OT Hi, Bruce. Re: For the cost of another power Book, you could build a Terminator with 4 monitors and join the real computer world
Bruce, I welcome your thoughts and I'm sure you're right about this. I don't even know what a Terminator is (I assume it's a very fast Windows box). Everyone has a situation which for him/her works best. For you, I suppose it's a Terminator, or something quite technologically sophisticated. More power <g> to you.
Otoh, I have thought about this subject often, and my argument for PowerBook as best solution for me has several parts:
1) Everything I need is always right there with me. I don't need to duplicate or transfer information. I don't need to set up or access web accounts to obtain my own info. I use the same machine wherever I am. The 2nd time I make $1000 or $1500 on a trade because I had immediate access to something, the Book has paid me its own purchase price. I think this has already happened a few times <vbg>
2) I don't have to spend my time on setup/programming/misc computer-related stuff. My time is valuable. Running a Mac, I needn't spend time thinking about (and acting on) things like buying and installing graphics hardware, doing software set-ups, writing my own scripts (been there done that), viruses and worms, setting up and running security software, blue screens of death, patches, cascading pop-ups, indecipherable error messages, dll files, OS reboots (I've run OSX approx 1 yr - to date 1 hang, 0 crashes), etc. In the Mac world, these things just generally don't happen
3) I don't have to deal with Microsoft's annoying personality traits and user abuse. Do I pay (in Mac inflexibility) vs Windows or Linux? Certainly vs Linux I do; my geeky friends keep trying to sell me Linux' flexibility - I tell them I haven't time to learn and do everything myself. vs Windows, I'm not so sure. I used W2002 Pro for about 6 months last year on a contract project. While it had a few features that would be nice to transfer to Mac, for the most part I found the new Windows to be cranky, inflexible (eg cleaning the crap off the desktop is not allowed), slower than Mac in some functions despite faster hardware, tediously complicated, and as non-intuitive as ever.
The flip side of Mac's inflexibility is that, once you know Mac, almost everything you need in daily life is very fast and smooth, and the learning curve for everything related to it is short and shallow.
Conclusion (for me, that is, ymmv): a few extra bucks spent on hardware at the front end is well worth the time and money saved over the duration. It's about total cost of ownership.
I also visited here: http://iscs.us/xvsxp/ and found my weighted preferences gave OSX an even larger differential (~1.17 v ~1.12) over XP Pro (who would bother with "Home Edition"?) than the "final-score" unweighted differential. To each his own, of course, and the results reported by these sites are obviously subject to the biases of those who built them.
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