Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Jim is Jim]

Tex: here's one data point re: LINUX deployment... our company is considering switching to all open source because we really don't like what Vista has broken in the systems we ship (one of our main products is basically a lot of deepwater, subsea monitoring systems that use all manner of sensors, acceleromters and inclinometers, radar, sonar, etc. feeding data to a PC for processing and display)... we are still shipping our systems with XP Pro and specifically tell clients our stuff will not work running on Vista...

This summer we have to decide, and at this point, our IT manager says he is favoring open source *NIX of some sort.

We are definitely NOT upgrading the computers we use in the office to Vista -- at least not any time soon... we bought a few new computers for new hires lately and downgraded them to XP Pro and Office 2003 because of all sorts of problems with Office 2007 and the new .docx file format... it is pizzing a lot of our senior people off, not to mention those of use in the trenches...

So maybe you are right about switching momentum... after all, my boss, the VP of Eng. uses a mac (was the only one for a couple of years), but now our head naval architect just bought a MBP and also a black MB and loves both, so who knows... my boss knows that I'd prefer to get a nice new Mac Pro with dual quad cores to replace my Dull, which even he says is too poky for me to use (but the IT mngr says first he's going to double my RAM to see if that helps

It helped that my boss used my Dull one night after I'd left to .pdf some stuff because he hadn't installed the new Acrobat Pro on his mac yet and he whined about how slow my Dull is (this after I'd been whining to him about it for months -- esp. when I run Illustrator alongside a large, complex Word document... takes forever to launch Illustrator on this Dull...

Jim