The cost differential concern is interesting, though. A recent report (I’ll have to go back and try to remember my source on it and report it here) stated that people thought that the cost of a Mac was something like half again as much to double that of a PC (as you mention, Wayne), but the reality right now is that the desktop difference for like hardware is only an average of 16% more, and for laptops it’s only 9% more. Again, I really have to find the source for that though, because, if accurate, it raises a couple of interesting thoughts:

One, that the perception continues to be vastly different than the reality, and

Two – whether it’s true or false, it hasn’t stopped Apple from capturing 21% of the market in the U.S. (I believe it was 9% worldwide).

These two things almost seem like they should be contradictory, especially for Americans who seem to have the “Walmart” bargain-basement mentality about most things.

So what’s going on here? I can’t buy that it’s all about the Apple marketing and hype machine. That only get’s you so far. There has to be something else about the experience that is carrying the market further.

In the end, what’s interesting about the report Chris mentions, is that the figures are actually higher than I expected given that Apple really doesn’t put a lot of effort into playing in the enterprise space, yet they have 8% of enterprise purchasers planning to go with OS X? Again – it can’t be from hype – Apple doesn’t even really market to them, but there it is.

After 4 trips to the repair depot, I’ve almost given up on my Dell Inspiron. Dell just seems to have lost their way – and I am pretty sure they tripped up not only on quality – but by not offering fully configured hardware.

Remember how it used to be to buy a Dell?

It was damn near a “one click” experience. Dell rarely sold anything but beefy hardware.

At some point Dell started pushing this barebones crap. When I’d go to configure a machine advertised as $500 — it started to exceed $750 with just the bare minimum “upgrades” required to make it usable (memory, processor, disk size).

Fast forward to my recent MacBook Pro purchase (defection).

Upgraded the hard disk (the one area that I’m squeamish about swapping out in a laptop) — DONE.

No confusing or misleading configuration (and yes I paid about twice what I’d have paid for a Windows machine)….boy do I hate bait and switch stuff that Dell seems to have ridden to (brief) earnings glory for several years ….

When Windows came out with umpteen versions of Vista I just rolled my eyes. It was confusing to say the least. Then I started to get messages from my friends about how slow Vista was. How much the OS relied on very strong hardware.

If I knew that I could connect up effortlessly to my servers at work, I’d probably grab an iMac for my desktop. Heck, I may still do that.

With the Mac I have an OS that automatically backs up my data (Hello Windows – is that such a hard concept to grasp??).

Just like the iPhone came along and knocked every mobile phone on it’s ass with their far superior browser — leopard is waking up the competition.

I think Windows is too bloated and too far removed from anything innovative. We buy it as a commodity now. When the “Microsoft tax” gets too high – we start to look at options. That’s what people are doing now — nobody wants to keep paying taxes without feeling they are getting some service in return. That’s the lesson Microsoft needs to learn. I’m curious if they’ll learn that before it’s too late.

I did a parallel run of the two machines for 2 weeks and then dumped the T61! I only run the bare minimum of software in the XP environment and look for Mac solutions first before contemplating an XP one.