> From: Rick Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Dear Mac Users, > I have a frustrating debate with a collegue who swears that a PC can do > anything that a Mac can do but cheaper and faster.
Rick, "Cheaper and faster"? Hmm sounds like a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis is in order. Winn Schwartau, the well known Security Analyst and CEO of The Security Awareness Company http://www.thesecurityawarenesscompany.com/ is a prime example of a professional Windows user who finally had enough of Windows and recently switched his entire company to the Mac. He mounts a compelling case against Windows from a TCO point of view, detailing the true cost of purchasing and maintaining a Windows PC vs a Mac: http://www.thesecurityawarenesscompany.com/TCO/Winn%27s%20TCO%20WinTel%20vs% 20Mac.pdf He has also created a spreadsheet to allow people to enter their own figures to calculate the TCO situation for themselves: http://www.thesecurityawarenesscompany.com/TCO/Winn%27s%20TCO%20WinTel%20vs% 20Mac.xls The figures he comes up with from his own experience comparing his 17" Dell laptop vs his 17" Apple PowerBook are (in US$): Min WinTel 3 Yr TCO $5,189 vs. Min Mac 3 Yr TCO $3,475 Max WinTel 3 Yr TCO $7,533 vs. Max Mac 3 Yr TCO $3,994 Remember, this is from a life-long Windows professional who finally became "Mad as Hell" and recently switched to the Mac platform, not a Mac "fanboy". Here's a quote: "RELIABILITY COSTS This is what got me Mad as Hell in the first place. I was perfectly content running A/V, checking firewalls, defragging, managing start ups... maybe not happy about it, but it was due to my arrogance all that I knew. It was my entire world. So, as I suggested in a recent Network World column, I was subject to the Stockholm-Redmond Syndrome. The technology abuses you over and over, then promises not to. You have hope. And then it smacks you right back down again. More promises. It¹s an endless cycle of abuse that I was able to break. Point being: If the WinTel platforms had been more stable, I would have kept patching and upgrading like the rest of the world on the cyber- carousel of security. But the problems across vendors ad nauseum pushed me over the edge. Thus, I felt it was entirely justified to include Reliability as a measure of TCO, especially for businesses. Maybe you don¹t care about reliability. Ferrari owners go really fast when their cars actually work. F-16s are great, but need a lot of maintenance. But maybe you do care, and maybe you value your time. Maybe you value your time not in dollars but in headache factors. I don¹t know to measure that exactly, so I decided to stick to time and $ as the metric of reliability or lack thereof." On the performance stakes, many of the comments from others on Winn's blog http://securityawareness.blogspot.com/2005/09/mad-as-hell-finale-recommendat ions-and.html help to shed more light on the subject: "At 9/29/2005 02:08:26 PM, tsykoduk said... "If you want to use your computer, get a Mac. If you want to program your computer get *nix. If you want to play solitaire, get Windows" I just switched from Ubuntu Linux/Windows XP at home to Ubuntu Linux (server) and Macs, and I am not looking back. In fact, I am considering loading up OpenDarwin on a box and trying that as a server. What I like about my Macs at home is that they just get out of my way. They let me do my work - and I feel faster and more efficient. I was (and still am) willing to pay more for that feeling. Am I more efficient? I dunno - I have not done any time/effort studies at home. I work as a network admin on a 3 state portion of a global network. We run a combination of systems, including Windows 2k, NT, Novell 5.x/6.x and Mainframes. When I sit down at my windows box at work, I find that it is more clunky, harder to navigate, and harder to use. Not to mention much - MUCH slower. I run a 3.4 g processor with 2 gigs of RAM. And my 1.6g Apple Powerbook with 1 gig of RAM smokes it. I have had a DVD burning in the background and been surfing the Internet, downloading files etc on my Mac with out a hiccup. Just try and load a Java app on my windows box and do anything else. Baad idea. For me, it's not about benchmarks, it's about perception. I perceive that my time with my Mac at home is more productive, there for I choose to use them. I get more bang for my buck with Macs. Therefor, I buy Macs." And this comment from another poster: "At 9/29/2005 12:26:36 PM, Anonymous said... I use a windows machine at home and work, and am primarily a network administrator and product trainer (for end users, staff and VARs) for my company. We designed and built the worlds first integrated file level and BareMetal multiplatform Disk-to-Disk backup solution, and have been selling that product in record numbers to primarily Windows firms for more than 3 years. Because we are, at some level, a security company, and contantly work in Windows, Linux, and other environments (25+ supported OS platforms) I thouhgt it would be simply rediculous to migrate to a mac environment. After reading ALL of Winn's articles, over the last several months, I became convinced it was possible for basically everyone other than our programming team and IT department to switch to macs. In fact, 2 of our support engineers have Powerbooks on their desks next to their PCs now. The results are astounding. These 2 people are closing more cases, handling more simultaneous tasks, and having far less downtime than any of our other users. Their ability to support our customers (who are mostly IT departments, not dumb users) is not impacted at all. After applying Winn's spreadsheet to our needs (which are extensive) and including some other calculations for needs including system imaging, software migration (of our own binaries), we put the cost of giving our users Mac notebooks over PC notebooks to be more than a $800 per year savings! More over, once I started chatting it up with the developers, we determined it would take only a few weeks to port our software over to a Mac OS X server instead of a Linux box, and we could then eliminate nearly $100,000 per year in i386 hardware testing and design. We could sell X Servers with our software pre-installed, for a savings of about 20% per unit, and at the same time cut our support calls nearly in half regarding client system failure. Simple enough to say, even with our complex, multiplatform environment, Apple offers us ever feature we could want or need. Even the programmers can switch over (something I though was not possible) Only some of our marketing and sales people would not be able to switch. One more thing to note: Once switching to Mac, we could drop having from 2 T1 connections back to a single T1 since a lot of our bandwidth would no longer be used by tuesday patches, virus updates, spyware updates, and spam. We'd also solve a lot of our IT headaches revolving around how to provide user security with servers at only one of our 2 sites. Starting from now, if the plan were approved (it has yet to be discussed with upper management) I estimate we could save approxamately $64,000 per year on hard costs, and more than $100,000 per year in man hours and labor to cover our 80 users. initial costs for the switch would be paid off in less than 18 months. Based on Winn's numbers this would save us almost double what I have quoted, but we would still require some of the "unnessessary" security apps for Mac systems, and since most of our users are mobile, we have other headaches as well, not to mention some proprietary software to port internally. I've used Mac systems since the Lisa, and have owned 13 in my time. I currently do not own one due to "cost of ownership" This will be changing VERY soon!" But I guess this is all a bit too much more than the 1 paragraph your Windows friend needs. Oh well. :-) -Mart -------------------------------------- Martin Hill mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] homepages: http://mart.ozmac.com Mb: 0417-967-969 hm: (08)9314-5242
