From: "Chuck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Real Cost of OS "Skimming"
From: "Charles Martin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>I'm not sure I'd put it quite so harshly, but I agree with your overall
point: the cost of Mac ownership is LUDICROUSLY low compared to PC
ownership, and the importance of actually paying for
I have to say, based on experience, this is completely wrong. TCO for Mac
products is top dollar, no matter how you try to rationalize it.
I don't have to "rationalize" it. Every study ever done on Macs vs. PCs for TCO comes out in favour of Macs.
It also is a reduction of basic choice. On the PC side you have choices.
Yes you do -- viruses, hackers, spyware or malware. So tough to choose ... ;)
Windows or Linux or Unix.
As opposed to Apple's much more limited choices of OS X, OS 9 via Classic, Linux, Unix (X11 [several flavours], FreeBSD and Darwin among others), Windows (all versions, via Virtual PC), DOS (via at least three emulators) and many others.
Um ...
That and the higher cost in general of Apple is the exact same road that Sun is now struggling back from as we speak.
Au contraire, mon ami:
http://www.systemshootouts.org/
Plain and simple, when youMore than that ... not every dollar spent on Apple-related stuff benefits Apple. While it's important to keep the company afloat and innovating (which paying for things like your OS X license does, along with periodically upgrading your machine), what also vitally important is that developers are attracted to the platform by the prospect of making enough profit to justify the expense of catering to a select market.
pay
for all your installations, you are investing in the quality of the next
generation of
software from that company.
Take game developers for example ... it costs BIG bucks even to just PORT a PC game over to the Mac, and if you think Mac marketshare overall is anemic, imagine what sub-percentage point are dedicated gamers. If people pirate the game rather than pay for it, what incentive does a game maker have to bother, particularly for such a tiny possibility of reward?
The same problem affects many other Mac developers, from shareware authors on up to fairly large companies, more or less. The day the "tech press" perceives that developers no longer care about the Mac platform, that's the day the "death notices" will start to actually ring true. Don't believe me? Read the "death spiral" notices we were getting in 1995-96 and note how many of them started with a phrase like "[Developer X] is leaving/may leave the Mac platform, further limiting users' software choices blah blah blah." Now go look at how many computers Apple *actually sold* those years. It's a very high number -- better than some recent quarters to be quite blunt.
Though I disagree with Chuck about Mac TCO, he is right on the money about the benefits and importance of Mac users getting as legal as possible -- as I said earlier: small investment, big reward in the long haul.
_Chas_
FL-MUG: central Florida's Macintosh User Group. Meetings: second Thursday of the month, 6-9pm, at the Orlando Science Center. http://www.flmug.org
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