From: jess@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Jess M Holle)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: RE-MACS COST TOO MUCH (NOT!)
Date: 2 Sep 92 22:57:58 GMT
Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network

This is truly a worn out subject, BUT since I had a related personal 
experience last night, I couldn't resist posting.

I have a friend who I tried very hard to talk into a Mac purchase, but
he kept on saying "But I can get a 486 with a NNN MB HD for less than
the machine you are pushing." (Okay not an exact quote, but close).
Keep in mind that I am not personally selling Macs and that since he is
a student he could have gotten approx. 40% off MRP without ANY bother.

He got his 486 a couple of days back.  Last night I (a Mac guru, but not
TOO shabby at DOS or Windows stuff) spent a couple of hours helping him
install programs copy files onto his drive, etc.  He had previously been
unable to get any of this stuff working by himself.  The only thing that
he didn't have trouble with was installing Windows itself.

After all that time, he admitted that he probably would be much happier
with a somewhat slower computer for the same money if he could actually
use and understand it.  He now wishes he would have bought a Mac (in his
own words, or paraphrased from them rather).  He kept mentioning that the
salesman had said that he would probably never need to look at the manual
and he should have everything set up in no time.

In his case, a 486 supplies unnecessary power (unless it is wasted on the
inefficiencies of Window's GUI).  An '030 Mac (say a IIsi for arguements
sake) would provide a smooth GUI with a speed ROUGHLY on par with a 486 
(as far as computationally unintensive graphic interface only, I'm not 
talking raytracing here).  For the word processing, spreadsheet work, and 
drawing that he is doing an '030 Mac would be quite adequate (and much 
cheaper than the 486 system that he bought).

This particular friend is a business major, but I had a similar experience
a couple months before that with an aeronautical engineering major.  He
had less trouble grasping the overall system, BUT he was not unscathed by
his PC.  He spent two entire days (in a very busy part of the semester) 
trying to figure out a mess with his COM ports, his IRQs, and a variety 
of other .SYS and .COM files to get his two modems and his mouse to
coexist.  A PC-"expert" and I also wasted much of those two days on the
problem.  Some time later, his computer completely forgot it had a hard 
drive (all initial attempts at getting it to recognize it failed).  This 
required a call to the dealer of this particular brand of clone to get a 
bunch of settings over the phone and over a day out of 3 people's lives.

Cheap PC's are filled with costs (and frustations).  The learning curve 
is very steep (compared to a Mac, esp. since you MUST learn a fair 
dabbling of DOS even with WINDOWS) and the necessity of diving into 
interrupt settings and .COM/.SYS files and device tables whenever 
something goes wrong wastes many man-days on supporting computers that 
should be spent using them.

For those of you who are about to say that OS/2 will solve all of these
problems, I have two things to say:

 (1)  Very few new PC owners start off with OS/2, since clone dealers 
      don't push it and market inertia isn't pushing people in that 
      direction (instead it FORCES them to deal with DOS and pushes 
      them at Windows to solve all of DOS's shortcomings).  Also, many new
      PC users get PC's partially because they are afraid of the unknown
      and they don't know anything about OS/2 (not all PC users just
      many), therefore they don't even consider it as an option.

 (2)  I hope so for my friend's sake, because he is considering getting 
      it soon and he expects it to solve all of his problems and to "work
      just like a Mac."  Considering his difficulties with setting up
      Windows and DOS programs, for his sake I also hope that it is VERY 
      easy to set up.

Just my 2 (or perhaps less than that) cents worth,

Jess Holle
Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student in
Computer Aided Design
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc