determining factor they should be fired.
I don't buy it.
Great site by the way, this is my very fisrt time here and I already like it.
Iaax Page
http://iaaxpage.blogspot.com
1. Open Office 3.0 for the Mac or Google Docs
2. The faster startup (boot and hibernating) and lack of crashing OS can really increase productivity over time on the Mac. That can be very important for a small business.