A study from 2022 found that deploying Macs in the enterprise has a lower TCO than Windows. Mainly because they have to buy less extra software and they don’t need as many IT staff to support them. Also, employees with Macs are more productive and do better on their performance reviews.
I don’t see this mentioned there, but that Apple has largely ignored enterprise works out as a strength; other companies wrote and open sourced pretty good tools. That can result in tools that better meet your needs, and generally will result in a lower TCO.
Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.
Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.
Depends on the enterprise. If you’re a 1 user to 1 device shop maybe. If you’re an institution with shared devices…good fucking luck, be prepared to enter device management hell
seeing the mac logo im thinking this was when steve jobs was between. Nobody wanted an apple in 1999 and even early 2000's I remember a guy who used to stick apple stickets on his ibm to deter thieves.
Apple purchased NeXT in 1997. Steve became the i(nterim)CEO shortly after. iMac was first introduced in 1998. Steve was running the show already. That’s around when the logo stopped being multi-colored.
Thanks for the context. One thing I liked about ios was the way it used many next things (that and I was so jacked that it was built on freebsd). They were my favorite machines back in 1994ish. I was aware jobs went from there back to apple but I thought it was more a falling out previous to that. I was a fanboy by 2005 (well as much as Im gonna be about anything) but it only lasted half a decade as the service at the mac store faltered combined with the whole iminmalist thing when I like them due to maximalist.
Guess it’s as good a place as ever to remind everyone who uses Patreon that if you are subscribing through Patreon app on iOS that prices are going up in Sept by 50-60% and if you want to save money go through the actual website. This is Apple charging more not Patreon.
Edit: Apple is forcing Patreon to abide by the 30% Apple store fee this going through Patreon App on iOS will increase costs for end users by at least 30%; easiest solution is subscribing through the website, still being able to access content through the iOS app.
Why aren’t more people on ghost? It’s a stupid name for what it does, but the $9 a month and keeping the rest is a great deal if you have more than a handful of subscribers.
Ghost managed hosting gets more expensive as you get more subscribers, I don’t think Patreon does. You also have to set up the payments processor yourself (usually Stripe), and if you self-host, you need to set up an email service like Mailchimp. Ghost also has much more basic community features than Patreon, and doesn’t do per-user RSS feeds, so stuff like subscriber-only podcasts are more difficult.
Since I got downvoted on this - among other things, Patreon is removing the “per post” subscription model. One of the people I follow sent: “This is the second time in as many years that Patreon has screwed up my business”
The monopolistic shenanigans aside. I hope that companies also learn from this and have functional websites again and stop forcing people to apps. It’s gonna a be a win win
Apple is not charging 60% more. That is patreon. How this drivel spreads is beyond me. Apple charges 30%. This has been pretty fucking consistent for a decade. Patreon is telling creators to raise their prices because they (patreon) aren’t going to take the loss, they’re going to force it on their userbase. Patreon could easily just eat the 30% or even 15%, but that would cost them profits so they don’t. And then they claim Apple is costing users a 60% price increase. Fucking ridiculous.
And 60% of 160 is almost 40%, nice rounding down there to make your numbers sound better. And what the fuck does that have to do with anything anyways??? 30% of 100 is 30%. I’m saying that the creators shouldn’t have to do anything.
Why does Patreon even have a fucking app!? There’s no need for it at all. This ridiculous rise of companies creating useless apps just so they can harvest your info in addition to the info they’re already harvesting from you just signing up.
I don’t disagree on the Patreon app point, but I sub to like 6 podcasts and never visit the app or website. For me it’s very much an RSS feed experience via my preferred podcast app.
The most annoying thing is that in apples terms of service you are not allowed to tell people that you could go to the website for cheaper prices. Or if you don’t offer payments through the app store why you are doing it. (because of apples stupid fee)
Android isn’t really better, but at least you are allowed to link to websites that function out of the play store payments.
Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That’s reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you’re into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.
From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple’s specs as closely as possible, you’d find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from “okay” to “so bad it feels like a personal insult”), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple’s own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).
Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See computerworld.com/…/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and…
Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let’s say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.
As for the “does more”, well, that’s debatable. Considering this is using Apple’s 90s logo, I think it’s pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its “beleaguered” period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don’t think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn’t boil down to “we’re used to it” or “we’re locked in”.
Windows did a few vital things that Apple failed miserably on in the 90’s.
Mac dropped support for legacy software and hardware on every new OS in the 90’s. Microsoft maintained backwards capability. It was a major reason windows was more resource intensive and had more bugs. It was a smart move because windows OS was able to handle more software and hardware than Macs. This is the top reason why windows demolished Mac in sales.
Microsoft’s business model allowed greater range of pricepoints. Most users in business or at home do not need the capabilities of the lowest priced Mac model. You don’t need much to check e-mail, browse the web, and do some basic word processing. Apple did not service this largest section of the market at all.
Windows benefited by not being tied to the hardware. So if you could slap together a bunch of parts and swap out a few dozen floppies you could get a Windows machine. Which meant there were a ton of companies making Windows machines for cheaper than Apple could make Macs.
Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.
It’s a shame that they won’t just release macOS as a standalone product, even if it requires specific hardware to run. I would pay for it in a heartbeat.
I was actively into the Hackintosh scene in the early 10s. You could have an insanely powerful build (albeit the parts had to be compatible), and it would still be half the price of a lower end Mac Pro.
insee it as apple is a full vertical stack conpany who doesnt want to share its vertical stack as it cuts into their profit.
its what nvidia is trying to do, and if windows for arm takes off, i bet that nvidia is ready to attempt to remove all competition on windows due to how reliant some sectors of the industry are for nvidia hardware
Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.
Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.
Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.
To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.
Prior to Steve coming back Apple had a ton of different product lines. You had three or four models of Performa, then two different lines of Power Macs, three different Powerbooks, and even some servers. This wasted a ton of effort and resources maintaining all these product lines.
Steve divided the segments in to four quadrants on two axes: Portable vs. Desktop and Consumer vs. Professional. I think if they’d have started with simplifying their product line there might still be a market for the clones.
Totally agree. Their product line was an absolute mess back then. Their current lineup is getting a little bloated too. I don’t know why they bother having two laptop product lines anymore when they are so similar.
Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.
And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.
apple was never cheaper than their competition, and when IBM got into PCs they were also not even comparable in quality anymore. Reality is that even in the early days apples was also more expensive and they relied on a dedicated fan base to sell their trash, to be fair they sorta earned their reputation in the super early PC space with actually good products but when IBM came in, it had better PCs at lower prices and apple was basically riding on pure brand power. Then they had a few good hits with the ipad and later the iphone (tho the ipad was not as significant at the time as people seem to think it was looking back) and now they have been entirely eclipsed when it comes to phones and are once again reliant on hype and brand recognition.
It is not a unique history by any means but i feel it is especially egregious considering just how shit apple products are and how expensive they are.
At the same time Windows is going down the drain, so if you compare removed to that it definitely has an edge. And that 8GB Air is not that expensive either… And fanboy can tell you it can swap to SSD so fast blah blah…
But if you have the knowledge to use Linux, there are less and less reasons to go even near removed computers…
So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.
It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.
The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.
Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.
And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.
I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.
Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.
Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).
The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.
You for got to mention the free and heavily discounted prices to get Mac computers into schools to get kids hooked on them. Which is something they still do to this I think.
There’s a reason why no-one bought IBM PS/2s. They were horrible value for money.
The real competition at the time was the thousands of other brands selling PCs. By that time IBM was plummeting in sales and other companies were selling most of the PCs. That’s where 95% of the market was.
Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.
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