Letters to the Editor
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I don't drive a Z3 on the beach either
For instance I have a need for military hardened machines. Not going to find a Mac to do that. I will find a PC based machine that I can run an NSA hardened OS to run on a shockproof box I can throw off the roof and have a car run over and still work. I have even experimented with one that's Grade-III-A bulletproof. It won't work after that but it's still bulletproof.
Anyway, different niches for different purposes. Macs are great for people who need a machine to NOT get in their way. It's lifecycle support costs for the purpose it's intended to serve is quite a bit lower than for PCs unless you lock down PCs in a corporate environment so that the end user can't fuck with it. Mac's just work. Now, if you're like my tribe at home - profoundly UNTRAINABLE and utterly without any ability to clearly articulate what has gone wrong, then a Mac is a great tool for them. It just works. Period. They're not running corporate IM clients or Lotus Notes or specialized corporate apps like I do. They don't need to run highly tuned JVMs. They don't run SAP or Oracle financials & help desk tools and they certainly aren't running VMware or Tivoli Federated Identity Management on top of a DCE/DFS or an LDAP core.
But what they do is entirely rational and useful on a Mac and it's cheaper, faster and easier to run and it costs less time and effort to maintain. Is it more expensive? Yes quite a bit. But that HP $449 laptop you just bought is probably end of life and will barely run Vista as-is w/o plunking 2GB of RAM on it. The screen will be small, it's rather heavy for a laptop and you will have problems trying to play DVD's, synch your iPod and such. You can have the option of putting XP on it then you get to enjoy the experience of endless patching, Microsoft "Fix Tuesday", updates you don't need, aren't explained and take forever to complete. And that's for the ones that don't fail. For instance I have two machines which are binary identical for XPSP2 and yet one installs the latest 13 Office 2002 patches and the other one doesn't. I will probably rip both of them out and put OO2.4 on them. Why not? At least I don't have to screw with it.
Now, let's say you simply aren't hip to the whole Mac ethos. Ok. buy a 'PC laptop' w/o an OS, save yourself the $189 bucks or whatever and put or get someone to put Ubuntu Hardy Heron on it. Or Linspire which is even more 'end user' (monkey) focused. Or one of the other half dozen or so useful desktop oriented Linux distros that are out there and work rather well. Or if you need exotic DBCS support, Red Star is excellent. And run that. I have a Thinkpad around here that runs zero software you have to pay for. And includes being able to supplant (admittedly not easy) iTunes. The only things I can't use are applications tied to specific hardware like WinFax and some scanner software. I estimate that in the next 2 years there will be an Ubuntu that installs like Windows, and is application compatible with Windows file structures and will have sufficient applications that can replace Mac OSX apps. After all OSX is really BSD under the covers. Which is also why you pay so much to Apple to make it friendly. BSD is positively user hostile. More than even Slackware for the folks who know. Apple spent a huge amount of time and effort building an excellent user shell atop the BSD kernel and subsystems. There is nothing comparable that anyone else has been able to do with BSD or SunOS or Solaris or AIX. And most Linux distros are far behind Mac OSX in elegance, ease of use and rich features.
Now having said that I don't want my DB servers running it. I really don't want them running Win2K3 or one of the more exotic flavors like Advanced Server or Data Center edition. But for small servers it's very useful. Not as cost efficient as AIXv5 running multiple images across a plane of CPU cores and not as efficient as running iSeries OS/400 or zOS across their corresponding multi image pools but it's good for what it does especially if I'm lazy and I want to make Active Directory do all the heavy lifting.
So there you have it - use it for its good for and don't use it for what it sucks at. It's your money and your time.