Macs vs PCs — research, reports and articles

In mid-2000 our local North Carolina K-12 school district decided to "standardize on the Windows/PC platform." At that time 90%+ of their computers were Macs. A group of local taxpayers (including teachers) felt that this was inappropriate from several perspectives, and started working on reviewing the merits of this decision.

I, John Droz, was asked to be their spokesperson and to create this website. Over the last few years this site has taken on a life much bigger (and more important) than what happens in one small school district, so our emphasis now is on debunking PC myths. [For the curious, go here for more details about our local situation.]

This 2005 edition has been my second major redesign of the site since its inception in mid 2001... In honor of the Macintosh 20th year anniversary (2004), you’ll note that I have included a few screen shots from the 1984 Superbowl advertisement (one of the most acclaimed advertisement in history), as its message still resonates today. (Go here to see the whole extraordinary thing.) As I’ve said all along, even though I am not a professional web designer, hopefully you will find the site reasonably easy to navigate and attractively laid out.

Also, I look at my role here as more of an editor than an author. My challenge has been to find (i.e. research) and read well over four thousand studies, reports, and articles that have been published on the Mac vs PC topic. No small matter. The majority of these were discarded for a variety of reasons (too obtuse, outdated, repetitious, etc.).

The bulk of my time was then spent with the remaining 1200±, trying to digest them in more detail, then synopsizing the material, and organizing each one into the site. My main objective was to be able to transcribe all this technical mumbo-jumbo into an educational, interesting, readable — and occasionally even entertaining — report. Hope you find it so.


Before digging deeper...

Contribute

Since I started this site in March of 2001, I have put well over fifteen hundred hours into researching material, putting it all together, editing updates, creating PDFs, answering email, etc. I would like to think that the resulting pages are a comprehensive, beneficial, and unique resource towards helping people get a better understanding of the very important Mac vs PC issue.

But this amount of time has had a serious impact on my life: economic and otherwise. If you would like to encourage me to continue this effort — or if you find the work already done to be useful to you — a Paypal contribution would be most appreciated: just click on the Paypal icon below.

THANKS!