[PLUG] Mac Cost

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2012, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> Overall, a Mac seems like a good computer for people with lots of 
> money who prefer a slowly evolving curated experience to a 
> customized experience with niche apps.  These days, with any 
> platform, all you really need is a decent web browser and the right 
> sort of web apps, worldwide and local.

The latter sentence is incomplete for a large number of laptop users. 
You also need

  * a graphical environment that won't choke when it's repeatedly
    plugged into and unplugged from external monitors or projectors,

  * wireless network drivers that handle frequent reassociations,

  * a power-saving system that doesn't leave the machine in an
    unusable state after frequent sleep/wake cycles.

It's been our experience at work that those are issues in which Macs 
excel and Linux is often found wanting.

The wonder and the curse of our favorite OS is that "Linux" can mean 
different things in that last sentence: Ubuntu on ThinkPad, Fedora on 
Dell, CentOS on Toshiba, etc. It's very difficult to predict how a 
given revision of a given Linux distribution will work on a given 
laptop model of a given manufacturer.

It won't surprise me at all if the various Linux distributions catch 
up in terms of mobile stability, but my observation is that they 
aren't there yet.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/