They're still making money hand over fist despite having a lame duck OS and one of the worst economies in decades. Their revenue increased by $10 billion and had profits of $3.5 billion.

I really wish that people would look at these numbers before declaring doom and gloom for Microsoft. The market isn't exactly running screaming from Microsoft as some would hope.

All of these columnists miss the point -- OS X and Linux won't sell for exact same reason that Vista doesn't.

Huh?

Big tin: IT infrastructure used by organisations to run their businesses.

So, I think this final sentence needs translation. For "Apple's business model", substitute "Apple's business model, which involves not caring much about the low-margin, high-grief corporate IT hardware business." And, for "contempt for its users", substitute "contempt for the people running corporate IT departments". (Remember, IT doesn't care about the people who type on the computers. It's the people who set up the computers who are the primary "users".)

I'm sure it really does suck to try and maintain Macs in a Windows-centric corporate environment. But it's not as if corporate IT has anyone but themselves to blame. They turned away from Apple in the early 1980s and have never really looked back until now. Apple has learned to survive without their business and now has no real incentive to become the next Microsoft. Somebody else needs to step up and do that.

Low-margin? I used to work at a large bank, and I recall Dell charged them some £25 for a plain USB optical mouse with just 2 buttons and a mouse-wheel. I'm sure many businesses could do with these kinds of margins.

Other questions to put this anecdote in perspective: Was that a list price or the result of a negotiation? What were the competing products in the UK at the time, and why would a bank choose Dell if those products where significantly cheaper?

There were plenty of competing products in the UK - I could have had a better mouse for cheaper by wandering down to PC World, down the road, and paying £10. But the corporate ordering process didn't allow me to get involved in that - all I could do was express the fact that I needed a mouse with a wheel.

Well, there you have it. If you are Dell and you secure that exclusive deal, you get to charge high margins on certain incidental products.

Of course, as has been pointed out by olefoo, to get a deal like that Dell probably had to give up a lot of margin on other products. And throw in support contracts, and expend a lot of sales time...

His comment said nothing of the kind.

For many years Macs have been portrayed as "cool", with all the "Mac vs Pc" adverts as well as the indirect appeal from the iPod / iTunes advertising.

Microsoft have been quite clever at counteracting this in the new adverts this in my opinion. In their adverts, they're gently nudging the idea that Macs are one step up from cool; the implication is "Macs are elitist" owing to the price differences making a purchase by "real-life people" imposible. Once this implication gets through to the majority of people, this starts to kill the trendiness factor.

Or am I over-analysing it?

For >20 years now, I've just been in the habit of preferring the odd-numbered versions, and assuming that the even-numbered versions were meant as incubators for the next major shift (most recently, from 32 to 64 bit computing). At first I thought this was due to ham-handedness at MS, but nowadays I wonder if it isn't the actual strategy - the pattern has repeated so many times now, perhaps it's because it actually works for MS. Notice how aggressive advertising on Vista's behalf only began last year as W7 was going into beta.

Thus, I predict that Windows 8 will require a minimum of 2 cores, 16gb of RAM and a 1gb Graphics card, leverage virtualization technology for application switching and be decried as a hugely inefficient and pointless attempt to recycle server solutions onto the desktop for no good reason. When Windows 9 emerges, there will be many headlines of the 'Microsoft desperately needs to recover from the disaster that was Windows 8...' variety.

There is a huge barrier for enterprises to move to OS X, it is locked into Mac hardware.

Macs are extremely overpriced as compared to their PC counterparts: 30% - 50% more!

So for cost conscious enterprises, when they compare between the cost of upgrading to Windows 7 (which has had good reviews so far) with cost of buying new Apple hardware and OS X, Windows 7 turns out to be the winner.

Do you have any analysis, or are you just spreading old FUD?

Here's a 2006 link finding that a Mac Pro was cheaper than a comparably equipped Dell of the time. (Though, as you can see, you can spend all day arguing about what "comparable" means.)

http://www.macworld.com/article/52540/2006/08/dellmacprofoll...

Here's a 2007 Computerworld analysis:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...

Of course, the difference is that Apple simply stays out of low-margin markets. So it's definitely possible to get a box with "PC" stamped on it for much less money than the cost of any new Mac. The most conspicuous current example of a market which Apple does not deign to enter is the netbook market.

Also have no intention for starting PC brand war here. One can go visit a PC vendor's web site (say, dell) look at the notebook/desktop/workstation hardware configuration and prices and then compare with what one can find on say, Apple Store.

This year, I recently purchased a gateway laptop: http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668231.php

(17" HD display, 64 bit Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 2.26 GHz CPU, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 320 GB 7200 rpm hard disk, NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GTS Graphics with 1GB of GDDR3 Discrete Video Memory).

I got this for $1270 after tax. For the same amount of money I also bought a Macbook: http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html (13.3" display, Intel Core 2 Duo CPU 2.0 GHz, 2 GB DDR3 RAM, 160 GB 5400 rpm hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory).

I would like to point out that I love both of these notebooks. I would give Apple extra points for build quality, fit & finish and better user experience. That said, one can very well see, item-by-item, how do the technical specs compare between the two mentioned here.

When a for profit company has to make a decision, cost of purchase becomes a big factor and that is the only point I am trying to make here.

We might not be "Enterprise" yet but it works well for us.

Macs may seem more expensive up front but the cost of buying the machine is not its whole cost. Total cost of ownership is important. Downtime for highly paid employees is just as bad if its their desktop as if it is a server.

Mac's have fewer problems and have fewer downtime. Over 3 years we've never had a Mac desktop go down. I can't imagine a similar statement coming from a similar sized business running Windows.

In past 10 yrs I have used Unix (Solaris, IRIX, Linux and OS X on x86) as well as Windows (XP & Vista) and have never had downtime on any of those, except for explicit and deliberate OS patches/upgrades' installation time.

I have come to believe that the computer downtime is usually a function of the hardware, people managing the infrastructure and sometimes, the users.

To me it seems the article is only talking about trends and survey results, is not espousing any particular "Apple Love" and is not aiming to delve into the mechanics of how Apple is bettering its brand -- its merely making observation.

Your comment to Apple lovers really applies to Linux as well, so I'm not sure why you need to make the distinction.

I guess corporate users would generally move their desktops (either to the next version, or to something else) because they feel it creates extra value (maybe better stability, easier management or whatever), and this outweighs the cost of the change. Or, from fear that if they don't keep up, in future they may be stuck with a larger problem.

Corporate desktops that are sticking to XP aren't moving anywhere; not even to Vista/7. Obviously nobody is creating sufficient incremental value - yet. Thus, one really can infer nothing as to where they might end up migrating down the road.

Lack of "proper exchange client" or "advanced active directory features" (?) also probably doesn't mean much -- its not as if anyone has the "One True Way (tm)" of doing email, scheduling or ldap. Corps do walk away from Exchange/AD (or any other technology for that matter) if sufficient value is added overall.

I never had a problem connecting the computers, the biggest problem was that file types weren't compatible. However, with any incomparability problems I just went the old fashioned way of RTF and CSV to get the job done.

For everything else, well there's always Boot Camp.

You're on a web site for a company headed by a notorious Macbook Air user.

To italicize, use astericks.

I don't know why the word "how" was stretched out to awful proportions.

A carot for a nose is just silly.

The word "kidiot" is worse than the word "luser".