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The fact that one has to struggle to name companies with large Mac deployments is a sign of the reality of Apple's ecosystem: It's a premium (and expensive) dev

The fact that one has to struggle to name companies with large Mac deployments is a sign of the reality of Apple's ecosystem: It's a premium (and expensive) device that can hardly be justified for the average mid to large business. Of course, there are industries and use cases where they just make sense. Web development being one of them, mainly due to it's unix underpinnings. Although I have to argue strongly that Linux is a far superior choice. We deploy on Linux and it just makes sense to work on Linux. In terms of web development there's nothing whatsoever on a Mac that provides an advantage over, say, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The CAPEX side of the equation is i portant for most companies. We can't compare a Google or Facebook to a car dealership (even a large one), a fulfillment center or a manufacturing operation. As one small data point, I just bought two brand new HP laptops for my kids. They have 15.4 inch screens, powerful quad core processors, huge hard drives and tons of memory. Quality is excellent. Cost? $249. These would be perfectly good business machines. To a business this is huge. A Mac laptop of the same screen size starts at $2,000. You can buy excellent computers for EIGHT PEOPLE for the cost of a single Mac. Or, you could buy a few less and outfit each one with a second monitor, something that is absolutely proven to increase productivity by a significant margin for certain use cases. And so, when faced with having to outfit 100, 1000 or 10,000 desks one cannot ignore a CAPEX differential of 8x to 10x. Support. It is a myth that PC's require an innordinate amount of support. Before having my own business I worked for companies with deployments of a couple hundred Macs and lots of PC's. The support nightmares were there just the same simply because most issues were "operator error" rather than issues inherently related to the computer hardware or OS itself. In fact, it was weird to see Mac users (people who used them at home and work) drown in relatively minor problems while PC users typically needed help with higher level issues. The typical user at this company was a graphic artist (stills, video, animation, 3D modeling). I could not imagine most businesses being able to justify such CAPEX decisions. The Google's of the world get away with it because their profit margins are huge and there's a culture to support. At the opposite end of the scale is the owner of a chain of restaurants operating at 5% margin. That's probably closer to where most of the businesses in the world exist.

odiroot 11y ago
You can tell your opinion is unpopular, you're already getting downvotes. I would have to mostly agree though, maybe besides the HP point. It's not quite a proper comparison.
- evgen 11y ago
  The down votes are not because the opinion is unpopular, it is because it is so easily demonstrated to be incorrect. The rehash of the "mac tax" arguments (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple), misunderstanding how enterprises discount capex, anecdotes about support requirements, etc. The companies that are mainly Mac-based know what they are doing and what works at scale.
  - slantyyz 11y ago
    >> (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple) If you're focused on specs, build quality and performance, etc., of course they are not equivalent. On the other hand, if you look at how they are to be used in the real world (i.e., a typical staffer who primarily does e-mail, Office and accesses web apps), they could be equivalent in terms of end-user effectiveness/productivity. A lot of people use computers that have too much capacity for their daily tasks.
    - mokus 11y ago
      Absolutely, but it is incorrect to cast that as a problem of the units being overpriced. I don't need Teledyne-LeCroy's 100 GHz oscilloscope at work, so if I bought one anyway when a 1 GHz unit would do, it'd be hardly fair to claim they overpriced it. I'd just be an idiot for buying a machine far more powerful than I can justify.
  - rebootthesystem 11y ago
    I'm sorry, but this sort of thing can only come from people who are religious about their computer rather than practical. A $250 HP laptop like the one's I just bought my kids is just as capable and useful than a $2,000 Macbook Pro. Let's see, can it be used to log onto something like SalesForce by sales people, assistants, managers and other workers to manage customer leads and the sales process. YUP. Can it be used by various people to do email, browse the web, produce Word and Excel documents, make Skype calls and run other business applications. YUP. Can you use it to make presentations? YUP. Large display? YUP. Edit videos? YUP. Edit sound? YUP? Run Photoshop, Illustrator? YUP. Can it be used by software developers to maintain the company's website/s. YUP. Can it be used by graphic artists to work on brochures, images, pamphlets and other printed and web-based sales materials? YUP. Can it be used by engineers to run SolidWorks, AutoCAD or an EDA tool like Altium Designer. YUP. Embedded development, Keil? YUP. Run Eclipse? YUP. NetBeans? YUP. PyCharm, etc.? YUP. Can it be used to SSH into a server to run, well, whatever? YUP. Oh, let's see, can you run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Workstation? YUP. Can you run a VM with a Linux server? YUP. Multiple instances? YES! ...and the above list is not complete. Well, then. What, pray-tell, do you get for $2,000 that you cannot do with a $250 machine? Please don't say quality. That's nonsense. Yes, Apple machines have great design and quality. That is true. However, the $250 machine isn't crap and easily outlives it's useful life (meaning, you'll replace it with a new model way before it fails) and it offers just as much utility and functionality as the $2,000 Mac. Yes, some are crap. The beauty of the PC ecosystem is that you get MULTIPLE choices at every price point from a multitude of manufacturers. We've had good luck with HP, Sony and Acer. YMMV. And, when we buy laptops, we test the hell out of one for 30 days and then buy a dozen of them if they do well. You can nearly buy a dozen great PC laptops for the price of a single Macbook Pro. You can outfit an entire small company for the same money as one computer. That's saying something. And, frankly, the vast majority of the machines you see at the store from major brands are really nice machines. If you want to splurge and get a monster of a machine, spend $500. BTW, we have both Macs and PC's. Most of our engineering machines (either type) cost $10K to $50K by the time you account for the software and hardware installed in them. The point is that we are not delusional about why we have the machines we have. They are tools for a job. We would have no use whatsoever for Macs if it were not to work on iOS projects. Everything else, including web development can be done on any one of a horde of excellent PC's running Linux or Windows. Even commodity computers today are grotesquely over-powered for the vast majority of applications normal and not-so-normal businesses typically run. Look, wanting to buy a Ferrari is OK. Pretending it is a sensible solution when you commute on the 405 on a daily basis is delusional. Yet, if someone truly wants to drive a Ferrari and they can swing it, it's OK so long as they don't start to believe that this is a reasonable decision for everyone else out there. Please, answer my question: What do you get from a $2,000 machine (beyond above listed utility) that you can't get with a $250 machine? It's a very simple question.

odiroot 11y ago

You can tell your opinion is unpopular, you're already getting downvotes. I would have to mostly agree though, maybe besides the HP point. It's not quite a proper comparison.

evgen 11y ago
The down votes are not because the opinion is unpopular, it is because it is so easily demonstrated to be incorrect. The rehash of the "mac tax" arguments (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple), misunderstanding how enterprises discount capex, anecdotes about support requirements, etc. The companies that are mainly Mac-based know what they are doing and what works at scale.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  >> (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple) If you're focused on specs, build quality and performance, etc., of course they are not equivalent. On the other hand, if you look at how they are to be used in the real world (i.e., a typical staffer who primarily does e-mail, Office and accesses web apps), they could be equivalent in terms of end-user effectiveness/productivity. A lot of people use computers that have too much capacity for their daily tasks.
  - mokus 11y ago
    Absolutely, but it is incorrect to cast that as a problem of the units being overpriced. I don't need Teledyne-LeCroy's 100 GHz oscilloscope at work, so if I bought one anyway when a 1 GHz unit would do, it'd be hardly fair to claim they overpriced it. I'd just be an idiot for buying a machine far more powerful than I can justify.
- rebootthesystem 11y ago
  I'm sorry, but this sort of thing can only come from people who are religious about their computer rather than practical. A $250 HP laptop like the one's I just bought my kids is just as capable and useful than a $2,000 Macbook Pro. Let's see, can it be used to log onto something like SalesForce by sales people, assistants, managers and other workers to manage customer leads and the sales process. YUP. Can it be used by various people to do email, browse the web, produce Word and Excel documents, make Skype calls and run other business applications. YUP. Can you use it to make presentations? YUP. Large display? YUP. Edit videos? YUP. Edit sound? YUP? Run Photoshop, Illustrator? YUP. Can it be used by software developers to maintain the company's website/s. YUP. Can it be used by graphic artists to work on brochures, images, pamphlets and other printed and web-based sales materials? YUP. Can it be used by engineers to run SolidWorks, AutoCAD or an EDA tool like Altium Designer. YUP. Embedded development, Keil? YUP. Run Eclipse? YUP. NetBeans? YUP. PyCharm, etc.? YUP. Can it be used to SSH into a server to run, well, whatever? YUP. Oh, let's see, can you run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Workstation? YUP. Can you run a VM with a Linux server? YUP. Multiple instances? YES! ...and the above list is not complete. Well, then. What, pray-tell, do you get for $2,000 that you cannot do with a $250 machine? Please don't say quality. That's nonsense. Yes, Apple machines have great design and quality. That is true. However, the $250 machine isn't crap and easily outlives it's useful life (meaning, you'll replace it with a new model way before it fails) and it offers just as much utility and functionality as the $2,000 Mac. Yes, some are crap. The beauty of the PC ecosystem is that you get MULTIPLE choices at every price point from a multitude of manufacturers. We've had good luck with HP, Sony and Acer. YMMV. And, when we buy laptops, we test the hell out of one for 30 days and then buy a dozen of them if they do well. You can nearly buy a dozen great PC laptops for the price of a single Macbook Pro. You can outfit an entire small company for the same money as one computer. That's saying something. And, frankly, the vast majority of the machines you see at the store from major brands are really nice machines. If you want to splurge and get a monster of a machine, spend $500. BTW, we have both Macs and PC's. Most of our engineering machines (either type) cost $10K to $50K by the time you account for the software and hardware installed in them. The point is that we are not delusional about why we have the machines we have. They are tools for a job. We would have no use whatsoever for Macs if it were not to work on iOS projects. Everything else, including web development can be done on any one of a horde of excellent PC's running Linux or Windows. Even commodity computers today are grotesquely over-powered for the vast majority of applications normal and not-so-normal businesses typically run. Look, wanting to buy a Ferrari is OK. Pretending it is a sensible solution when you commute on the 405 on a daily basis is delusional. Yet, if someone truly wants to drive a Ferrari and they can swing it, it's OK so long as they don't start to believe that this is a reasonable decision for everyone else out there. Please, answer my question: What do you get from a $2,000 machine (beyond above listed utility) that you can't get with a $250 machine? It's a very simple question.