Some people look at numbers and think "Ah, thank goodness: cold hard facts." Me, I've been a bit distrustful of numbers ever since that whole "7 ate 9" business.
You see, numbers purport to be all objective and straightforward, but just like words, their meanings can be twisted and turned, interpreted to suit the agenda of whoever's holding their leash.
Take, for example, this recent report (PDF link) by frequently-quoted analyst Roger L. Kay, the President of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "What Price Cool?" sets out to discover the "hidden costs" of owning Macs versus owning Windows PCs - but you don't need to flip to the end of the 10-page report to tell how it's going to end.
Spoiler: Windows PCs are cheaper! It's right there on page one, where it reads "Sponsor: Microsoft."
The Redmond-based software giant has recently gone to great lengths to point out Windows machines' inherent superiority, attempting to dispell the perceived "coolness" of Macs and denigrate their performance. So it's hardly shocking to find that this report retreads the same ground whilst applying a thin patina of carefully selected "facts."
The meat of the piece is the last three pages which feature the "realistic point of view" of a hypothetical family of four, including two charts that line up the prices of building what are supposedly comparable Windows PC and Mac systems. The hypothetical dad's spreadsheet examines the differences in cost over five years and - amazingly - concludes that buying Macs will be a mind-boggling $3,330 more expensive.
There are a few flaws here - okay, there are several flaws here, and to pick them apart one-by-one would only be redundant, repetitive, and redundant, but let's take a look at just a few of them to get the idea.
For one thing, the report repeats the age-old fallacy that once you buy into a Mac you have to buy into the whole Apple ecosystem, despite the fact that we largely left that world behind around the time that people were wondering who precisely had let the dogs out.
For example, Kay budgets $150 per year for Apple's MobileMe service - that being the price of the MobileMe family pack, which supports up to five users.
But you don't need MobileMe - Kay says it's for backup and file sync, both of which can be accomplished with free technologies provided by Apple and others. Heck, the Windows Live Mesh that Kay touts even runs on a Mac. But similar third-party syncing services like Dropbox work well too.
And, for backup, every Mac comes with Time Machine built-in. Look, I just saved the hypothetical family a hypothetical $750 - hypothetically, of course. Kay also insists, for some reason, that the family buy an AirPort Extreme router for $180 instead of the $150 Linksys Wireless N router that he budgeted for the PCs, despite the fact that the Mac and Linksys routers are interoperable.
You could save another $30 (or - and I know this is going out on a limb - you could spend the extra $30 to buy the AirPort Extreme for the PC side because it's a better product. Hey, it's an option).
Here's another wacky choice: Kay suggests the family will want add Blu-ray capability (which, it's true, is not currently supported by OS X) to the desktop system in year four. He budgets $95 for a Lite-On internal drive for the PC and $300 for an external Sony Blu-ray drive for the Mac.
Never mind that, as they've chosen the extremely expandable Mac Pro, they could easily upgrade the computer with that same internal Blu-ray drive (presuming, of course, that four years from now, Apple's added Blu-ray support to OS X - if not, that Sony player won't be much more useful anyway). Knock off another $205.
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