Hardware costs holding CIOs back from Mac
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Microsoft’s Vista rollout costs have CIOs blanching at the cost. But much as they love OS X, a Mac revolution may not be on tap.
The prospect of bringing a multitude of enterprise PCs up to Vista specifications has budget-minded executives longing for another choice, preferably one from Cupertino. These execs still have the perception that Mac hardware costs more than its Windows PC equivalents:
But Gavin Whatrup, group IT director at marketing agency Creston, said the cost of Apple hardware is still a barrier preventing more widespread deployment of Macs.
He said: “With a mid-range Mac still being approximately 33 per cent more expensive than its Dell equivalent, don’t expect a mass migration to the Mac any time soon. OS X may be improving but it still has a long way to go to be as heterogeneously robust as Windows XP.”
I would think robustness depends on the specific applications an enterprise needs running in its cube farms. Not word processing or spreadsheets, obviously, but the hardcore business-specific stuff that probably wouldn’t run well in emulation.
A 20-inch iMac with a base configuration of 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2×512, and 250GB Serial ATA Drive lists at $1,499 on Apple’s website.
A Dell OptiPlex small form factor 745 model with Vista Business, Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6400 (2.13GHz, 2M, 1066MHz FSB), 1.0GB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM, 667MHz, (2DIMM, note Dell recommends 2.0GB for Vista), 128MB ATI Radeon X1300, plus a Dell 20 inch UltraSharp 2007FPW Widescreen, Adjustable Stand, VGA/DVI comes to $1,305.
But this Dell lacks an optical drive, where the iMac arrives with its SuperDrive 8x. Another $89 adds the 8X SlimDVD+/-RW Roxio™DellEdition, Cyberlink for VistaHomeBasic/Business, kicking the total to $1,374.
If we go with Dell’s recommended 2.0GB of RAM instead of the 1.0GB minimum to run Vista, and a prudent IT department would want the extra RAM, the Dell price tag hits $1,458.
Enterprises don’t buy their PCs this way, of course. They pick the least expensive choice to run their applications. But if we’re going to compare cost, it’s only fair to Apple to make an apples to Apples comparison.
Via Silicon.com
July 13th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
A research scientist at work used to work for Raytheon. He said they did a study on Macs vs. PCs in their company and found the Mac significant’ly less expensive when the considered maintenance costs. Now that Macs don’t cost much more or cost less for equivalent PCs (especially in the laptop space) there really is no excuse to not switch to Macs based on long-term benefits of doing so.
But who in the business world thinks in terms of further out than the next quarter?