Not to derail, but does anyone here remember $10,000 IIfx' and $7900 IIci's?
I had both. In terms of Apple being noncompetitive in price, you could point to a more recent example - the G5 tower against the then-PC equivalents.
The tech is cheaper these days, but Apple is trying to get some R & D back on the new manufacturing process, hence the prices aren't "bargain basement" like most thought/expected.
There is no 'new manufacturing process'. True, Apple may be the only one doing it en masse specifically in the computer market, but there's a good reason for that to (not) be when considered from an engineering standpoint.
Apple doesn't cater to the bargain basement shopper, the days of the "Performa" are/were long over.
Perhaps you forget how much Performas used to cost in relation to other PC's - they weren't even bargain basement then, but at least they were still built solidly inside and out compared to the competition, unlike now perhaps - where it's just the outside that seems to count.
Fine, if you do not like Macs get rid of them all. Make your setup all PC if you want to (if dislike Macs that much).
Your name should be mosx#2 maybe instead.
As I said kabunaru, that's what I'm in the process of doing. I've pretty much had it with 'all form, little function'.
I don't know who mosx is, but my thought is that the less you know what you're actually doing, or at the more inanely nerd level the more hung up on tweaking the Apple OS you are, the more you'll appreciate the Apple way - and the comments I see on this board seem to strongly reinforce this.
These days I'm pretty much kicking myself daily that I wasted so much time and money - which is very likely more than the people participating in this thread have ever spent on Macs - since '05 on trying to make this work. With the benefit of hindsight, what we have now could have been achieved better with around a quarter of a million dollars' worth of kit and services under Windows / OSS, not more than triple that.
There are many elements of how Apple works that I like and I remained in two minds about this for a long time, but the practical upshot is that the solutions offered by Apple are just too compromised and ultimately ineffective for someone with my level of experience, capability and resources - even for casual at-home use in many circumstances.
I'll be glad to see the back of my XServes sometime in mid-2010, which will likely be the last of my "Macs" in regular use - although seeing as I've switched many people who I deemed too incapable to be trusted around Windows machines and
they're very happy, I'll likely still need to keep one or two around to be able to help them out.
