Eight Financial Reasons Why You Should Use Mac

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CIO article "Eight Financial Reasons Why You Should Use Mac"

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But there is also a counter http://www.cio.com/article/127101

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And if you examine the thorough critiques of the second article, you begin to see how poorly it was written and especially researched. Not one point was accurate in the article.

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And you are saying that from a completely objective viewpoint I suppose.

The comment by Marcus Rhodes in the second article is so on the nose. Mac-ists are still singing the same song that they did back in the 80s. The box has its fans I accept, but I can assure you, because I have priced it, it is not cost effective in a large corporation.

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Obviously no one is "completely objective", not even you or I.

No, if you read the critiques you will discover that there was not thorough research on what is available to compare similar product lines, nor understanding what Macs can, in fact, do. This is not 1985, nor is it classic Mac OS of 1985. The move to OS X (BSD) and Intel processors changed the landscape of this discussion, but the author seems unaware of those and the implications. Then for her to admit that her boss "made her write the review". hmmmm

The zealots are on both sides of the aisle, not just the Mac side. Sadly, Apple has made some bad decisions regarding the business world. But that does not mean that Macs are not worthy in the corporate environment, especially since with the Mac, the Mac can run Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and other operating systems side by side, natively.

One who works in IT, and actually supports both Windows and Macs, had some pertinent comments:

Quote: Most the reasons stated for not using macs are specious, but some are real. 1. Mac is proprietary: This is a non-issue, at best and favors Macs by a small margnin. Windows tends to be worse because of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy with standards, and failure to document interfaces (e.g., mapi, office formats, etc.). Macs function at least as compatibly as Windows with Office productivity, email, web, and non-windows-specific development activity. 2. Limited selection of Mac platforms: This is a non-issue. IT limits selection anyway, the choices are sufficient for our needs. 3. Hardware costs more on MAC: not relevant, don't look at initial cost, look at TCO. We expect 2-3X the lifetime out of a Mac. Our management costs are substantially lower per unit. TCO favors Mac. 4. Intel mac won't run all mac software: non-issue in practice. We use MSFT office and browser as standard issue. However, see issue 6. 5. Mac market share small, 5.6%, limited support people: got this one backwards. 5.6% of the installed base is a huge number. We've found that skillbase of available mac admins to be superior to windows admins. 6. Mac market share small, limited vendor support: This is a real issue. It seems to be getting better. The biggest headache of all is working with Exchange server, but let's place the blame where it belongs. MSFT doesn't have open API's or documented protocols for working with exchange. With IMAP/POP3/ICAL/SMTP enabled life is workable, but stay away from native exchange protocols. Another problem is Active Directory integration. AD can be made to work but that requires working around all the ways MSFT doesn't comply with the LDAP standard. 7. Websites incompatible with mac: this is also an issue, sometimes. But, this is not an Apple-only issue -- this is more of MSFT's lockin strategy that makes it really easy to create websites that don't work with anything but IE. Given the relative security profiles of IE and Firefox, for example, I think we all should be concerned about this tendency to standards incompatibility from Redmon. In practice, we've found nothing we can't live without or work around. Finally, I believe it is our responsibility as stewards of our enterprises' technology to vote with the purse - we need to push back on our vendors' attempts to create lockin. The best way to do this is to support a diverse ecosystem and eschew monoculture. Using Macs in IT is workable and profitable. Find a niche that can tolerate the learning experience and justify the short-term ROI, then edge out from there. And enjoy the freedom that ensues.

Do I expect anyone to switch? Not hardly. Given the choice of using Excel on the Windows or Mac version, there is no question I would choose the Windows version (MS has something to do with both the operating system and the software). Given the choice of word processors (with multi-lingual RTL support) and page layout, there is no question I would choose on the Mac software. But with Macs, we can have the best of both worlds, using Windows natively as well as OS X.

[dasher108]

cool

[HannaPearson]

I use Mac because I can do all my graphic projects here. I can also do my programming jobs too without any problem.

[jacksena]

Well i am very happy to read your informative post which describe about Mac which is right i am also giving Mac support for solving all Mac issue, now you can safe your Mac system by taking Mac support.