Fanbois taught to use Apple's new killer app: Microsoft Windows Apple is preparing to train its shop staff to use Microsoft Windows in a bid to flog more Macs to business users reared on PCs. The fruity firm is planning to teach its shop staff to use a piece of virtualisation software called Parallels, which allows fanbois to run both OSX and any number of Windows and Unix operational …
so you mean I can spend £800 on an imac and then an extra £100 or so to run windows on it? Amazing.
Or y'know, I could just buy an equivalent PC for £300, an equivlanet monitor for £200, and save about £400. Although I could see this being useful for developers, Y'know people making apps for their iPhone / Android / windows phone etc using something like mono. Develop it in their fave environment on windows / linux / apple. Deploy on the favoured enviornment and bug fix, then port it effortlessly to the remaining two environments for testing.
Could be useful at the very least.
Show me the equivalent PC for £300. You can buy *A* PC for £300, but it won't be directly equivalent. You'll also find PC manufacturers selling AIO models like the iMac for about the same money as the iMac.
It's your money to spend, but don't pretend it's the same exact thing you are buying,
It's not a matter of equivalence, it's a matter of what's required to do the job and whether it's economical for a business to equip itself with Apple equipment.
Of course it's up to the business at the end of the day to make that call, it's their money - but I wouldn't spend the premium on Apple equipment.
What you will tend to find is a PC laptop with similar RAM and CPU, but quite often the disk or GPU will be lacking. The PC laptop will come with UEFI which makes Linux booting troublesome, Macs come with EFI without all the locked bootloader junk.
Plus take into account that OSX is much more optimised for the GPUs Apple uses than Windows. A PC laptop will look good on paper but the user experience won't be great, "Made for Windows 8" stickers that remove the finish of the case, bloatware pre-installed etc.
Not to mention after sales service. I got a three year old Macbook Pro repaired for free by Apple, dropped it in on Saturday, collected it on Sunday. (It was repaired due to the GPU packaging fault that NVidia admitted liability for).
I run Linux on a box with uEFI, I didn't even know it had uEFI until I noticed secureboot in the BIOS which, because it initially came with a Windows pre-8 installed on it was switched off.
Even if you want to run Linux on a box and still keep secureboot, most major distros support it right out of the box.
Now, installing Linux onto my G5, with EFI, now that was a massive pain in the pain. These days, I use vmware fusion on my macbook pro and that's pretty good.
I also contend that if my experience and the experience of those around me is anything to go by you've been very lucky with your Apple customer services experience. Whenever I call them up I seem to get the phrase "not covered by Applecare".
I run FreeBSD on a box with uEFI, I didn't even know it had uEFI until I came to flash a device's firmware to the latest version, at which point it failed, because the machine has no fucking BIOS.
3 days of swearing later, I had the firmware updated, via a loaner mobo that had the required slots and still had a BIOS. I'm so glad they took away that nasty slow simple BIOS and replaced it with that nasty slow complicated uEFI.
I've taken my six year old notebook to Apple three times, once after 12 months, once two years ago ( my fault both times) and once for the infamous white plastic cracking fault. All quick and free (in Europe).
As for installing Linux: why? BSD as supplied is better; X server works fine; all the useful GNU stuff not there by default is readily available, plus Eclipse and its ilk. If you must, use VMbox or similar.
Apple uses the exactly same GPUs from AMD, NVidia and intel as any other PC manufacturer out there, and it's a widely known fact that the OS X drivers are worlds behind in terms of performance and capabilities than their Windows and Linux counterparts.
Because Windows and Linux is where high end users are going.
"it's a widely known fact that the OS X drivers are worlds behind in terms of performance and capabilities than their Windows and Linux counterparts."
By whom? No one who has actually looked.
By the way, MS Office 2011 for osx runs rather well and, so far, has not betrayed me with any incompatibilities such as OpenOffice used to display. For Word, Excel, Power Point etc. just run them natively. They are faster than on the equivalent PC.
>"Made for Windows 8" stickers that remove the finish of the case
Interesting that there are some people who attach significant importance to the presence of a sticker which they view as "removing the finish" of a case.
You learn something every day, as they say.
>bloatware pre-installed etc.
Yep. PCs, Macs, even Linux come with "bloatware", aka programs I don't want. I usually find that removing them solves the problem, if I'm that bothered, which I'm usually not.
Feel free to point out these equivalents.
There's plenty of equivalents but they also come with an equivalent price which kinda detracts from the original posters point.
It would have made more sense to say by choosing other than Apple you can have the choice of much cheaper devices or a device better configured to your needs but that wouldn't have sounded as good as trying to suggest you can have the same level of product at half the cost...
Interesting way to miss the point entirely.
I don't own a Mac and like you think they're overpriced for what they offer. But if someone does choose to run a Mac for whatever reason, having the option to run additional operating systems is a bonus rather than a spending fail. The point here is someone who normally uses the Mac OS out of choice, has the ability to use that Mac in a work environment where Microsoft products dominate, without having to wait for a version of Office to be released.
More importantly, as developers remove support for alternate platforms - they may only develop for Linux, Unix, Windows, etc - having the option of running a second OS in parallel is an extremely useful feature. Even having the option to run it exclusively could be important, especially if there are Mac specific application you must use along with say Autocad or Maya.
This isn't the direction I would choose myself, but that doesn't make it any less valid.
I am an accountant. I have a MacBook with Windows XP running in Parallels so I can run all my Sage stuff on it. I chose it because when I compared Macs with the equivalent spec PC, the price was actually pretty competitive. I also have my Adobe stuff on it, not in the Windows VM, for playing around with photos.
What it comes down to, however, is that Apple's unique selling point is their operating system, and now they're trying to sell systems to people that don't want to use their operating system. Seems a little iffy. If they were still using heavily customized hardware it would be one thing, but they're pretty standard parts now outside of the cases.
And while I don't want to touch the whole what's cheaper spec for spec argument (and I strongly suspect it may vary by location) it's worth noting that a $200 PC (using prices here in Canada as my basis) will run business software (spreadsheets, exchange clients, accounting packages, ERP packages, etc) without any hiccups. Spec for spec isn't that important when the minimum spec to do the job is many levels below the minimum spec Apple will sell you.
Touching the last point about support. I agree that Apple's retail support can be very good (in my experience it varies strongly store to store, some are populated by idiots and others not so much). However, Apple's support is extremely consumer-oriented; large IT departments can't be dealt with by retail support, the needs are simply too different. If an IT manager calls in asking about licensing details for deploying standardized images, you can't respond with a script that starts with 'have you tried to reboot the affected system, sir/ma'am?' So unless Apple is making the corresponding changes organizationally, I have a hard time seeing them gaining traction against the likes of Dell, HP, and so on, bizarre as that may sound at first glance.
There's really no basis to conclude that Apple is "trying to sell systems to people that don't want to use their operating system". Much more likely they're trying to sell systems to people that do want to use the Apple operating system but falsely believe that they can't because a vital piece of software isn't available in a native port.
Otherwise they'd be demoing BootCamp rather than Parallels.
The very first sentence in the article is the basis. It doesn't say anything about users wanting to move but being held back by critical applications, it specifically singles out users who only know and want to use Windows. Nothing about userland software is mentioned at all. The only thing I'm assuming is that the article author had access to more specifics than us and this was the strategy explained to him.
You take "Apple is preparing to train its shop staff to use Microsoft Windows in a bid to flog more Macs to business users reared on PCs" to mean "users who don't want to use OS X"? That's like saying that if shop staff are trained to demonstrate a browser then that means they're targeting customers who don't want to use desktop applications. It's a false dichotomy.
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Re: Wow
"I am an accountant. I have a MacBook with Windows XP running in Parallels so I can run all my Sage stuff on it. I chose it because when I compared Macs with the equivalent spec PC, the price was actually pretty competitive. I also have my Adobe stuff on it, not in the Windows VM, for playing around with photos."
I still think you really chose it because you're an accountant who believes you've made a cool choice (which not everyone does).
So you chose to pay over 1K for Intel HD graphics or a GT650 at best? Which specs are you referring to? My kids have Asus laptops with higher specs for substantially lower prices, and these run high end games without frame drops. I am very sure you are this person in Starbucks sitting with your macbook trying to look cool.
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@William Donelson
Apple maturity: If someone doesn't worship at the Apple altar, resort to name calling.
I've been 'trying' Parallels for about 12 years now, and 'trying' is a very good description of the experience.
VirtualBox is available and just as good as elsewhere. Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and assuming all decisions were made purely on merit, I imagine that Apple might prefer to push Parallels because it does a lot of work tightly integrating the two environments. For example, file associations work in both directions, from the Finder onto the Windows desktop and vice versa, the start menu is added to the dock, your Windows applications appear in /Applications and hence in the Launchpad, etc.
It's actually why I stopped using Parallels and started using VirtualBox. I needed Windows for a particular application only and otherwise to be contained in its box — I actively didn't want Parallels to start messing about with my whole system.
Now, to listen to advice from someone who thinks that suggesting running XP is a viable option, or not?
They are ceasing support in only a few months time, regardless of your feelings about Windows 8, you're giving advice to buy imminently obsolete 13 year old software. That's not good advice. I realise you said or 7, but the fact that you even suggested XP gives you no credibility.
"Now, to listen to advice from someone who thinks that suggesting running XP is a viable option, or not?"
I dunno about you, but if I was one of the many XP users wondering where to go next, and therefore potentially interested in something not dependent on MS, I'd be happy to talk to a non-MS vendor who understood my current needs.
In those circumstances, a non-MS vendor focused on understanding Windows 8 has missed the goalposts by a country mile. Understanding *both* Windows XP and Windows 8, that might make sense.
I actually agree with you here the resale price is pretty good. I sold a mac pro for a hefty amount a year ago. I was pretty shocked as the spec was pretty poor, i actually put it down to the fact that there is a lot of Apple users that are not that tech savvy...
"a lot of Apple users that are not that tech savvy"
Exactly why you get dopes (IMO) buying old and outdated hardware....they only care that it has the Apple branding on the outside. It could be an atom powered POS and that would not matter.
It's not a tool...its a fashion accessory for 90% of the buyers IMO.
Umm, could it be that an old Mac is *actually still useful*?
Got an ancient (2002-era) PPC iBook here fitted with an SSD. Runs in clamshell mode as a silent server and daily newspaper aggregator. Uptime: {checks} 709 days. Not bad. I've certainly had my money's worth out of it.
Hmmm. I have an IBook (old PPC chip) here too. Got PPCMint on it, but having trouble getting it to do anything, as flash is not supported. Not a worry for me, but darn, so many things depend on that bloated software these days. :(
Can't even use it to play radio off iplayer/online. :(
Used 2008 macpro, driven pretty much 24/7 for video rendering since I bought it back in 2008. Filled with hard drives, upgraded GPU, upgraded RAM. Sold it for more than I paid for it. Now that's what I call good value. It is now giving an old friend sterling service as his main edit machine. Basically, it takes a 2013 quad core i7 macmini to achieve the same benchmarks as the 2008 macpro.
Resale value is only of consideration if you don't run your machines until they're dead. We just got rid of a Thinkpad x31, it did sterling service, but in the end no matter how many upgrades it had been battered to death. No-one would have bought it from us, but we certainly got our monies worth from it.
"I just sold an 8 year old dual G5 for $500"
And i thought used car dealers are crooks.
Does the church of Apple even allow this? I mean, for $500 they could have gotten a brand new iPad, you know, Post-PC era and so, and it would have looked better in the Churchs fiscal reports.
I have a G3 power mac staring at me here. It only needs a PSU to be in working condition again. I don't think there would be much point though, except as a curiosity.
On the other hand, the custom-build gaming PC I bought for £500 three years ago is still chugging along just fine. £100 on a new graphics card about four months ago. I reckon I could get a few hundred if I sold it, but why would I want to do that? It's still very useful.
Yep, it's younger than a G3. However, I reckon I could still get a similar percentage (or better) back on my purchase, than you would with a 3 year old Mac.
"I have a G3 power mac staring at me here. It only needs a PSU to be in working condition again. I don't think there would be much point though, except as a curiosity."
Pft. I agree totally, and at the $450 asking price for that PSU it wouldn't be worth the bother or expense. For something made of diamond-encrusted depleted uranium you'd think they wouldn't suspend it over the motherboard with only half the screws the chassis calls for and a , what, foot of drop to get it up to speed, but there you go.
Please downvote me, because it isn't like I've actually pulled one of these pieces of crap apart and rebuilt it for an ingrate relative who used my PC running XP the entire time I was fixing his "better" G3 to do his e-mail.
And 20 bucks for a bios battery? Lasted about the same as my $5 lithium disc but was *much* harder to source. Thrrrp!
Hah, even better, I know someone who recently got ripped off for £50 (I know, only £50 for a Mac, right?) on a generation 1 Mac Mini, minus the keyboard. At least the Windows button on a PC keyboard works as a splat button on a Mac, or we'd have been completely stuffed trying to make it work. At least a "factory reset" to remove the old admin account was basically a removal of one file to do a Jedi Mind Trick on the thing. "You have never been run before!" - "I... have never been run before.."
If all you want to do is go on static-imagery websites, I guess it's fine. Youtube makes it choke like a bitch, and there's no chance in hell it'll ever run anything further than 10.5 (currently running 10.4). We tried installing various things such as VLC, or even Safari, only to be told to STFU because the computer's too old. Cue much trawling for ancient PPC-compatible builds of the aforementioned. You could try some serious rendering or graphical work if you really like pain, but I'd rather go for a Core i7 or AMD FX of some description.
But hey, it has an Apple logo on it. Somehow that makes all the difference.
Is the same thing as teaching a windows user to use OSX on a hacked VM... You can use the OS but its nothing like installing the OS on the Hardware...
Not to mention the differences in the OS for business.
Remote Desktop (Built into Windows, you have to use VNC Server/Clients to do anything similar)
Roaming Profiles (Not supported on OSX)
Domain Authentication (Supported very little on OSX)
OSX is not for Business..
Windows Sharing is built into Mac OS X. I'm using it now (simply to make the point I can). Yes it's based on VNC and that makes a difference in what way? It works well enough for me for when I need it, I wouldn't use Windows Remote Desktop over a long period of time either. Just remind me what the client licenses for Windows is again?
The fact that Roaming Profiles isn't built in is a major plus. I've used Roaming Profiles in large organisations, you start a new machine up and go and get breakfast as it tries to pull down a vast amount of information to build your profile up on the machine.
Domain Authentication - Yes you are correct, Domain authentication is poor on the Mac compared to Windows.
And thats the list of your complaints as to why Macs aren't ready for business? Bloody hell, I can do better than that and I've got a Mac for business and like it.
1. Poor support for many big business applications such as Sage etc.
2. Not so much enterprise support for rolling out large numbers of machines.
3. Lack of Kensington Lock on the new Macbook Pro. Tiny sodding detail, but highly annoying.
4. Lack of enterprise backup software. Time Machine is absolutely fantastic right until the moment it stops working and throws your backups away. Biggest pile of utter shite and anybody who relies on it for backups should not be in business.
5. OS X Server is not ready for business. The documentation is crap, half the software works some of the time but fails regularly, no idea why. Software Update Server, Caching server, the mail server, ldap server all work some of the time but sometimes just stop working. I have slowly (very) moved most of my OS X server software onto other replacement machines (normally Linux) as I undo our abortive attempt to use OS X Server.
6. Perhaps the biggest failing is that Apple themselves is not ready to support big business. As an example, try and get Apple support for OS X server. The forums are junk, nobody from Apple gets involved,, self help is the only way forward. The roadmap from Apple is teased out of Apple to let it fall as crumbs to the floor. In business I'd like to know what the future holds, Apple is far too secretive. I'm no Microsoft fan but their support for business is head and shoulders over Apples.
So why do I have a Mac:
1. Most of the time it works fine. I don't have niggly compatibility issues with device drivers and graphic cards and software. Does it "just-work"? No, thats marketing bollocks and I ignore it. Its reliable and rarely crashes. To be fair neither does Windows 7 or Linux.
2. It's UNIX based which I use a lot. I like the fact I have a decent OS under the hood that I can interact with at the command line. I do write shell scripts to do things as thats pretty easy to do. Windows is junk for this sort of thing. I know I can download Cygwin (and I do) but it's not as nice as a proper UNIX box.
3. The compiler is free (or is cheap as chips). It's not a bad compiler at all, the instrumentation is nice, the editor is OK (I prefer Emacs) but it works well enough. The equivalent compiler from Microsoft is far too much money.
4. Final Cut Pro runs on it. If you do decent editing this is great. Nuff said.
5. Facetime runs on it which means I can talk to my kids on their ipads. Yes I do have Skype as well but the kids use iPads and it's easy for them (they're six and four).
6. Its well made. My main home machine is a 2006 Mac Pro. I keep looking at a new machine but can;t justify the costs. The bastards at Apple tried to stop us running Mountain Lion on it as they made ML require a 64 bit EFI. We got round that little problem though. Anyway, my last Macbook lasted three years, was still running perfectly well and I got £600 for it, so 2nd hand value is very good. My t'other half has a three year old Macbook (White) and it still works fine, though she'd like an Air, can't really justify it. I do keep hoping the kids will drop the old Macbook and we can get a new one.
7. Sleep works properly. I close the lid and it just works.
8. Hooking up to a new monitor seems easier than it did with Windows 7. I always seemed to be having to reset things in the Control Panel under windows for it to recognise an external monitor.
I have no doubt that this will get downvoted and flamed, but I like my Macbook Pro, I'd rather run a proper Linux box but I do have to run some business software. In my defense I do have VMWare with Centos on.
Lack of enterprise backup software? TSM, Networker, NetBackup and IIRC ARCserve, Data Protector, Comm Vault, and Backup Exec all have Mac OS clients.
Which enterprise backup software are you using?
The only one that doesn't support Mac OS that I can think of is MS DPM and that's because it only support Windows or Hyper-v backups.
>> 3. Lack of Kensington Lock on the new Macbook Pro. Tiny sodding detail, but highly annoying.
Not just annoying but totally bloody stupid. Same on the MacBook Air. Thanks to that 2 people had Macs nicked at a festival last week where every other machine was Kensingtoned up.
Looks like the "solution" is a large square metal plate that you are supposed to adhere to your mac with special sticky tape and industrial glue.
WTF were apple thinking NOT to provide a Kensington lock? Surely an extra, tiny oval hole in the case wouldn't be noticed? Or is the aluminium chassis not strong enough to support someone twisting it off?
Totally stupid. Sorry had to say it again!
Its a fair call, does anyone use OS X Server? I wasn't aware that www.apple.com and www.icloud.com ran on Linux, but since Apple is abandoning the server business (the Xserve went some years ago) its not a surprise. The theory is great, the software is actually pretty good on other Linux systems. Not much is actual Apple software but Apple screws around with it to make it fit and I think they change it so much that nobody has a clue what it's really doing. Sometimes you do need a proper command line system.... :)
OS X Server is (IMHO) targetted at the people who use Windows Home Server and I have no doubt it can be made to work, sadly Apple has no interest in it, the documentation is rubbish, the support non-existent and so few people use it, it should actually be shot and put out of its misery. Its one of a number of pieces of software I have seriously regretted buying. The only upside is that it's forced me to move even more to Linux than I already had.
I'd tend to agree - I don't think Apple has any interest in Enterprise at all. They pretty much said that the day they ceased the xserve. They actually suggest that you put a pro workstation or a mac mini into a rack on a shelf, something that no Enterprise datacentre would do. That's not to mention the other features they're missing such as redundancy, lights out, front to back air cooling, etc.
It's all rather odd, because all Apple have to do to gain even the tinest presence in the datacentre is to certify their server OS to run on a virtualisation platform, such as VMware, Hyper-v, xen etc.
They also seem to be going all out to really piss off the users of their pro workstations and video edit software.
@AC9:02 "all Apple have to do to gain even the tinest presence in the datacentre is to certify their server OS to run on a virtualisation platform"
Well, they also have to make it work, which I suspect is the harder part.
OS X Server is an absolute pain in the ass to get working and pretty much every Apple-ified tool added to supposedly make it easier just increases the pain levels tenfold. Without the ease of use aspect that's worked on the desktop, there really is no sane reason to choose OS X over a Linux box.
@AC15:37 "I do write shell scripts to do things as thats pretty easy to do. Windows is junk for this sort of thing."
I take it you've never used Powershell then? Try doing the equivalent of a Powershell Parallel Workflow script aggregating results across hundreds of machines in Bash, then decide which is "junk for this sort of thing"
Windows has moved on a lot since DOS batch files, y'know.
"The equivalent compiler from Microsoft is far too much money."
Visual Studio Express costs the princely sum of nothing. The compiler is the exact same one used by the most expensive version of Visual Studio (you just lack many of the advanced IDE functionality).
Macs are all well and good if that's what you want. Though the point of buying a machine then also buying VM software and a completely different OS all over again because that's the only one that runs your applications is lost on me. You accomplish nothing other than making your life just that little bit harder, for no tangible benefit.
When I first moved over to Mac (my first was the 'anglepoise' iMac) I was still using a lot of Windows based software - MS Money, Publisher, Office, etc. Used the MS Virtual Windows things and it wasn't too bad...
Now where I currently work about 50% of the staff choose Apple, with the PCs split between Linux and Windows. As most things are web based (such as our CRM) or we use PDF / MS Office formats to save into - there is little need to use Windows if you don't want to. I use the Apple iWork suite and send PDF or .docx formats if needed.
But I know accountants will be wanting their SAGE - if they want MS Office - you can get that too.
As an alternative I use Oracle's VirtualBox to run Windows 8 on a Mac so I can use some of the more advanced functionality of Microsoft Excel available on a PC.
For accounting no one really needs Windows (or Sage) if you using a modern Cloud based, mid range accounting system such as Aqilla. All you need is a browser....
No problem, they can buy the full retail version of Windows 7 Pro for $299, ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116717 ) and then upgrade that to Windows 8 Pro for an additional $199 ( http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Windows-8-Pro/productID.257987100 )
I have a mac mini which is bootcamped with windows 7 I used it for a iphone app project, currently my son has it for minecrafting! works really well you have to reboot to switch. a few years back for a similar project tho I created a hackingtosh running in VMware running in VM Player. for me that was by far the most usable solution.
If only apple would either let us develop app on anything but osx or at least allow it to be install on non mac hardware which lets face it is just a pc. They lock everything down through fear that given the choice we'd never use them and to be honest they might have a point. developing in xcode was like going back in time after visual studio.
I am a windows Technician that works on behalf of IBM.
Before that I was a Windows Tech that worked for a multitude of Government and Financial types such as banks and insurance companies. I'm windows through and through, what I would actually like is a brand new shiny device though. Of course, I don't want them at work, I'd have nothing to do.
Friend of mine is using a 3 year old iMac... and using Parallels to run Steam games where there isn't a native version of the game for OS X. I was watching him play Assassin's Creed III on it the other day and it performs surprisingly well on a 3 year old machine running through an emulation layer. In fact, when we rebooted it and ran it through Boot Camp (i.e. native Windows), it wasn't actually significantly better.
Me, I'm using a MacBook Pro (developing for the mobile things) and I'm in Boot Camp most of the time. Don't know what it is but Parallels just doesn't run very well for me. Guess my friend is the lucky one.
The problem with virtual machines, apart from the performance issue, which is becoming less of a problem as hardware gets faster and the virtual machine coding becomes more efficient, is the backup.
Using virtual drive files leads to an explosion of redundant data on Time Machine, or any incremental backup solution that operates at the file level. Every time you boot the virtual system the drive file will be written to, and as a result the drive file will change, therefore the backup system will backup the whole drive file. For a fixed size drive file of 100GB this will make short work of a 4TB backup solution, filling it in a little over a month if backups are done daily and the virtual machine is in daily use.
Sparse (in Apple parlance) drive files which grow as they fill up can help alleviate this, but only to a certain degree as even they will tend to run to 10-20GB in even lightly used virtual machines.
Most people I know running VMs, including myself, end up excluding the drive files from the backup. In my case it's not critical as I only use Virtual Box to mess around with various flavours of Linux so no big deal if I lose the files. But somebody running critical data on a VM would be well advised to implement a backup system from within that VM, rather than relying on the host system to take care of things.
Somehow I don't see the Oompa Loompas in the Apple store being particularly well informed on that aspect.
Parallels left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe things have changed since but I remember "offers" that had to be dismissed each time I launched the application. When I upgraded OS X the version of Parallels I was using assumed it was incompatible and wouldn't launch. The only option available was to purchase an upgrade. So I did some research and found Virtual Box. It was rough around the edges but has improved since then. Also it is free, thanks to many volunteers.
I was under the impression that Parallels came out in 2006, along with the intel Macs...
The thing that Parallels can do that I've yet to see VirtualBox etc. do is get rid of the Windows, errr window. i.e. Windows programs appear on the Mac desktop. I thought that was rather neat.
Oh, and "operational systems"? I thought this was a tech site...
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"Having said that, I would not buy Apple stuff unless I won the lottery"
If you figure in resale value, I'm sure the monthly cost of using a Mac is lower than that of a PC.
You can almost always sell 3-5 year old Macs for over 50% of their retail price. Meanwhile PCs are almost literally worthless after 3-5 years.
I should know. I've been trying to sell my Windows HTPC that I bought 3 years ago for $600 and I can't even get anybody to buy it for $100.
"while architects, hipsters and Al Gore hotdesk around the world armed with their shiny new Macbook Airs."
Add to that all the scientists, academics, software developers, system administrators, etc. who learned on *nix systems in university and prefer OS X in part because it's what they know. There's a reason why almost everybody at Google uses Macs and it's not because they are hipsters who don't know about computers.
Germany
Apple iMac 27", i7 3.4GHz, 32GB RAM, nVidia 680GTX 2GB, 1 TB HD, HD camera, wireless mouse/keyboard, integrated speakers, OS.
2829.- Euros (if purchased online...costs more in store)
Windows PC (self built) exact same specs (other than the case).
2156.- Euros (if purchased from a local retailer...150.- Euros cheaper if purchased online)
May not be half the price...but with the 673.- Euros I would save, I could also buy a laptop or tablet to compliment my Windows PC.
"Apple iMac 27", i7 3.4GHz, 32GB RAM, nVidia 680GTX 2GB, 1 TB HD, HD camera, wireless mouse/keyboard, integrated speakers, OS.
2829.- Euros (if purchased online...costs more in store)"
First of all, buying memory from Apple is a ripoff. (Which you should have noticed when you selected that 32GB for +600 euros and not ~200.) So you should really lower your quoted iMac price by 400 euros. Second, if you're trying to save money, I question the logic of paying Apple 200 euro extra for a CPU that's ~6% faster.
So for 73 euros more you could have had a sleek, conveniently-sized iMac that's practically silent and runs OS X. And, best of all, you could have used it for 4-5 years and sold it for ~1500 euros, whereas I doubt you will be able to get any money back for your PC.
My MacPro is coming up to 5 years old now and I use Parallels to run various flavours of Win and *UX. It all seems to run pretty well.
As stated above, unless you sepecifically tell it not to, Time Machine will quite happily back up those 20GB+ VMs, which may slow/clog things up a bit. I don't bother backing up any of the *UX stuff as most of it is for play/test, but I do back up the Win VMs as I value my time/bandwidth too much to waste ice ages installing and patching from scratch.
Come to think of it, the only time I *really* need to use Win at home is when I need to use a MySQL import util I quite like (and have not looked too hard for a native replacement) or to trawl through old .pst files in Outlook.
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