Image Credit: "Once you go Mac, you don't go back." by Andrew Trinh
I’ve been spoiled by Mac and I will not go back to PC! I cant go back! Day 23 was filled with working on PC’s in school bas to finish work and fixing families laptops and desktops. I found myself making silly mistakes. I’ve grown accustomed to Mac and instantly missed my mouse-pad gestures and the placement of the command key, I expected everything to work as they did on my Mac. They did not. I was in a world I’ve known for many years that suddenly felt alien. Program installations displayed unnecessary pop-ups, the right mouse button seemed unnecessary (although I miss it the most on Mac), laptop cases felt flimsy, and the ALT key was in the wrong place! Clearly, Planet Windows was a world I left far behind 22 days ago. Continue Reading »
I’ve been weighing the purchase of a new laptop; either a new MacBook Pro or PC (Dell XPS Studio 16). I wanted to investigate pro’s and con’s of switching systems or just performing a hardware upgrade. Very rarely am I a person who is happy with a Microsoft product: I hate Internet Explorer, I hated Office (before Office 2007), and I wasn’t a huge fan of XP (I really like Vista). I was also critical of Microsoft stating there is an "Apple Tax". Having been critical of Microsoft, I wanted to evaluate one of my major reasons for purchasing a new PC over a Mac.
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I’ve begun the process of purchasing a new laptop, the question is which one? My initial research has lead me to choosing either either the Dell Studio XPS 16 or the MacBook Pro 17”. Windows-based systems tend to be less expensive, but Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc suggests there is a hidden “Apple Tax”, that is in the long term Mac’s are costlier. This suggestion stems from a Microsoft sponsored whitepaper by Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates indicating there is a $3,367 difference of owning a Windows system over five years. There are many issues with the whitepaper (outside of it being sponsored by Microsoft), it reads much like a blog post and includes items that aren’t reflective to either systems (such as the inclusion of Quicken for the Mac only and not the PC, Purchasing Office on the Mac opposed to iLife, and the lack of any Anti-Virus software.)
This notion of an “Apple Tax” does raise an interesting point. When considering the purchase a new system one should look beyond the initial costs to figure out the true value. I wanted to look at the projects costs of purchasing these two laptops over 5 years. Instead of using the metrics in the whitepaper or assumptions of an average user, I wanted to compare both systems based on my needs. I broke these down into two parts, first the initial cost (the system cost and software I would require to accomplish all of the things I want to), and then the maintenance costs over an additional 4 years of each system.
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