Each passing day brings more people purchasing iPods and iPhones. People seeing increasing numbers of friends sporting those sleek silver laptops. Most of those people eventually ponder whether a Mac might be right for them as well. After discussions of security, stability, efficiency, and user friendliness follows the inevitable deal maker/deal breaker: money.
Despite deciding that a Mac is more secure, stable, efficient, and friendly than a PC, a lot of people pass them up over the price tag. “Macs are just too expensive,” they say. “Think again,” I say. Your decision between a Mac and a PC should not be about the price difference — it should be about the cost difference.
Cost involves more than just money
Rather than simply considering the digits on a computer’s price tag, factor them into the overall cost of using that computer over its lifetime. Ask yourself this question: a week, a month, a year after you have charged the price of that computer, what is the single largest factor that will continue contributing to its cost? The answers is your time. Time is money.
A computer that is more secure and stable saves you the time and money that would be spent on the software and IT manpower required to deal with viruses, spyware, trojans, other malware, and system failures. Whether you can pick up the phone call call your organization’s IT help desk, or you must open your door to a stranger from some retail giant’s home repair service, you have lost time that would have been better spent getting things done.
A computer that is more friendly and efficient works with you to get things done, saving you valuable time in the long run. The less time you spend fiddling with system settings, looking for buttons and menus, and dealing poor interfaces built by people who think design only about flashy colors and graphics, the more time you can spend writing your book, blogging, hammering out code, or constructing a killer presentation.
But what about those über-cheap PCs?
Still hung on dollars, eh? An old adage comes to mind. You know which one I’m talking about. “You get what you pay for.” Top-of-the-line hardware does not come in bargain-priced computers. Considering that it is not unheard-of for some people to get a new computer every two or three years, and considering how fast technology advances, how long do you think it might be before it’s time to upgrade or replace that bargain machine?
I dropped $2,000.00 on a PowerBook G4 in October of ’04 — a lot of money for this then-college student. But what has that PowerBook cost me in the long run? Not a whole lot. Over the past four years I have edited hundreds of photos, blogged thousands of words, and written hundreds of thousands of lines of code on a laptop that has probably cost me less than 24 hours in maintenance and downtime. I am still using my Powerbook to this day, and it has never had a major hardware failure, I have never lost a file, and I have never formatted its hard drive. I call that “getting my money’s worth.”
