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 The majority of these were discarded for a variety of reasons (too obtuse, outdated, repetitious, etc.).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...
- Although the information presented here was originally designed for schools, it is now applicable for any business or individual who is making a Mac/PC decision...
- We realize that "PC" stands for "Personal Computer" — which means that Macs are PCs. However, since common usage implies that PC means an "IBM compatible" computer with Microsoft Windows as its sole operating system (aka Wintel), that is what we will mean when we say PC here.
- If you are looking for icons doing backflips, etc. you’ve come to the wrong place. This web site is designed to help you make a more informed computer purchase, not to showcase web page design — i.e. the emphasis is on the 115± pages (8.5" x 11") of ad-free content.
- If I knew more code I could probably do a better job of having pages look optimum for all browsers on all platforms. In any case, I’ve tried to choose good fonts and sizes. If you have suggestions for making the text more readable, please let me know.
- To make this site more useful, I have set up the HTML so that when you click on a link, a new window will open with that information (while keeping the page you were on, in the background). After you look the new page over and then close that window (a simple keyboard shortcut), you will immediately be back at the original referencing page. This should make navigation simpler for you.
- One of the purposes of these pages is to benefit the ENTIRE Mac community, so if you need to reference any material on this site, please feel free to do so. (Please attribute proper credit.) Sending us a copy of published references would be appreciated.
- Despite doing my best I now find that I am getting a bit behind in keeping the site up-to-date. At this time I have over 150 new reports and articles to be incorporated into the website. If you have the time and interest to assist with this, please let me know!
- Any Windows/PC advocates who have nothing better to do than flame me, feel free to do so here. However, to be accurately informed, I would suggest that you first read the ENTIRE site (115± pages of some 1200 referenced reports, studies, etc.).
Download a single printable PDF version of the whole site,
with hyperlinks and bookmarks (115± pages, 1.8 MB; Revised: 5/04/05).
[Periodically check the revision date of this file:
significant changes will be result in a modified version and a new date.
We do major updates about once a year.
In the meantime, check the web pages for the latest material.]
[This is an intermediate update since we are falling behind a bit here.
Rather than have people wait for the final version, this can be printed out now.
About 2/3 of the pages have been revised, but not all hyperlinks are set yet.]
Download (for all platforms) Adobe Reader (to read PDF files).
In my Internet travels, I found a few sites (none gave direct attribution)
that said something similar to the following:
In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages. This type of poetry has strict construction rules — each poem has only 17 syllables: 5 syllables in the first line,
7 in the second, and 5 in the third.
Haikus are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving
a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity.
On each of our main section pages I will cite an example:
Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.
My idea of a Haiku would be something like this (remember I am a Physicist):
Choose Mac or PC?
Now everyone wants to know.
The answer is clear.
