Paul Howland's Profile

UrbanBard said " The studies are clear; many independent sources have verified this. You may simply have not counted up the costs. Small business owners say that Mac users are 20% more productive than PC’s users, because they don’t have to spend as much time maintaining their computers. Of course, there are condition when a person would never notice this fact. Mostly, it is where they don’t place high demands or long hours on a computer and trade it in very often. These are the equivalent of low millage car. Low milage cars tend to have fewer maintenance costs.' The Microsoft campaign, and the majority of Apple computer sales, are not about small businesses. They're for home users. For home users there is no difference in TCO. Indeed, as Beeblebrox pointed out, the cost of repairing a Mac when it does go wrong is ridiculously high, as is the cost of buying standard memory from Apple. This is nothing to do with "low mileage" (where do you dream up this nonsense?). The inside of a current Mac is fundamentally no different from that of a PC. Same chipset, same memory manufacturer, same CPU, same disk manufacturer, same motherboard and assembly factory in Taiwan and same graphics chip. And for all this rhetoric about "quality", I had to replace my original iMac G5 20" *three* times and my iMac Intel 2.8GHz 24" once. Thank God for Apple Care - did you factor the cost of Apple Care into the cost of an Apple? I never needed an extended warranty for my PC's as it was so easy to source and replace components. (This last statement may sound at odds with my original statement about Apple components being the same as PC components, but the difference is that Apple make subtle differences - like using EFI instead of BIOS, integrated graphics, customer motherboard shapes, etc that mean it is impossible to do anything more than replace the memory and disk drive). In any event, I remain highly skeptical of the "independent studies" showing major TCO differences between Mac and PC use in the Enterprise. Frankly, the fact that you *cannot* use a Mac in the Enterprise in the same way as you can a PC (due to a total lack of Enterprise software) inevitably means that there will be less work to do. I also doubt the studies are ever independent - who would fund such a study unless they had a point to prove?

I buy a Macs because I prefer MacOS, like the external design more and am fortunate enough to be able to afford them. But it's total nonsense to pretend that Macs are cheaper (they're blatantly not - given a fixed budget, I will always be able to find a PC that has higher performance) and nonsense about TCO is just that - unless, perhaps, you're self-employed and time spent defragging your hard disk could be spent earning income. Mac users make themselves look silly by pretending anything else. The math is pretty obvious - even to a PC user...

I agree that the continual press coverage is often distasteful. However, Apple, to a very large extent, has only itself to blame. Apple has consciously and continually cultivated the "Cult of Jobs" for marketing purposes for the past decade. The whole black-turtleneck "one last thing" Mac World thing was a deliberate strategy to link the "coolness" of their products to the "coolness" of their CEO. Jobs was promoted as Apple, with other staff barely featuring. When it comes to Apple and marketing, nothing happens by accident. It is therefore inevitable that when Jobs appears to be in trouble, the press show incredible interest. It's no coincidence that the mainstream press couldn't care less if Steve Balmer, Larry Ellison or Eric Schmidt fall sick. Indeed, I remember no panic when Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft. You reap what you sow.

Very nice, but the more file-specific functionality you add to Finder, the more bloated it becomes. Ultimately it could include the functionality of every application you have on your system - and be 20GB in size to boot. Far better to have a lean and mean Finder and let the applications take care of the specifics.

The whole Apple community thrives on rumours and speculation. This seems part and parcel of being an Apple user and was one of the striking differences I noticed after "switching" a few years ago. Good on Kelly for highlighting the stupidity of many in the community!

What about wanting to listen to music whilst reading a book? Seems like a blindingly obvious reason for including a music player capability to me...

Smarter Smart Folders - at the moment you can only define multiple criteria with the AND operation. eg. Word document AND opened last week. But there's no way to have a Smart Folder which contains Word documents OR Pages documents. Or Documents AND NOT Powerpoint documents. etc. Without this, the usefulness is somewhat limited.