Closing the door on Vista

Umm no Macs hold waaaaay more value then lets say a dell inspiron.

 

It is cause the used Mac market is a sellers market.

 

Desperation leads to delusion.

 

Qtf^^^^^^^

 

Who's going to use any laptop after 5-6 yrs?

 

Touche.

10 char

 

I now know why Apple is coming up with more "Mac vs PC" commercials .

 

Wow, you are just on a roll.

 

People forget to look at the returns sometimes. Say if you buy a MBP for £1,629 and use it for a couple of months and sell it when Apple refresh their line up. If you try and sell that notebook on Ebay you might get £900 for it and closer to £1,000 if you are lucky.
This is the price that they tend to go for. If you sell it later on you will get even less of a return for your money.

I bought a MBP and the rrp was over £1,700 and a few months down the line when a new model came out i tried to sell it. I would have taken quite a hit as i was getting offered i think in the region of £900-£1,000 for it. I didn't sell it for that as the price i was being offered was not acceptable to me.


If you was to buy a Dell M1530 say from Dell for £800 you will at least get half your money back so you will have lost £400 whereas you could stand to lose more if you buy a more expensive computer. With the MB's you will get a better return as they are cheaper.

Edited to add:
Here are some past completed listings on Ebay. I think that the PPC Macs had a better resale value in there day than these Intel Macs do.

This had an rrp of £1,600 a few months back.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/APPLE-MACBOOK...yZ141177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This had an rrp of £1,800 less than a year ago.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/MacBook-Pro_W...yZ141177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This also had an rrp of £1,600+ at the time of release it is less than a year old.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Apple-Macbook...yZ141177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This is the latest model that is still being for £1,700+ because of the HD upgrade and they probably upgraded the ram themselves.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Apple-Macbook...yZ141177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This had a value of £1,600+ a year and a half ago.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/15-Macbook-Pr...yZ141177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Macbook-Pro-1...yZ141177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

This laptop is a previous gen Sony FZ that had a retail price of £1,199.
It sold for £630 which got about the same return as the laptops above.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Sony-VAIO-FZ2...goryZ177QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

I hadn't realized what a big issue it was either. The two links in my sig show that this is a growing sentiment.

 

Apple isn't the threat to Microsoft. HP and IBM, while are some of Microsoft's biggest customers, happen to also be Microsoft's biggest threats.

Microsoft isn't threated by consumer market products. It's the cellphone and the productivity market where they are most threatened. As cellphones get smaller and more powerful, they threaten to cut into the laptop and computer market. While they will never replace it, people will carry around at least one and another (PC and Laptop). So ya, the Iphone is making Microsoft up at night. But currently, nothing comes even close to challenging Office.

The server market is where the money is at though. All it takes is HP or IBM to cut into the Server 2003 market and Microsoft is toast.

 

Nobody on this forum because you guys are all geeks but the average computer user (which is the majority) keeps their desktops and lappys around for many years just for web surfing and email which is what most people do with the most recent lappys today.

 

I think that most people keep their computers for an average of 3-4 years not 5-6 years.

 

My current computer is from the fall of 2003, so that's 4.5 years

 

On my desk is:

an Inspiron600m from 2002

a Dell XPS desktop from 2005

a MBP from 2008

I should really get around to re-formatting the earlier two and donating them away

 

My dad still uses a gateway he got 10 years ago. So yeah. It was running Windows 98 when we got it. Now its running 2000.

 

Is it usable?

 

Oh hell yeah. He still uses it. We had problems but nothing major you know.

 

I salute you for putting up with that computer. We had our old XT for years before we sold it at a garage sale. It had a 5.25 floppy, 10MB harddrive (That was SOOO rare to see on an XT), and 1MB of EXPANDED memory (gah, does anyone even know what that is?). I should of kept it for nostalgia.

 

Vista's problem is that its main purpose was to raise the price of Windows. The only way a monopolist can increase revenue is to raise prices, after all. The other problem is the utter lack of ideas at Microsoft. Maybe it's because they don't need to be creative - Windows will sell either way. Maybe it's something else, I don't know. But it's a fact.

Vista was a big part of the reason I went back to Mac OS X. I tried Vista (not going by what anyone was saying), it was horrible. Not because of resource use, I knew they were going to fix that - though even that seems to take a while - but because of usability issues. Everything, every everyday task in Vista takes more clicks than in XP. More dialog windows, more text to read, more buttons to click. That's bad - very bad. It's not something that would be fixed easily either because this problem is

I still wanted a modern OS, so I tried ubuntu, it was still good old linux - I still had to use a text editor to edit some config file to make it work with my graphics card. Party like it's 1999! Deja vu all over again!

OS X Leopard then introduced some neat new things that were not only new (no shortage of new stuff in Vista) but also a decided improvement over 10.4.

 

Ahh, for old times sake, I dug up some old XP articles.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,73843-page,1/article.html

http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/techtest/ml102501.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=6500617

Last time, it was XP. And people everywhere were forcasting that PC users would jump ship and start using Macs. This time, it is the same story different characters.

Raise the price of Windows??? Anyone remember how much XP cost when it first came out?
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I believe XP pro retailed for $299 and home retailed for $199.

How much did Vista cost at release? Basic (which is a piece of trash):$199 Home: $239 Business: $299

I don't see a price increase (Vista Home /= XP Home). In fact the Business = $0

And these are RETAIL prices. Where do you think Microsoft's revenue is tied up? OEM. I would speculate that OEM prices haven't changed any.

 

Agreed. The fact that they over 10 million editions of Vista seems to support this theory.

Ultimate? Basic? Business Ultimate? Freelance?

 

People seem to want to look at Vista Ultimate as the reason why "M$ raized prices ZOMG, DoLLaR B1LL gAt3$ iz teh mOneY!!!11" Looking at Vista Home Premium relative to XP Home and XP Media Center Edition, there is little difference. On the OEM side, XP Home with Service Pack 2 lists for around $89-99. Vista Home Premium is $99-109. XP Media Center Edition is $109-119.

I also believe you are correct when it came to the original retail price of XP and how it was virtually the same then as it is for Vista now.

 

So EVERY everyday task takes more clicks?

Last time I checked the start menu is basically the same, and Icons are still their.. The only way anything would take more clicks is if you do not have UAC disabled.

 

So in order to maintain efficiency, I have to disable the new features offered in Vista?

I'd rather stick with XP and wait for Windows 7. Or at the other poster noted, transition over to OS X. Seems like businesses are feeling the same way.

 

Having UAC on adds ONE more click, if having ONE more click makes you inefficient then you have other worries.

Also, a lot of businesses JUST NOW switched to XP, I would not expect every businesses to immediately switch to Vista.. and anyways I would think that most businesses would appreciate UAC.

 

I would think maintaining security would HELP your efficiency, not hurt it. Transition over to OS X? With your thinking, this would require a high learning curve and MORE "clicks." Retrain your IT staff. Redevelop your test deployment. Retool your secuity processes. Retrain your general staff. Yeah, that's real efficient.

You can't offer OS X as an efficient replacement if your definition of efficiency is less "clicks." You can offer OS X as an efficient replacement if you show the basic return on investment in the next 5 years or whatever your company sets as a guideline for ROIs.

I think most businesses actually see UAC as an annoyance.

In theory, UAC is a great solution to Windows XP's security problems, which was the fact that many programs would simply not run in limited and thus everyone defaulted to Admin. UAC solves the problem by allowing a per case elevation while the rest of the account's function still runs under limited privileges. Every other OS has the same thing. You only elevate privileges on a per program bases. Like using sudo instead of running as root.

Personally, I hate UAC.The PERFECT solution would be a highly customized Group Policy for every user out there. Unfortunately, UAC is the best solution for the current circumstances that I can think of. Anyone with a better idea, I'd like to hear it.

 

Well to each his own I guess, personally it never really bothered me much.. Any program I use regularly is set to run as admin.

Its almost like the whole UAC thing has been exaggerated.. Unless you are just constantly installing stuff I cant see how it would be very bothersome.