Microsoft Remains on Offensive with 'Apple Tax' Report and Latest Laptop Ad

[KerryXEX]

Most I know are still on XP - and the thought of replacing all the hardware to cope with vista doesn't seem to be encouraging them.

Is it worth it for companies to swift to vista today - or should they wait til w7?

I work for a 450k people company and Vista and Office12 are officially *forbidden* to use due to the hidden M$ Tax that would be incurred due to enormous user problems and teaching.
However, this raises even bigger problems with usage of Sharepoint because this only really works reasonable and productive together with Vista and Office12. In our environment Sharepoint behaves like pre-beta sw and anything else but reliable.
It's really ridiculous to have such products on the market

Cheers
Kerry.

 

[BongoBanger]

I work for a 450k people company and Vista and Office12 are officially *forbidden* to use due to the hidden M$ Tax that would be incurred due to enormous user problems and teaching.
However, this raises even bigger problems with usage of Sharepoint because this only really works reasonable and productive together with Vista and Office12. In our environment Sharepoint behaves like pre-beta sw and anything else but reliable.
It's really ridiculous to have such products on the market

Cheers
Kerry.

I work for a large financial group (about 90K employees) and we are not implementing Vista or Office 2007 either. However, it's not a hidden 'tax' that stops us, it's the fact that we have corporate support agreements for XP and Office 2003 so there's no need. However, when these support agreements run out we will upgrade, just as we upgraded from NT to XP in 2005/6 (four years after XP was released) and moved from Office 97 to Office 2003 at the same time.

The vast majority of corporations do not install leading edge technology, they install the software available when purchasing and support cycles come around. That's why I don't take any piece about Vista's poor corporate adoption rates seriously - I mean XP didn't have a 50% corporate penetration until four years after its release for goodness sake! The trouble is there weren't that many blogs around at the time to highlight the issues so people think this is news when in fact it's not.

That said, if W7 is on the table when we come to the next update cycle we'll take that unless, of course, we get a good deal on Vista and our hardware configs are up to it.

And this highlights the problems with the, frankly, stupid Mac vs PC arguments: blogs and Internet articles publish half truths, biased articles and out and out lies and no-one is there to act as a guardian of truth in the same way as, say, the press commission does for the papers.

The basics are:

1) Macs are safer than PCs. This is not down to OS design, however, it's down to lack of market penetration.
2) Macs are more stable than at least some PCs. This is down to the closed operating environment they're built to use.
3) Macs and PCs last about the same length of time - except bargain PCs which quite clearly do not. The reason is that Macs and reasonable PCs use the same rated components so they're subject to exactly the same hardware failure rates.
4) PCs are not infested with virii and are a hell of a lot safer since Vista. XP, in base configuration, was just awful. Oh yeah, and most consumer AV programs are free or pretty cheap these days.

If you're looking for a nice, clean, safe machine and you're prepared to work with a restricted set of hardware and software and pay a premium for it then buy a Mac because you aren't going to find a better solution for your needs in the PC OEM world. If you're looking for more flexibility in terms of build, power and software, don't want to pay over the odds and are willing to accept a little more clutter (and it really is a tiny amount) then get an OEM PC.

Choice is good. I wish more people would appreciate that.

 

[4D4M]

The attitude of some Apple fans in this place is utterly repulsive. There's a level of smugness, arrogance, ignorance, that frankly just defies belief.

Nobody's making you stay here!

 

[4D4M]

do you even work downtown where you live? TONS of companies have switched to vista after SP1 was released (the driver availability from 3rd party manufactures seemed to have stabilized after SP1), i know some schools that switched to vista from DAY 1

But overall, uptake and critical reception have been disappointing. The evidence is everywhere, just Google it.

 

[Anuba]

It's clear that there are a lot of Windows advocates hijacking this forum.

They would've been much more likely to come here at the peak of the "I'm a Mac ... and I'm a PC" ad run, now wouldn't they?

I've seen very few Windows-only users on these threads. What I've seen, however, is that these Laptop Hunter ads have brought out the ugliest side in Mac evangelists, they go into FUD overdrive and spew some of the most ridiculous garbage possible, which has turned people who use both platforms into full-time Windows advocates.

It's kind of like being on a black community forum and all of a sudden there's a barrage of racist tirades against asians. The members who are half black, half asian aren't gonna stand for that.

But overall, uptake and critical reception have been disappointing. The evidence is everywhere, just Google it.

Yep. Everything from the product name to the confusing myriad of redundant editions to the marketing reeks of epic fail. It holds 23% of the market share which is light years below Microsoft's expectations.

But it's history now. Vista was Microsoft's Cheetah, Vista SP1 was Puma, and now their Jaguar, Windows 7, is being prepared for rollout.

Cheetah's uptake was, well, how to illustrate... We had some 30 Macs at the web design agency I was working for at the time. Huddling in a dark corner, last in the row of retired machines we kept around for browser compatibility testing, was an bluish green iMac with OS X installed. It was referred to simply as "the thing with the new stuff on it".

 

[-hh]

LOL sounds like a Ubuntu Machine

Great! That means that in case Apple drives off a cliff, I still won't have to use Windows.

lovely software (the software in OSX is a crap compared to what ubuntu offers, even on the LIVE CD ubuntu has a full office suite including a visio-like program)

Really? But can you just point me to where on Adobe's website, they're selling Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat (full) and Adobe Lightroom for Ubuntu?

BTW, please note that I didn't say "Adobe-like", or "Adobe Clone".


-hh

 

[bruinsrme]

I work for a 450k people company and Vista and Office12 are officially *forbidden* to use due to the hidden M$ Tax that would be incurred due to enormous user problems and teaching.
However, this raises even bigger problems with usage of Sharepoint because this only really works reasonable and productive together with Vista and Office12. In our environment Sharepoint behaves like pre-beta sw and anything else but reliable.
It's really ridiculous to have such products on the market

Cheers
Kerry.

This is the first company I have heard that actually adopted Vista and office 12. I thought XP SP2+ and SP3 and office 2003 were pretty much IT standards.
As far as teaching the employees go Office 12 did away with the standard tool bars. But I will admit that ribbons, once you learn them, it is much faster and productive
Sharepoint works just fine with office 2003 and office 2000.
Its not just your environment that sharepoint behaves in that manner.
Sharepoint is far from what the average consumer would set up and use in their homes. The problem with sharepoint is not, as you would put it, M$ it is at the Corporate end. The first version of sharepoint was distributed as an what my IT friend called it MS version of an FTP server. Early one so many IT departments adopted it MS kept it going and creating a new cash cow.
Sharepoint is not my favorite program and is extremely clunky.

 

[Anuba]

The vast majority of corporations do not install leading edge technology, they install the software available when purchasing and support cycles come around.

Exactly. The corporate domain takes "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" to a whole other level. Back when I worked on e-learning stuff for large corporations, the browser requirements always made me laugh.
"We'd like to use Internet Explorer 5 for this, it has some great..."
"Oh, no... no we don't have that. IE4 is our standard."
"But IE5 has been out for 3 years... can't the employees in question just download and install..."
"Oh GOD no. They're not allowed to install anything."
"Fine, so how about the Flash plugin..."
"Not allowed."
"You can't have browser plugins? But IE4 shipped with Flash included!"
"Not allowed."

Upgrading the OS on 20,000 computers that are configured in a borderline fascist manner to be exactly the same in terms of OS, OS config and installed software, is a massive undertaking that large corporations will put off until they're at gunpoint. Microsoft will still be offering XP downgrade rights for Win7, just like they offered Win2K, Win NT 4.0 and even Win95/98 downgrade rights for WinXP. If these corporations had been on Mac, some of them would still be on Jaguar, refusing to move ahead. Apple would make this impossible, of course (Jaguar is PPC-only), which is part of the reason why these corporations aren't on Mac at all. They need new machines to be able to time-travel back to 1998 in terms of compatibility and connectivity. To this day you can't sell a business PC unless it has VGA, PS/2 and 9-pin serial. If you want a more Mac-like set of ports you get a consumer or prosumer PC.

1) Macs are safer than PCs. This is not down to OS design, however, it's down to lack of market penetration.
2) Macs are more stable than at least some PCs. This is down to the closed operating environment they're built to use.
3) Macs and PCs last about the same length of time - except bargain PCs which quite clearly do not. The reason is that Macs and reasonable PCs use the same rated components so they're subject to exactly the same hardware failure rates.
4) PCs are not infested with virii and are a hell of a lot safer since Vista. XP, in base configuration, was just awful. Oh yeah, and most consumer AV programs are free or pretty cheap these days. To this day you can't sell a business PC unless it has VGA and 9-pin serial. If you want a more Mac-like set of ports you have to get a consumer or prosumer PC.

If you're looking for a nice, clean, safe machine and you're prepared to work with a restricted set of hardware and software and pay a premium for it then buy a Mac because you aren't going to find a better solution for your needs in the PC OEM world. If you're looking for more flexibility in terms of build, power and software, don't want to pay over the odds and are willing to accept a little more clutter (and it really is a tiny amount) then get an OEM PC.

Choice is good. I wish more people would appreciate that.

QFT.

 

[rish]

I would like to extend my appreciation to Microsoft for creating their latest set of Ads, for pointing out that there is so much choice for PC users and at such competitive prices. I would also like to thank the large corporations which adopt Windows as the backbone of their IT departments.

Without these huge numbers of people, from the penny pinchers to the fat-cats, there would be no hope for Apple to shine. What would Picasso be without the multitude of mediocre artists to compare him with?

It's time to say "thank you" to Lauren and Giampaolo; they play a vital role, for they are the guinea pigs and the cannon fodder, who charge onto the battlefield with their ill-concieved machines and get picked off by viruses, bad hardware designs and poor software. There is so much to learn from their mistakes.

Let them have their choice! The vast array of PC's is like a draw full of spoons - some made of plastic, some from stainless steel, large, small and everything in between.

So sit down and choose your spoon Lauren & Giampaolo. Bon Appetite! I choose to eat with a fork.

 

[polaris20]

4 cores at 2.4GHz is faster than a 2 core at 2.93 or even 3.2GHz, a dual core cannot outperform a 2.4GHz quad core unless its clocked over 4GHz (all core2duo 45nm)

Can you find me a Macbook or Macbookpro that has a ATi Radeon 4870 x2 and HDMI?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220503

how about one with just a card reader? (and dont even say a card reader is useless when a macbook has a max of 2 USB ports)

It depends on whether or not your applications can take advantage of multiple cores. A 2.4 quad is not universally faster than a 2.93 dual.

 

[Rob0711]

They would've been much more likely to come here at the peak of the "I'm a Mac ... and I'm a PC" ad run, now wouldn't they?

I've seen very few Windows-only users on these threads. What I've seen, however, is that these Laptop Hunter ads have brought out the ugliest side in Mac evangelists, they go into FUD overdrive and spew some of the most ridiculous garbage possible, which has turned people who use both platforms into full-time Windows advocates.

It's kind of like being on a black community forum and all of a sudden there's a barrage of racist tirades against asians. The members who are half black, half asian aren't gonna stand for that.

Yep. Everything from the product name to the confusing myriad of redundant editions to the marketing reeks of epic fail. It holds 23% of the market share which is light years below Microsoft's expectations.

But it's history now. Vista was Microsoft's Cheetah, Vista SP1 was Puma, and now their Jaguar, Windows 7, is being prepared for rollout.

Cheetah's uptake was, well, how to illustrate... We had some 30 Macs at the web design agency I was working for at the time. Huddling in a dark corner, last in the row of retired machines we kept around for browser compatibility testing, was an bluish green iMac with OS X installed. It was referred to simply as "the thing with the new stuff on it".

actually i think most people in here behave pretty decent. the first one to compare the mac users behaviour in this thread to racist tirades was you if i havn´t forgotten about an earlier post although i think both sides trade "blows" (though i still don´t take this whole thing serious so i don´t deem it necessarily fruitful to get this into an agressive mode) . which is a pretty heavy attack for someone just being here to show us all the light. and besides that, which quite a lot of people will tend to take personal, these threads were started to discuss the ads in itself. it´s no let´s compare our epeen thread. and if you really think that no one will answer if you and some other people continue to more or less call us jerks because we chose this plattform over your favourite one, and do that in a mostly mac user operated forum i guess you came here out of the wrong reasons in the first place.

 

[polaris20]

I dont have time to reply to the rest right now. This one caught my attention though.



I have a better question for you.

Can you find an Apple notebook with a Core 2 Quad? Because Newegg has quite a few notebook PCs running Core 2 Quads

They have 3 (which I wouldn't call "quite a few"), and they're all crap. HP? Toshiba? Gateway? All around 9lbs. All an inch and a half. Wow, sign me up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...escription=&Ntk=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

I'd much rather have a dual @ 2.93 than a quad @ 2.0.

 

[Anuba]

They have 3 (which I wouldn't call "quite a few"), and they're all crap. HP? Toshiba? Gateway? All around 9lbs. All an inch and a half. Wow, sign me up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...escription=&Ntk=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

I'd much rather have a dual @ 2.93 than a quad @ 2.0.

Dell has the m6400 with up to 3.06 dual or 2.53 quad, up to 1 GB nVidia Quadro, up to 16 GB of RAM and up to two hard drives in RAID config. Also, edge-to-edge 1920x1200 LED screen with 100% Adobe color gamut, backlit keyboard, and an illuminated touchpad that works as a jog/shuttle wheel for timeline based apps like Flash and Premiere.

Is it big and heavy? You bet. And expensive, too. I've actually finally decided now to go with the MBP 17", mostly because of the battery life and the sex appeal. But for hardcore professionals who need an absolutely extreme laptop to the point where they'd put up with the m6400 being twice as heavy and twice as thick as it is, just for the ability to have such wicked power in a machine that isn't a minitower, the m6400 dances all over Apple's highest end portable offering. And there is at least one positive thing about the huge size: People who have reviewed the m6400 report that it only gets lukewarm on the bottom, where other laptops usually allow you to fry eggs.

 

[FF_productions]

Can somebody explain why a Mac Pro was used in this comparison? And why is Mobileme $150 a year (Family Version??)

Why is it that the PC is not being considered for geek squad or the million other things that will go wrong?

$1600 in PC's, compared to a MacBook and a Workstation Mac Pro...um?

How can they say in year 4, a blu-ray drive is $300? Can we bring this to a fair level?

And notice the PC comes with no software!

(A normal family's chart over 5 years, not one chocked up by Microsoft)
MacBook $999
iMac $1200
MobileMe-$100x5 years
$150 for Office, $70 for Quicken, $70 for other SW
One to One Care (seems unnecessary, but will be thrown in) $99
AppleCare-$250
Airport-$180
1 TB USB Drive-(According to MS, it is $150, a year from now, uhh no, it's actually around $100 now) $90
Standalone Blu-Ray Drive-(not $300 in 4 years) I'll say $150
2 gigs of ram-($100 in year 3? No!) $50
Radeon HD 4870-$350 (same price in year 3? I guess)
Total for Mac: $3839

According to MS, total Cumulative Cost for PC $2,693

 

[Anuba]

View attachment 166690

Can somebody explain why a Mac Pro was used in this comparison?

Um... because it's the only minitower Apple has to offer, perhaps?

Can somebody explain why a Mac Pro was used in this comparison? And why is Mobileme $150 a year (Family Version??)

Because the example is about a household with one laptop and one desktop, so in order to compare to the free Windows Live service they need to use a family license.

 

[polaris20]

Dell has the m6400 with up to 3.06 dual or 2.53 quad, up to 1 GB nVidia Quadro, up to 16 GB of RAM and up to two hard drives in RAID config. Also, edge-to-edge 1920x1200 LED screen with 100% Adobe color gamut, backlit keyboard, and an illuminated touchpad that works as a jog/shuttle wheel for timeline based apps like Flash and Premiere.

Is it big and heavy? You bet. And expensive, too. I've actually finally decided now to go with the MBP 17", mostly because of the battery life and the sex appeal. But for hardcore professionals who need an absolutely extreme laptop to the point where they'd put up with the m6400 being twice as heavy and twice as thick as it is, just for the ability to have such wicked power in a machine that isn't a minitower, the m6400 dances all over Apple's highest end portable offering. And there is at least one positive thing about the huge size: People who have reviewed the m6400 report that it only gets lukewarm on the bottom, where other laptops usually allow you to fry eggs.

That's all well and good, and I'd certainly take a Dell (especially a Precision) anyday of the week over a POS HP, Gateway, or Toshiba, it's not exactly the same market as the MBP, and certainly nothing I'd buy. Too big!! I've already had to carry one of the Dell's predecessors all over Chicago's Loop as an IT consultant (I had an M90) and it was horribly heavy. This one's even heavier.

So I guess it's all what you're looking for.

 

[FF_productions]

Um... because it's the only minitower Apple has to offer, perhaps?

Because the example is about a household with one laptop and one desktop, so in order to compare to the free Windows Live service they need to use a family license.

The unfair thing is that the PC doesn't have software included, and a Mac Pro was added to the mix. I don't see how it's a fair comparison if the other PC is not running the same server-grade parts??

I know also that not everybody wants an All-In-One, if you hate the iMac's that much, then yes, you'll have to step up to a Mac Pro, that's just how it is with Apple. Sucks, but gotta deal with it. But hey, Mac Pro's have 4-8 cores, the speed is pretty nice hehe.


I don't wanna sound like the biggest fan boy, but it's kinda unfair.

 

[Anuba]

The unfair thing is that the PC doesn't have software included, and a Mac Pro was added to the mix. I don't see how it's a fair comparison if the other PC is not running the same server-grade parts??

I don't wanna sound like the biggest fan boy, but it's kinda unfair.

Didn't sound very fanboyish to me.

Which software do you mean? Mail, media player, browser, DVD maker, movie editor and calendar is already there. Online storage, web mail and an instant messenger are available for free. One could argue all day over the quality of iLife vs. whatever Vista includes, but regardless, the software is there.

The point of the Mac Pro comparison is precisely the thing you pointed out: The only minitower Apple offers has server-grade parts (which a lot of people around here are miffed about, because they'd like a consumer/prosumer minitower with consumer-grade Core i7). MS exploits this gaping hole in the product lineup by comparing such a consumer machine to the Mac Pro.

That's all well and good, and I'd certainly take a Dell (especially a Precision) anyday of the week over a POS HP, Gateway, or Toshiba, it's not exactly the same market as the MBP, and certainly nothing I'd buy. Too big!! I've already had to carry one of the Dell's predecessors all over Chicago's Loop as an IT consultant (I had an M90) and it was horribly heavy. This one's even heavier.

Yeah, you wouldn't want this one in your rucksack. In fact the power brick of the M6400 is so large (8 inches long, 4 inches thick) and heavy that it doesn't fit in 17" notebook bags, and without the brick you're screwed since the desktop-grade components gobble up so much power that the 9-cell battery only lasts 2 hours. This is mainly why I'm not getting the M6400, even though it has some killer features and a docking port for Dell's E/View stand+port replicator. Inventing a new kind of super battery like the one in the MBP 17" is just one of those things that Dell are too dimwitted or lazy to figure out.

 

[AidenShaw]

do you even work downtown where you live? TONS of companies have switched to vista after SP1 was released (the driver availability from 3rd party manufactures seemed to have stabilized after SP1), i know some schools that switched to vista from DAY 1

Others are not "switching" en masse, but new machines come in with Vista. As machines are replaced in the normal cycle, the replacements are Vista (and soon Windows 7).

The application compatibility is fine - even between 32-bit and 64-bit.

 

[FF_productions]

Didn't sound very fanboyish to me.

Which software do you mean? Mail, media player, browser, DVD maker, movie editor and calendar is already there. Online storage, web mail and an instant messenger are available for free. One could argue all day over the quality of iLife vs. whatever Vista includes, but regardless, the software is there.
.

On the PC end, you need to count Anti-Virus software subscriptions over those 5 years, and Microsoft Office of course (unless they assume people use open source software or just plain pirate all their stuff). I like how they included MS Office 2008 for Mac, but the PC has no extra software. Last I checked, PC's came with the bare minimum and trial software.

And yes, you're 100% correct, there is no mini-tower from Apple, so the Mac Pro ends up getting the finger pointed at. In the instance a person decides to get an iMac, you instantly take off almost $1300 from the supposed "Apple Tax".

 

[KnightWRX]

Antivirus = FREE, Antivir, AVG, Avast (Vista doesnt really need one since the UAC makes it more secure than a mac)

UAC doesn't protect against WORMs, like Conficker. You still need an anti-virus.

 

[KnightWRX]

They would've been much more likely to come here at the peak of the "I'm a Mac ... and I'm a PC" ad run, now wouldn't they?

No, usually people come to gloat when they think they're on top, not when they're apparently scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

I've seen very few Windows-only users on these threads. What I've seen, however, is that these Laptop Hunter ads have brought out the ugliest side in Mac evangelists, they go into FUD overdrive and spew some of the most ridiculous garbage possible, which has turned people who use both platforms into full-time Windows advocates.

FUD ? Like what AidenShaw, whitefang, pr5owner, mosx and yourself are spreading ?

 

[polaris20]

UAC doesn't protect against WORMs, like Conficker. You still need an anti-virus.

Yeah, UAC isn't so much a security feature as it is a speed bump for dimwitted users.

"conficker wants to install itself on your computer. Do you wish to proceed?"

"Yes!!"

 

[VoR]

Inventing a new kind of super battery like the one in the MBP 17" is just one of those things that Dell are too dimwitted or lazy to figure out.

Dell have some crazy battery life on some of their laptops (I've seen 16,19,20+ hours quoted), like a lot of other manufacturers - you can just plug in larger battery.
Always been a bit sceptical about the mbp17 battery - I honestly can't see why it isn't user removable. The 'super battery' technology seems to me to just be a compromise. 17" laptops have a large footprint, and you often see things like dual hd/battery bays etc in them, while apple decided to go with few components and a large battery.

 

[KnightWRX]

Um... because it's the only minitower Apple has to offer, perhaps?

A family absolutely needs a tower computer when they are never going to even upgrade it ? .

This reeks of FUD. Like you claim you want to dispell. Here was your chance, you've just shown your true colors. As far :

Because the example is about a household with one laptop and one desktop, so in order to compare to the free Windows Live service they need to use a family license.

Ok, I think the question was more "Why is MobileMe even included ?". What is the PC equivalent of MobileMe that they are comparing to ?