What is it with this fetish of endless hardware tweaking among PC users? Some so-called high performance PCs remind me of those hyper-modified cars that are showpieces of technology but are hardly even driven because the engineering is so unstable.
Also, I think we have already reached the point of diminishing returns in all but the most demanding software. Sure, PhotoShop eats computers for lunch, but I've still got a Pentium 3 in my office with "only" 512MB of RAM that runs WinXP and MS Office2K like a champ. It also handles email and web surfing just as well as any nitro-cooled, 733t h4xx0r monstrosity you could find.
Sure, I've got a game computer "dragster" but it's a freak machine. I don't do serious work on it and if it blows up, I won't lose anything valuable. (I back up my config files and saved games routinely.)
A computer that is cheap and fast but also unstable and high-maintenance is not a good machine for important work.
Another thought: one of the editors of MacToday (Scott Kelby, I think) once made the point that when you browse the shelves of Mac books, they are almost entirely devoted to actually DOING things with your Mac. That your Mac is working properly is assumed.
The PC library, on the other hand, is chock full of diagnostic, repair and troubleshooting volumes. At least half the PC books at my local Borders' are devoted to the problem of PCs simply not working.
An observant eye will also notice how many of the top-selling PC software titles, year after year, deal with simply keeping the various versions of Windows running or negotiating hardware hassles.
Ask any computer support person how often they've had to respond to emergency calls for Macs constantly crashing or going haywire - even in a Mac-heavy environment. This might account for the MIS community's opposition to Macs; their very existence presumes offices filled with computers that need constant attention... look at a Mac office and, 99% of the time, you'll see some MIS guy reading Wired all day long and a layer of dust over his stack of "emergency recovery" disks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment