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• Wednesday, November 7, 2007 02:10 PM

  Too Many Pretzels

  People have been 'proving' to me that Macs are a better buy for years, without proving they'd be better for me.

  I keep my PCs, as does my wife, until they are not re-sellable to anyone - that is, when they stop working and I can't fix them. So the resale value doesn't apply to my situation.

  I like Macs well, I used one at work for the last four years. But I need to accomplish a vast and varying amount of tasks. When I needed a piece of software for a single, one-time, job I'd search for Mac software, and there was often, though not always something, and almost always for-pay.

  We had one PC in this office, and I was the only one who would touch it - the Mac people acted like it would give you cancer.

  I'd always find a fantastic piece of freeware for whatever job I needed doing, so I'd download the software and process whatever needed processing and send it back to the Mac. Luckily, I needed to process text files, Word files, database files, things that easily flow between PCs and Macs.

  The cost saving on these utilities really added up. The amount of time I put into switching over to the PC for these activities was minimal. If I was being paid hundreds of dollars an hour it would have made sense to just buy the Mac software, but only if I didn't have to waste time getting approval for the purchases.

  But I was paid $25 an hour and the few extra minutes I'd take to move over to the PC cost the company a few bucks each time, no more, and of course the freeware saved vast amounts of time.

  So, it would seem to me that unless you buy a new computer every one or two years, and never, ever have to use specialty utilities once or twice, and are willing to use pirated versions of Office and Adobe products to replace the PC versions you can't use on that brand new Mac (though your legit copies'll work just fine on a new PC), then you really don't fall into Manjoo's subset of people who will do better by buying a Mac.

  A large subset of the PC people I know also save money on advice. They call me or another geek friend, learn what they need to learn, and I've been able to be a good friend.

  When someone switches to a Mac and call me for advice, sorry, I don't know enough to solve your problem. Take it in and if someone at the Genius Bar can't help you, better pull out that wallet.

  One hidden cost in Macs: belief that upgrading your OS to the new version is going to change your productivity. I didn't upgrade to Vista - wouldn't have even if it were a great system because XP has been so reliable. The macs at work crashed constantly, my XP machines have crashed once in 4 years.

  But my mac friends just saved negative $150 by upgrading to Leopard, mainly for new utilities they'll use for a few days and then go back to work. If you watched Steve Jobs introduce Leopard while you were at work, if you played with multiple desktops for a few days before realizing that few jobs actually need them - your company lost money on their mac investment. (Of course, I wasted my 'multiple desktop' hour around 1991, when utilities started allowing that on PCs, so that's a wash.)

  Every year or so someone twists logic around to demonstrate the advantages of switching over the Mac. Nice try.

  —kdoggg Read kdoggg's other letters
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