In about two hours I have to present an argument for the purchase of $90,000 of new computers.

I have taken on the task of swaying to vote to PCs rather than Macs. As usual I have been given hours rather than days to get prepared, so I am asking for any insight/points you may have.

We have a diverse group of people here, and I would like to see what you have to say. Please share any experiences, points and opinons you have. (No "m4xintosh d0snt have EQ th3y suxxor" though)

For what sector? Business? Education? Graphic design?

I'll assume business/government use.

The most compelling argument?
Cost. Price PCs and their software and then price Macs.

Also, the software used in business and government is for the PC- so you can usualy email someone an Excel spreadsheet without having to do file conversion and be sure that they will be able to open and read it.

Bottom line:
For use as a work appliance, PCs are superior. Nobody needs huge bells and whistles- they need word processing, spreadsheets, email and maybe a presentation program. PCs offer all of these cheaply.

Government use. We're talking MS Office type apps. A small segment of photoshop etc.

TCO on Macs is a nightmare, and is going to be one of my biggest points. We learned it the hard way when we purchased $300,000 of iMacs, and now have about 50 percent operational.

Yes, TCO gets horrible on macs as you have to retrain support staff, replace parts (if you even CAN), buy new software, retrain people to USE the software, etc.

And we have not even TOUCHED the mobile segment.

1. Cost
2. Applications. Want to do something? The software will be available for the PC.
3. Support. PC support people are everywhere.
4. Compatibility. The rest of the world uses PC's.
5. Mac people don't like to admit it, but apps like Photoshop are the same on on PC's.
6. Standards. If these people are really government, there's a regulation somewhere saying they're supposed to use PC's.
7. Networking. What type of file servers do you have? Email servers? And what clients are going to work best with those?

TCO on Macs is a nightmare, and is going to be one of my biggest points. We learned it the hard way when we purchased $300,000 of iMacs, and now have about 50 percent operational.

You've given the best argument yourself.
Talk TCO and no manager will even think about mac's.

There only 2 situations where buying Macs makes a little sense:

Your primary business is Graphic Arts....and the apps you need run better or are only available on the Mac. Your base of users and support are Mac oriented.

or

You are in K12 eduacation and are in the same situation above with users and support staff.

The only good macs are in the form of G4 towers...which start at $1500 with a decent monitor. The lesser MAcs in our district, just don't hold up well (we spend something like 5 times as much on Mac repair as we do on Compaq). A Base PC (2.4ghz..more RAM than the above MAc with a 17" screen) comes in below a grand and performs at least as well for most uses.

BTW...I'm a former Apple System Engineer :o

You are in K12 eduacation

Unfortunately for Apple, not anymore. Apple's huge education discount are keeping them in this particular segment. Many kids already have exposure to PC's when they hit kindergarten, and middle/high school kids already have Kazaa, Winamp, and mp3 collections at home.

Depending on the number of users you need to supoport....

You could purchase 4 decent (Dell in this case) servers at $8,000 (hardware and OS Liscense, including Citrix Metaframe XP Subscription Advantage) each. Each supporting 35 or so users.

Purchase Wyse Winterm 1200 LE's for $300 each and the additonal Terminal Services Cal for $120 each.

Coming in at $88700 for 135 clients.

For the people you described. PC is the way to go.

TCO for Apples can be insane but can be built with 1 image across the board, thus easier to setup a build. Down side for mac's : Pricey, Retraining users how to find what they need. To get the most out of Mac's in a networking ability ******alk is recommended. Many network switches do not support ******alk and if you find one that can, you will have extremely noisy sub-nets.

erm why spend so much money on windows licenses ? get linux or freebsd for the servers (if there any needed) no matter if apple or intel platform and maybe stick with windows for the john smiths at their Pc who cant live without their windows minesweeper apps ..

After an extremely heated battle, I managed to have the Apple idea dumped. As usual overall cost was the winning factor.

You wouldn't believe the bullshit ignorance I had to go through.

The Mac fanatics started up with their whole "ease of use" debates and "lack of PC apps" one of them went and questioned why we need "such a complex network anyway" one even threatened to go back to using a pen and paper for everything.

Other gems of the 4 hour long battle were: "PC laptops dont support wireless!" "I don't want to use a text only computer!" "PCs don't let you play music like iTunes!"

were they like 10?

were they like 10?

no they are for

Government use.

Public servants I assume.

Nuff said.

The government spent $300,000 on iMacs? /sigh

You can learn about Macs here:

www.waveworks.net/mac.html (http://www.waveworks.net/mac.html)

#1 bit of infomation WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO BE USED FOR.

i am a PC fan and hate mac's but i know if you want easy multimedia editing macs out preform and the software is a lot cheaper.

video, sound, pictures all edit much better on the mac. i dont know why they just do, and make sure you get a good mac, i been hearing about issues with OS10 with some machines.

but i hate mc's with a passions if not using it for the 3 things..

#1 bit of infomation WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO BE USED FOR.

i am a PC fan and hate mac's but i know if you want easy multimedia editing macs out preform and the software is a lot cheaper.

video, sound, pictures all edit much better on the mac. i dont know why they just do, and make sure you get a good mac, i been hearing about issues with OS10 with some machines.

but i hate mc's with a passions if not using it for the 3 things..

Two reasons why they OutperformED Pcs was cause compared to other pcs, they had huge bandwidth in the FSB.

with the newer interations of the AMD and Pentiums/Motherboards this is no longer true.
Well built P4s outperform macs for multimedia applications.

That said, macs do offer one substantial advantage similar to what console game systems do.

Theres alot less "ifs" when writing programs for a mac, the systems are more or less standardized, and you only gotta compensate for 4 or 5 models as opposed to thousands of configirations.

I don't see why theres so much hate on either side, I can't speak for the new G5s and thier 64bit architechure though.
Well I hear plenty of good things, Ive yet to use or test one.

Each has thier strengths and weaknesses, and I should point out that well very slowly, apple's marketshare does continue to rise as years go by..

Im a Big PC advocate, though I'll most likley be buying a Mac when WoW gets closer to release.