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Unread 28-07-2002, 16:32
DougHogg DougHogg is offline
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Macs found to be 36% cheaper to operate than PC's

Apple last year hired a market research group to conduct a survey at Melbourne University - which operates a mixed network with thousands of computers- to see how the costs of operating Mac's versus PC's worked out.

The Macs were found to be 36 percent less costly to operate.

Here is one link I found that gives the whole story:

http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...e15309,00.html

So if Macs are cheaper to operate, why are there more Windows machines in use.

Years ago (in the beginning...), Apple had the majority of the PC market with the Apple II, but then IBM stepped into the market with the original IBM PC, and took over the market. (The Apple III was a big failure. Besides, people knew that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM".)
Bill Gates made a deal with Apple to support the Mac (with Microsoft Word and Excel) in exchange for the rights to use aspects of the Mac OS, and he created Windows. (I recall reading somewhere, that Bill Gates originally wanted to help Apple to spread it's Mac OS to other platforms, but Apple didn't go for it. Too greedy I guess.)

So while Apple was still being very proprietory, new companies were starting up and whipping out PC clones left, right and center. IBM lost control of their own market. They tried to come out with a more proprietory version (with a patented Micro Channel Bus for plugging in perpherals) but it was too late. The PC world didn't need IBM any more. So here we are with a gazillion PC clones and only one Mac (although Apple did allow cloning agreements for a while.)

However now that all the new Macs use a version of Unix, it seems that Microsoft may become the odd man out. Of course only time will tell, but it appears that the Linux/Solaris crowd has much more in common with Mac OS X now than with Windows, and I suspect that we will see a lot of software being ported from the Unix world to the Mac. It's going to be interesting.
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