Macs and PCs a new digital divide

Over the past couple of years, Apple has been making steady progress in increasing its market share in the personal computer business, even while it was tromping everyone else in the music player and more recently mobile phone business.  While significant, the fact that their share of units sold has continuously grown pales in relation to the significance that their revenue share has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Recent numbers show that more than one in every two dollars spent on desktop computers in the US is spent on an Apple equipment.  At the same time, more than one dollar in every three spent on notebooks is spent on an Apple branded portable.  The huge difference between Apples share of the market in units sold against its share in dollars earned is directly related to the fact that while PC makers are busy fighting for every consumer in the low-end portion of the market, Apple decided that it would continue to produce more sophisticated products that it could sell for a premium.

In a not too distant past, when first these sorts of number for Apples revenue share came out, a friend asked me what I made of this.  Without much thought I gave him an answer that has given me pause to think a lot.  "It seems that most people that want to buy a GOOD computer, buy an Apple computer."

That simple statement has come back to my mind frequently and done more so in the past couple of weeks as I went through the motions of getting a new notebook and ended up reaching the conclusion that a MacBook was the best solution for me.  Reflecting back on all my reasoning about this choice, one thing stands out.  Once I had concluded that it made basic financial sense due to battery replacement costs (which inevitably follow per my experience with Dell), the shear fact that with a Mac I can do anything I can with a PC, but with a PC I can't do everything I do with a Mac seemed like the ultimate argument.

This essentially stems from the a relation Mac and PCs share with squares and rectangles:  all Macs are PCs, but not all PCs are Macs.   Could this lead us into a new divide based on social factors?  Are we moving towards a world where those who can afford it have Macs and everybody else has a PC because that is all that they can get?

The new white MacBook is a solid buy

The new white MacBook is certainly a solid buy.  Even if it were not for it having a nice set of specs, it would still be a solid offering from Apple, due to its new unibody enclosure.

Having come to regard the term unibody as referring to the aluminum built MacBook Pros it seems a bit strange to refer to the white MacBook by it, but nonetheless, the terms is applied. The new enclosure provides a much more sturdy feel to it than the original, giving the notebook a perceived "higher quality" to its whole package.

The tech specs are good, though I recommend upgrading the RAM to 4GB when ordering a new one, specially if you plan to run any Windows applications through a virtual machine.  2GBs is on the low side for that as it will force you to run the VM with less than a full 1 GB which could be to low for the more heavyweight Windows applications.

While I haven't been able to go through a real non-stop usage scenario, I can say that I ran the computer for several hours of Web surfing through wi-fi, running a Windows application in a Parallels VM and watching videos.  Running the VM had a huge impact on battery life as the project duration dropped from almost five hours to just a bit over two, in the few minutes I was actually using the VM.  Once the VM had shutdown, battery life projection went up significantly again.

All in all the white MacBook is a good computer and I recommend it for people who, like me, live in countries where the difference in price between the white and aluminum models is running at 500USD or more.  If you're in a country with a smaller price difference, you might want to consider the top 13.3 inch MacBook as it has similar specs and builds in a Firewire port, more RAM and back lit keyboard, besides the obvious difference in enclosures.

The cheap PC myth

A bit over one year ago I became a Mac user. You could say that I became a convert, though my household was still primarily a Windows shop, as I had three PCs to my one Mac.  At the time I decided to take the plunge into the Mac world, I chose the lowliest MacBooks as my first machine.

At the time I remember thinking that I was really paying a premium on a computer that didn't even have a DVD burner, but what the heck?  I wanted to have my own, first-hand, experience with OS X and Apple computers as I was already a convert to the iPod and was very happy with my third model.

It was a great experience.  Using a Mac is really easy and much less of a pain than a PC with Windows in many day to day tasks such as installing and removing applications.  For a bit over a year I used the Mac as my primary machine at home and moved everything I did to native Mac applications, except for my web development for which I use a Windows-only tool called Morfik.  I ran this software in a Parallels virtual machine with Windows XP, which worked like a charm.

Recently, as I was contemplating the computers I had at home and the use I, and my family, made of them, I was contacted by a friend that was taking a job abroad and that wanted to get a cheap notebook to take with him when traveling. He asked if I wasn't interested in selling him one of mine.

My own travel computer, an Asus EEE PC 1000HD, while a great little machine for a quick trip, is a bit underpowered being good enough for web browsing and email but not enough for any game that was released in the last couple of years. It also has a 10 inch screen and lacks a DVD drive which deprives you of  a nice way to pass away the time. 

As I considered this I came to the conclusion that the only machine I had which I would really recommend for such a situation, where he would be using the computer as his primary source of entertainment (he is going to be working on a tech project in Africa, in a place which hasn't got that many interesting entertainment options) was the MacBook.  My old Windows notebook, a nice looking Dell computer, hasn't got a working battery, as I've replaced it already three times and it is in need of replacement again.  My wifes'computer, another Dell notebook, while good enough for her web browsing and emails, isn't really up to the challenge of running anything but really old games and it weights well over three kilos.

So, there it was... the MacBook seemed like the perfect option.   While I didn't really need to sell him any computer, he was in a hurry to get a "traveling machine" and all the inexpensive options we could find were either underpowered or overweight.  

Having sold my Mac, I returned to using my Dell notebook and started to think about what would replace the MacBook as I can't really consider a three and a half year old Windows XP notebook without a working battery as my main personal computer.

When Apple announced it recent new lineup of products I was again attracted to the simple white MacBook as a replacement for my old one.  As I am in Brazil, while it is already listed in the online store, it is still not available for purchase.  This gave me time to wonder if, now that there is a new version of Windows, which I'm told isn't as bad as the previous one, it wasn't the time to reconsider my move to the Mac.  PCs are cheaper, after all.  While the global economic situation is showing signs of improvement, perhaps I should be prudent and choose a less expensive option and save a bit.

This reasoning took me to Dell's website to check out the notebook lineup.  I decided that the Latitudes, which are my current crop at home, where too expensive.  Just as I was choosing a plastic Mac, I could choose a plastic PC.  That would make it that much cheaper.  What do I care about this?  My personal computer is a notebook mainly for the mobility it gives me inside my home.  I work on a company computer for most of the day and take the EEE PC on trips.

So there I went to configure a Vostro 1320 with a decent processor, decent disk space and video options.  When I finished configuring the computer, it was about $50 cheaper than my choice MacBook, albeit it had 4 GB against 2GB of the default MacBook configuration.  The difference seemed small until I went back and really looked things over.  I was getting a slower processor, with a slower bus.  Slower memory and one "version" down on the graphics card, if the NVIDIA model numbers mean anything.  It didn't seem that good a trade off, but it was when I considered the battery that it really hit me.

My MacBook's battery, after fourteen months of usage was good for well over 2 hours of battery life.  My first Dell Latitude battery didn't even make it through the first year, being replaced under warranty.  The replacement, didn't last a full year and I ordered a new, larger, 9-cell battery which, in turn, lasted about a year.   Apple's new batteries have a much longer running time and are supposed to last a lot longer, five years if we are to believe the propaganda.   Well, I decided that if it lasts half that long, two and a half years, it makes the MacBook a bargain as replacing all those batteries isn't cheap at all.

So... I guess I'm off to get a new MacBook as my primary home system, throughly convinced that getting a PC wouldn't be cheaper at all.

How can anyone still use Internet Explorer?

I haven't really used Internet Explorer as my everyday browser since 2006, but until recently I hadn't really realized how bad it is. Back then it was IE 6 and Firefox 1.5, if I'm not mistaken. I preferred Firefox, but still used IE because there was at least one site I had to access, which didn't really look okay in Firefox. When I no longer needed to access that site, I made the full time use move to Firefox and never looked back.

Recently, however, I have been working on a couple of sites and applications which I decided to test with all browsers. You can't imagine my surprise when I found out that the sites looked and worked perfectly on all browsers, except Internet Explorer. (They are fine in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome.) I tried IE 8 in both its native and "compatibility" modes and it not only wasn't able to properly display the sites' images which use alpha-channel for transparency, but the speed for executing the Javascript was ridiculously slow.

For one small website, I redid the layout and got it to work okay on IE. For the applications I just decided that I won't support Internet Explorer. It is a seriously flawed product and I for one am not going to loose my time by trying to make it work as it should. That is what Microsoft should have done.

I haven't tried windows 7 yet, and I don't really care anymore

Earlier this year, when Microsoft announced that it would make Windows 7 beta available for testing I was quite excited. I had hated Vista, as soon as I came into direct contact with it and my newly acquired notebook came into the very broadly defined "Vista Capable" set of computers in which you could install the system, but could not use the new interface. The idea of trying out Windows 7 was appealing as it was promised as being a version that would makeup for all negative points of vista.

So I spent a while downloading the DVD image, burned it into a DVD and started the install process. That was when I found out that you can't install Windows Vista side-by-side with XP. You need a freshly formatted partition. Okay, I had started the move to my MacBook as my main computer but I wasn't really prepared to just kill off my Windows notebook. I had some work software and persona items such as photos, documents which I was still using on it and I didn't really want to have to reinstall everything on the notebook. So, I decided that testing Windows 7 wasn't so important after all. I could wait for the final version to do it all at once.

Well, now Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing and should be out in its final version in October and according to Walt Mossberg's recent article, on The Wall Stree Journal, if you are running XP you still need to reformat the hard disk to install it. Well... In light of that, guess what? I've figured out that I have no desire to run Windows 7 on my notebook.

I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing, no particular feature, that I'm looking forward to having or using, in Windows 7. I'm not saying that I won't use it, which was definitly the case with Vista, and I might end up getting a new Windows notebook for my Web development later this year. In that case I'll even make sure to wait until I can get it with Windows 7, instead of Vista, but I can really say that I'm not particularly looking forward to it.

Considering that I have been a heavy user of all versions of Windows up to XP (including the server ones), it is an interesting sign of just how far off Microsoft has managed to drive my interest, that I am more keen to try out the next release of Ubuntu than I am to try out Windows 7. Perhaps even more astounding is that I can actually install Ubuntu side by side my Windows XP, to do this, but I have to remove it to try out Windows 7.