macbook good enough?

[CCAccount0909]

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I’ve always been surprised at the number of people (or companies) that by Pac Pros. Apparently there are a lot of content people out there that need the 4 - 32 GB of RAM that you can stuff into these machines.

That’s for work. I’m referring to the consumer market. In the commercial market, there are people paid to make purchasing decisions.</p>

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A few years ago, there was the consideration of selling applications as virtual machine appliances. VMWare provided the tools to do this and a library of available VM appliances. I don’t know how popular this is today but it does make for an interesting way to deliver applications with the simplicity of not requiring the end user to install the program. It also provides compartmentalization of applications.</p>

<p>The IT trends that I’ve seen are moving towards virtualization as it reduces hardware and system management costs and Goldman Sachs has produced a report talking about a huge push to cut costs in 2009 by IT departments.

Virtualization seems to still be limited to the commercial market though. I don’t see it being necessary in the consumer market. A big reason for using virtualization is to provide backwards compatibility, which businesses need. Apple has proven that consumers don’t care about backwards compatibility, though. They regularly drop support for old standards/features with no repercussions.</p>

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As far as bitness goes, it’s already an issue because Vista x64 machines are in consumer stores.

Most popular consumer applications support 64-bit now. Ironically, one of the most popular Windows applications that didn’t support 64-bit until a year after Vista’s release was iTunes. But now that’s been solved, I’m not sure if there are any common applications that don’t support 64-bit.</p>

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The battery difference is in the operating system.

Not exactly. It’s the integration between the OS and the hardware. Ever tried setting up a Hackintosh? It works horribly, and rightly so. Apple supports only Apple hardware; it makes hardware support much simpler than it is in Windows.</p>

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They already have to make decisions based on bitness.

It’s not like 32-bit isn’t available anyway. There are plenty of computers with 32-bit Windows available, at your local big box electronics store or online.</p>

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Apple has good marketing but they also have a good product.

My point is that with something as complex as electronics, the quality of the product isn’t nearly as important as the marketing when it comes to sales. Apple manages to grab the consumer’s attention and hold it in a way that no other OEM seems to be able to do. The Vista disaster contributed greatly to their success as well, of course.</p>