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Many here have used the ridiculous "PCs are for power users and Macs are for Grandmas" argument. Others have used the "I can build a PC that will run circles around the Mac for half the price" argument. Then we get this nugget from the intrepid and eloquent ginmatt: "i've had both macs and pc's. i've never had a virus on my pc. my mac crashed all the time."
Well, if Macs are for Grandmas, and ginmatt couldn't get his Mac to work, what does that make him (no offense to any real grandmothers out there)?
kathygnome preceded ginmatt's White Paper by saying: "This article did nothing but demonstrate the ludicrous lengths Mac owners will go to in order to justify their purchase."
Balderdash. I can speak for every Mac owner I know (counting the 36 I have in current service at my SoCal post-production studio, that would be over 100). To a person, not one of us needs to justify our purchase. In fact, the amount of potential down-time we would have to endure, at $650/hour, would make the purchase and employ of anything but primarily Macs akin to committing financial seppuku.
Aside from the fact that software for PC doesn't exist for much of what we do, even if it did (and yes, it does in some cases), none of us would ever consider using it because the maintenance and potential for down time alone would make it cost-ineffective. Some of the Macs I have in service have been running 24/7 for over 5 years straight - no reboots, no crashes, and only occasional software upgrades. The same cannot be said for any of the 11 PCs I have in service. And I'm a 36-year-old male with an engineering degree; in other words, decidedly not a grandma. Bottom line has a lot more to it than purchase price and resale value. It is also reduced by the simple fact that we don't have to have a full-time (or even part-time) tech on staff.
As absurd as this "argument" is, I never understood why it's considered a bad thing to Mac haters that Macs work right out of the box and require little to no attention once running. Would we not demand the same from virtually any big-ticket item we buy? If a car didn't operate like that, most here would bitch to high heaven. To me, the whole computing experience should be less about the tools and more about the task. After a while, you shouldn't have to think about what brand of computer you are using - it should just disappear into the background.
Finally, this resale-value thing does not really apply to us because we typically get at the very minimum 5 years of use out of our Macs. But this made me think of the whole idea behind car leasing (manufacturers started making better vehicles, meaning they didn't sell as many over time, so they created leasing to get people into new cars more frequently). I wonder if this "length of serviceable life" has anything to do with why PC sales far outpace Mac sales.
