Not Going Back
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Apple, Technology, trackback
John Gruber has it exactly right:
Windows lost a huge chunk of the nerd market. Nerd switchers, in and of themselves, don’t constitute a significant enough number of people to account for anything other than a tiny blip in Apple’s Mac sales. But nerds are the people who recommend computers to friends and families; it seems inarguable that there are an awful lot of nerds recommending Macs today who weren’t five years ago.
I bought my first Mac (15″ MBP) in August 2006. In some ways, I bought it two months too early; in others, I bought just at the right time (I needed a new home laptop). In that time, I have convinced my parents to ditch their two Windows computers for a Mac—my MBP, when I upgrade early next year; I have told my wife that her next computer when this one dies will be a Mac and I have recommended Macs to three other people. There’s very little that one can do on Windows that one can’t do on the Mac; the only compelling reason for most people is games.
If you’re a big player of FPS games, you want a Windows PC. If you must always have the latest and greatest video card, you want a Windows PC.
Anyone else? You want a Mac. No, Apple doesn’t offer a $400 Mac. If that’s your budgetary limit, you *still* want a Mac, but you can’t afford one. Look at one of the Linux vendors. Because you’re not going to run a decent version of Vista on that $400 PC. And you’ll need to replace it sooner than you would an equivalent Mac. My rule of thumb for non-Mac hardware has been that you’ll get about 12 – 14 months of meaningful use per $500 you spend. I suspect that it’s 18 – 24 months of meaningful use per $500 you spend on a Mac. By meaningful use I mean before you start noticing memory and graphics limitations requiring significant hardware upgrades to keep up to date.
I’m not going back. I don’t know that I’ll stay with the Mac “forever”, but at this point, it’s the best computer investment that I’ve made so far. Aside from that first computer (and it was my dad’s investment then), that started me on the road I’m on.
Comments
well … I’m not going back to Windows either. And yes, there *are* some things you can do on Windows that you can’t do on my machines. But until somebody convinces me that an Intel chip is worth a couple hundred bucks more than an AMD one and Leopard is a better OS than Gentoo Linux, I’m staying right where I am — Gentoo Linux on AMD.
I’ve *never* run out of hardware on my slowest box, a 1.3 GHz Athlon T-bird. I bought it at 512 MB with a 60 GB hard drive for $700. It’s ancient, but it now has a full GB and a 250 MB hard drive.
The same goes for my 1.7 GHz Athlon XP notebook. It’s fine in 512 MB — the only slow thing on it is the hard drive when I boot up Windows XP Home on it!
When it dies, I expect to replace it with a $700 Windows notebook and nuke Windows entirely in favor of Gentoo Linux. And I expect to get five years out of it, just like the one I have now and the T-bird.
> If you’re a big player of FPS games, you want a Windows PC. If you must always
> have the latest and greatest video card, you want a Windows PC.
Or a Mac with a Bootcamp partition so you can dual-boot into Windows for Windows-only games, which is what I do on my Mac Pro at home. Games run as well or better on it than my (albeit slightly older) dual-boot x86 FreeBSD/Windows box.
Ed: what I know is that as a package, the Mac is a more convincing and better-engineered package than anything else on the market right now. I don’t use Gentoo (not enough patience), but even Ubuntu isn’t quite as smooth as I’d like. (I use it at work and run Windows in a VM jail, where it belongs.) I recently had a situation where X would come up but not display anything at all—even after I rebooted and even replaced the NVidia drivers. It took me two days (well, two work days and a weekend of waiting for downloads) to upgrade from 6.10 to 7.04, preventing the latest Linux kernel from booting (it doesn’t like my wireless USB keyboard…) in GRUB, and then installing the latest NVidia drivers before I could get a display again. I’m hoping I don’t have to reboot anytime soon, because I can’t remember how to edit the GRUB menu permanently to disable that disastrous kernel version.
Michael: True. It doesn’t work so well on a MacBook or MacBook Pro (what I have), but it is an option. If you’re constantly upgrading your hardware (as a coworker of mine is doing), the Mac won’t be your choice because of limited driver availability.