BS. I own a small business and we buy both Macs and PCs. I've been doing this for years.
You're intentionally confusing quality with marketing specs.
If you price out a PC (let's say a Dell) and a Mac with similar specifications, the Dell will be cheaper. If you're actually honest with yourself, and add enough to the Dell that it has the same quality components (by which I mean the same graphics subsystem), the Dell will be about 15-25% cheaper.
If you aren't honest, and simply specify the same MHz rating but of components that have totally different performance per MHz (for instance)... well then you're just being dishonest and we have nothing to discuss.
Of course, run side by side, the Dell will still be slower, because similar programs run faster and more reliably on the similar-spec OS X machine. This is not an idle claim and I'm not interested in debating it... go try it yourself. To actually get similar performance out of the Dell, you have to specify a more powerful machine, and then the price benefit disappears (and there's no way to make the software as reliable, for any price).
What does this say about the OS that the ad is trying to push?
But even ignoring that, the Dell is built with much lower quality components, and it will need replacement within 1.5 to 2 years. This is especially true of cheap notebook computers, the subject of this ad. I'm writing this on an iMac that was purchased just under two years ago, and it runs perfectly well and has never crashed on me (not once). I expect at least another year on it before I give it up, and when I DO, it's going to be because I'm at the top of the food chain and I get to get the new gear... it will become someone else's machine. I will easily get 4-5 useful, snappy-performing years of service out of this machine, and in the interrim, I will not have had to pay for the repairs that the commodity PCs require.
I did in fact get 5 years out of my PowerBook, and was still happy with its performance, but upgraded so I could run VMWare to run Windows programs to help support our customers. Note that nothing I could have added to a Dell could have allowed it to run the Mac programs that I much prefer to use
for my own work.
Had I owned a Dell notebook, the chassis and hinges would have broken years ago.
In other words, in order to perform reasonably well, you have to go in and specify the actual components that the Mac ships with from the factory. It's well understood that for desktop-class machines, custom configurations exist so you can upgrade from the dirt-cheap components the manufacturer specifies in order to hit the dirt-cheap sale price.
Here we go again.... "lalala.. I've had my say and I'm not listening to you... lalala"
I own more PCs than Macs because my company does IT support and we support what the customer owns. I know what these things cost because I pay the bills, and I know exactly what breaks and what doesn't. PCs break, both the software and the race-to-the-bottom-of-the-barrel hardware.
A. It's not really much of a debate. There are really no true MS or Windows advocates out there, only MS and Windows apologists. If you claim otherwise you aren't really being realistic. The only arguments left out there for Windows is that it's what everyone else uses and because of that there's more software written for it. It's got inertia and that's not always a good thing. If there were no Mac or Linux for MS to need to copy, we'd still have Windows Me and Windows NT.
B. It's not a different issue. Did you not pay attention to the topic? MS is intentionally directing attention away from its own product with this ad campaign and it worked great... on you.
