The bottom line is that you have to look beyond the pure physical parts to judge
It's intangibles like that which people need to measure and evaluate. Unfortunately, many people I know, don't do that and they end up getting a Wintel machine which they now are regretting.
The real bottom line as demonstrated by Alomex, and Pinza, and all is that there is no quantifiable difference dollar for dollar to the inexperienced or uninformed EXCEPT processor speed. You experts cannot even agree that a compareable machine exists. You've got an 800Mhz machine going against a 1600Mhz machine notwithstanding the differences in AltaVec or DDR/Rambus Ram. So the real bottom line is that most people, after comparing, will be utterly confused and will buy the Wintel machine because of fear or because Wintel is what they use at work or processor speed or ignorance. Even if they do regret buying the Wintel machine they will buy another because the hassle of learning a poor interface was enough for them, they dread learning another interface even if it's a better interface, so they will stick with the known.
I just taught my mom how to back up a word file on a floppy using WindowsME (Bizzare, no duplicate command). She hates learning even rudimentary stuff like that. You guys forget that.
It doesn't matter what the truth is to sales, it only matters what is the perceived truth.
Many people will buy the iMacs though, it's a real nice machine for people who want to do hobby video editing, and basic computer work, or people who value how it looks. But it's probably not enough to influence market share much. That can only be influenced now by businesses adopting OSX. OSX is our great digital hope. Converting Windows users by hardware cost/quality is a dead dream. Only, if and when people use OSX routinely at work they will consider crossing over to Macs. (Unless of course there is a huge breakthrough in PPC speeds, which seems unlikely, and even then it won't be enough without OSX.)
At least IMHO. |
