Andrew Kolakowski wrote:You ned to give it few years. PCs are difficult to maintain: remote management, install/configure software like Adobe etc. I know that company where I worked would not waste money on Macs only because they are shiny and look nice
This wasn't exactly a new shop... it's been around a long time.
VA Tech bought a Mac cluster over a Dell once. It was pretty clearly a PR stunt by Apple, though it ended up backfiring because it didn't even work due to not having ECC support.
The cluster had 1100 G5 macs. That's 4 DIMMs per mac, and when you analyse the probability of a memory error for that many DIMMs, it works out to an average of one per hour... which makes a large 2-3 day distributed simulation run a non-starter; you have run 3 to make sure that you have ONE good. Bad move on VA Tech's part.
But there's more! A lot more.
Apple's price included just the computers.
Dell's significantly higher price also included building out the power and network infrastructures, on site support for five years, and an upgrade involving additional compute nodes during that five year period (it was one upgrade, I think).
So Apple's seemingly lower price wasn't actually a winner, on top of needing a full replacement after Apple implemented ECC support.
What I've gathered from the IT staff over the years is that the support burden in terms of work is basically the same when you account for how many of them there are to support, but the costs are higher because everything Apple-related costs more... so the costs overall end up being higher.