Cheese Danish -
I meant parallel in the literal sense, not in the software sense.
OK, I am just going to explain the business models and what you get when you buy or build a PC versus what you get when you buy a Mac.
The Apple Business model-
This is much like the Asian car business models. For years the Asian car market has slowly taken over US sales. This is because they are known to make a very reliable car. Sure you can get a Chevy with a V6 or V8 and it will have more horse power than say your 4 banger Honda Civic, however the cars are engineered different and you are getting a different product due to a different business model. One of the main reasons Asian cars are so successful at having a good reputation for being well built and long lasting is that when they design new models every year, they only are allowed to make a few major engineering changes. Everything else is only allowed to be tweaked. This allows for them to only make 2 or 3 major changes and work it in slowly and methodically reducing the amount of recalls and failures of their product.
Apple does almost the same thing. First off they keep it simple, they have three models of desktops and three models of laptops. 6 models total. Each model every new version gets upgraded but not overhauled and they keep the major engineering changes to a minimum. This allows for them to have more quality control over their product. Remember that Apple builds a system from the ground up. They design the OS and they design the hardware, which only a few companies do. IBM and SUN are the other two that come to mind. Everyone else, buys components from other companies and just assembles them, or they send their circuit board to design (like if they are a mobo company like Asus) to another company and have them make it.
So, Apple slowly builds quality systems that are engineered from the ground up. They factor in all kinds of features that are not needed per se, but come in handy. The ambient light sensor I thought was a joke, and that was until I traveled with my MBP on a plane. When the lights dimmed on the plane my keyboard lit up automatically and my screen adjusted brightness so I could see better.
Apple's overall business model is to keep it simple and keep the quality of the machine to a maximum. Efficiency does equate to performance and time and time again it proves to be more about efficiency sometimes over what the performance is. Do you want to spend 25 minutes drilling through sub menus to find one feature of an OS or an Application, or do you want it to be simple and just work?
Once you get out into the real world and stop using your computer for just games and start to do actual work, you will find the work flow on Macs very efficient, and they are engineered that way. They dump time, money, and research and development into this quality. I mean with Expose, Spaces, and a third party app called QuickSilver, I can navigate through my Mac at lightning speed and I can do like 5 tasks at work at the same time. I assign each desktop a task. Desktop 1 is email/web, Desktop 2 is remote desktop, server and remote utilities, Desktop 3 is for all my terminal sessions, and desktop 4 is my text editor and sticky notes. I know where everything is and I can multi task at a level of efficiency that I can not find in any other OS. The only thing that comes close is compiz-fusion since you can customize it the same way, but it is not as simple as OS X makes it.
So when you buy into the Apple business model that is what you are getting. That is how they run their company and that is the product they are selling which is worth what they sell them for. Many people won't appreciate that until they have to do heavy work on a Mac and they see the benefits. Some people switch and are hooked instantly, while others may never use the Mac to it's potential and just don't see the point. Part of it is definitely personal preference.
Now the Microsoft business model is different. Microsoft focuses on massive amounts of deployments. Wide ranges of compatibility with hardware, and with extensive legacy support. Apple does not really focus on legacy support as much as MS and with an MS product, it really is the only OS out there that has that much backwards compatibility. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Yes, it is good because it saves both consumers and businesses money, they don't have to buy a new copy of MS office to run on Vista, they can still use their 4 year old copy of MS office. That is great because it saves the consumer money. However, when MS is forced to keep legacy code in their OS to support legacy software it does cause a sort of software bloat, and a lot of times that causes a software performance hit.
Since MS has to develop for such a wide range of products they leave it up to their third party developers to use their SDKs and develop drivers and applications. This gives the consumer more choices like you all have pointed out, but this also allows for developers to make sloppy and crappy products. MS doesn't regulate it at all like Apple does. They say, here is the SDK make your product and pay us the money for the rights to make it a Windows product. It is kind of like the wild west so to speak. Until recently when MS did digital driver signing and stuff like that, but even then they charge companies for that and some companies don't want to pay MS the fee for that.
Then you have the PC companies that make PC parts or whole computers and their business model is to just assemble or provide parts for, the latest hardware/software. Which is nice because you typically get the newest tech, but sometimes that means you also are beta testing an actual retail part or product. I have had brand new pieces of hardware run like absolute crap until the driver got updated, or programs that are suppose to run but filled with tons of bugs. You get more choices but you get less quality control because Microsoft does not make computers, they just make an OS and they make their OS to a very broad range.
I am not saying you can't have or make a PC run fast, but I am saying the business model does not allow for it since it is hardly regulated. You run the risk of having your machine run great and then having an update crash it, or a new driver actually make it perform slower. This is because no PC or hardware company out there can possibly test every single configuration of hardware/OS out there in the PC world. There are just too many combinations and too many different models. Apple has 6 computers they make and sell, PCs have I don't even know what to guess here, 1,000s of combinations of models and builds?
I built my first PC when I was like 15 (back in 1995 to show how old I am) and then started working in IT at 18. I loved how you could build and customize a PC and I was a hardcore PC fan, and a gamer back then. I do not game as much as I used to. I got into Linux in the late 90s and at my first IT job we had to support Macs. I hated the classic OS on Apple, but since I worked on them I knew how it worked. Basically, long story short, our Apple guy quit and my boss says there is no such thing as an Apple guy anymore here in our department. Everyone is now both PC and Apple he said. So that is how I got into them. Then Apple went out and bought NEXT for their new OS and OS X came out. Over those years of supporting them and already having a Linux background somewhat I slowly started to find myself using the Mac platform more. It took me a good 5 years to actual learn that is Apple's business model. I also then realized it is hard to put a price on that. How do you justify buying a BMW over a Volkswagen? They have almost all the same parts, both hail from Germany, yet one costs double over the other, so how do you justify it? There are reasons too, BMWs do have a higher degree of engineering in them.
So, really when you buy a Mac you are getting more than just hardware and an OS. It is a whole package deal and that is Apple's business model for them. When you buy a PC you are getting pretty much diversity and buying power of choosing everything you want, but it is at your own risk and support may not be as good. That is their business model. Computers are more than just hardware specs when you get down into it. I have seen machines that ran dual processors and still ran like crap due to shotty software or bad drivers. The quality control is less because it is not regulated.
I do think that technology is getting better and some of these software problems are getting less and less, but then again sometimes developers get lazy and just put out a crap product. Even respected ones slip up sometimes.
