My first exposure to personal computers was as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s with PCs, that had 640K RAM and a 20MB hard drive. I am not sure I had even heard of Mac those days. Through the years at grad school I predominantly worked with UNIX and variants thereof, but as soon as I joined the workforce, my personal computing device was a Windows device. Both the machine I had at work and at home tended to be windows machines as all the development I did was on windows. Apple in the late 1990s and early 2000s was not projected to be the winner in the personal computing revolution.
Fast-forward to now and resistance was futile! I essentially have every single Apple device that Apple has produced at home (iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV, etc. etc.). What is even more unbelievable is that I even bought an Apple MacBook Pro for my work. However, it was a mistake for me to purchase Apple’s MacBook Pro as a device for working on. Yes, the key productivity tools are available, as are development tools, but Word, Excel and Powerpoint on Windows are an order of magnitude better than anything remotely similar on the Mac. I had to make the decision to purchase a windows machine for work because the 8GB RAM MacBook Pro was just not cutting it for me. I ended up getting a 32GB RAM Windows machine, because for the kind of work I do my productivity with the Mac was significantly lower. And believe it or not, the Windows machine was cheaper than the Mac! Of course, some folks would say that Microsoft has made its software on Mac inferior by design, but that does not preclude Apple from making products that are comparable, especially given its supposed advantage in ‘controlling the entire stack’.
While I can see end consumers paying a premium for a silver/gold case with a glowing logo, I am not sure that business folks will. Yes, iPads are cool, and executives who need to see reports on the go will have them, but after experiencing the latest versions of windows and office, I think corporate end-user computing will be on Windows for some time to come.
Kannan's Blog 
Leave a Reply