MvP
Ah, that dreaded topic: "Mac vs. PC"1. It's a debate that has raged on for my entire lifetime, all, I suspect, without a single debater being swayed by the other side's arguments.
Today, I ran across a synopsis of this argument. (Thanks to TUAW) which had some amusing features. First of all, it runs into what I consider to be a common difficulty of trying to compare all macintosh computers to all non-macintosh computer running Windows. The most noticeable effect of this is wild variation in claims about price; in my experience simplistic analyses tend to claim the Macs cost more, while those that actually compare a pair of computers which have been determined to have features as similar as possible, tend to find that the prices are far more comparable. It's like saying that "clearly, airplanes are more expensive than automobiles." Such a statement is not only false (some airplane do cost less to buy than some cars), but is also not very meaningful; after all, the capabilities of an airplane and a car are not particularly similar besides providing transportation.
A point the like of which I've never seen before is the claim that Macs cost more because Apple releases new versions of their operating system more often than Microsoft does. It's not much of a point, because Apple has not been know to hunt down customers and force them to buy the new OS. Sure, many choose to, but also many do not, usually because they don;t think the price is worth it. My brother uses an iBook running Mac OS 10.3.9, which consist only of free updates added onto the original OS 10.3 released in 2004. I used Panther myself for more than a year after its successor was out because I didn't feel like buying the new software2. While there's always pressure to upgrade when using an old OS, it's much less strong on the Macintosh platform. Much of this stems, I think, from the essential lack of a malware threat. Although my brother's laptop doesn't have all of the security features and fixes that mine does, it had few vulnerabilities to begin with, and those which remain are and were apparently ignored by the persons writing malicious software.
But, my very favorite thing about the entire AOL article was the poll attached to it. It asked: "What will your next computer be?" I answered 'Mac Laptop', because whenever in the future I need a new computer that's what I'll be saving up to get. Having done this I was able to view the results from all voters. I was surprised to see that fully 32% of respondents had agreed with me, and another 17% had answered 'Mac Desktop'. Now, I hardly think that this is a sign of a startling surge in Mac sales, rather, since I found the article linked from The Unofficial Apple Weblog i suspect that many others did as well, and it seems quite likely that a vast majority of readers of that site would want to buy Macintosh computers. Mostly I was just amused to see how skewed this poll result seems to be, but there is a more serious aspect of it: it may be less skewed than simple marketshare analyses suggest: Windows boxes are ubiquitous because they're what large corporations buy by the thousand to use aas workstations, but when individuals want to buy a computer to use at home, many are actually choosing a Mac.