Mac OS X had the benefit of being able to almost entirely ditch its old code base in favor of a stable Unix core with OS X, whereas Windows (even up through Vista) still has to support software that was written 20 years ago. The difficulty of that task increases exponentially with every release. It's a wonder Vista even boots at all.

MS is (supposedly) ditching much of its legacy software support in the next Windows after Vista, which would do wonders for its stability, though I'll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, Vista is garbage and many apps are moving to the web and becoming OS-neutral, as you pointed out.

I would probably be selling my Microsoft stock if I had any.

Your "substantive reason number one" is less substantive than you thought.

SAP has Java versions of their GUI apps for a number of OSes, including Mac OS X.

Check out "ftp[colon-slash-slash]ftp[dot]sap[dot]com[slash]pub" for their apps. In particular, navigate to "[slash]sapgui[slash]java[slash]710r4" (the latest version), where you will see Java versions for six OSes: AIX, HP-UX, Linux, MacOSX, SunOS, and Win32.

I've run various versions of the Java client for Mac OS X for a couple of years without problem.

I used to make fun of Mac people, now I am one. It took me about a day after getting my MacBook Pro for work.
Our VP of Engineering only allows Macs for everyone in his Department (including myself).

It's not perfect, and I'll have my desktop at home be a PC for the foreseeable future for gaming purposes, but yeah. It just works.

"Remember, son-
I didn't sell out,
I bought in."

For small businesses, Macs are quite cost-effective. The only essential addon I'd recommend at initial purchase is AppleCare Protection Plan (APP) for the extended phone support and repair coverage. You never know if you may need it.

Let's say you have a small biz and you need five Macs (two midrange MacBooks and three midrange 20" iMacs). Total hardware cost pretax at MSRP = $7095. APP for these machines will cost an additional $1005 and there's no tax charged. The tax is only on the hardware. If you buy them at your local Apple Store, they may give you a small discount on the purchase if you say it will be for a small business.

Let's say you don't need MS Office: you can use NeoOffice (free) or you can purchase iWork 08 Family Pack (5 users) for only $99. You can probably get away with purchasing MS Office Home and Student ($119.99/3-user pk at Newegg.com). The lowest a single user license of MS Office (Small Biz, Windows) can cost you is $219.99.

The vast majority of small businesses don't need Exchange, so you save tons of money by not having to buy a server to run it and CALs (Client Access Licenses) to connect to it. You can use your ISPs email service (they usually give you the ability to set up multiple emails from one account), Gmail or other free alternatives, or if you need to sync data between all Macs, there are a few low cost alternatives, including Apple's .Mac at $99/yr.

My point is, you can get very creative and cheap with Macs making the bulk of your investment just the hardware and the service plan. The nice thing about them is that they will give you longer service life and if you need to upgrade the OS later on, it's only $199/5-user pk.

"Mac OS X had the benefit of being able to almost entirely ditch its old code base in favor of a stable Unix core with OS X, whereas Windows (even up through Vista) still has to support software that was written 20 years ago."

Uh...one of the first demos of "Classic mode" in Mac OS X was running MacDraw, written in 1984.

It's actually only with the advent of Intel machines in 2006 that Apple stopped supporting "Classic Mode" on Macintoshes. So 22 years of support isn't too shabby.

Well done. Well reasoned and well written.

And amen on networking. I refuse to deal with Windows networking questions anymore, and I don't have to deal with them with Macs.

Post of the issues being discussed are not business issues at all. But user choice issues of how they like to use a computer. Its pretty much home consumer issues.

You should be talking about issues like cost of servers, licensing, Active X, .Net, ASP, VBA, entrenched technologies, training resources like MSDN, certification, etc, etc.

There's also the availability of professionals with the required skill sets, and marketable skill sets which play a large part in getting market/business penetration.

The best reason to look into using Macs for your small business is that you're not locking yourself into anything by making the switch.

Find some test subjects and, when the time comes, buy them Macs instead of PCs. Work with them to see if you can provide access to the same sorts of software that they were using before. Revel in the lack of support issues once they're up and running.

If you have some programs that have no Mac equivalent yet, try them with Parallels or Fusion or even VirtualBox, and keep looking for alternatives that can get you away from the Windows software.

And if all else fails, and you're out of other options, install Windows (or even Linux) on the darned things! You've got the best designed desktop or laptop on the market right there, and even the PC magazines admitted that, for a while at least, there was no better Windows laptop than a Macbook Pro.

Sure, you may have paid more in the beginning for a Mac than you would have for a PC laptop, but you're all but guaranteed a longer lifespan than you'd have found with that $800 Acer or $500 Gateway.

Thinking in terms of ROI, it feels like a no brainer. And when you're finally settled in with Macs at every desk, you start working on the server room, and watch the same thing happen there.

The 18-24 month OS X updates can't be said to be without their upheaval. You still need to make sure your software and your infrastructure is ready for it. The real problem is that Apple cuts support for the previous OS with the first machines that ship after the new one comes out. If you buy a newly revisioned machine after a new OS X comes out, it will not run the previous OS due to lack of built-in drivers. This is the most common way of being dragged up to the new version, like it or not.

As a Mac IT consultant, I'm currently in the throes of this now with Leopard. You really get stuck when you're doing client management through Open Directory. For example, Leopard clients can't log into accounts hosted from Tiger Server. So, when you buy a new machine that has to run Leopard, you need to upgrade the server to Leopard as well in order for your network accounts to work.

That said, I just did this exact thing for a client yesterday. I, by myself, backed up their server, formatted it, set it back up with Leopard Server, and reconfigured all services in 7 hours. DNS, DHCP, Open Directory w/Kerberos, NAT, VPN, AFP, SMB and Web. Pretty smooth. I can't get a Windows client set back up in 7 hours, much less a server. Not to mention, a business this size (~15 people) could never afford to have a system that sophisticated with Windows. That server is domain controller, file server and Internet gateway all in one little Xserve run by one IT consultant who comes one day a month. The support costs alone would bury them on Windows.

The thing I like about Macs is Apple can't play the blame game. Because Apple builds the whole widget if I phone them about a problem they can't say it's not their issue. If I call an OEM they often say, "Call Microsoft, it's an OS issue." When I call Microsoft, they say, "Call the OEM, it's a hardware issue." :)

Blum's reason to not switch to Macs - "Windows Vista, properly installed and used in tandem with Web-based productivity tools, is a powerful, powerful alternative." is my primary reason for businesses to switch to Macs. Web-based applications make it so much easier to consider moving away from Windows. Most web-based apps are OS-neutral ; therefore the age-old argument that Windows has more applications is just about over.

Yet this does not offer in itself a compelling reasons to move away from Windows.

2. Ease of tech support
I'm not going to say that there is zero need for tech support in a Mac environment. But it is dramatically less than in a Windows environment. Because the Mac OS runs on a Unix base, it is infinitely more stable than Windows.

This is a naive statement based on a pejorative assumption of NT and hyperbole. "Unix" isn't some magical ticket to system stability. Quite plainly, you can make a shoddy Unix. NT derived systems have proven to be competitive in stability and data integrety. From research into system architecture and from personal experience I can only conclude that the systems are quite close and it all depends on how they are managed. The Unix is magically more stable than Windows assuption is a myth derived from ignorance.

In the two months that I have had my Macbook Pro, I have had to reboot it only three times and those were just for installing major OS upgrades and during the initial setup.

I have an XP install that is five or six years old and has endured numberous upgrades, including a motherboard switch. It's probably crashed few enough times to be counted on one hand, mostly from aging and failing hardware.

Time equals money. If you work for a company with more than 20 employees, how much time do you think is spent each week with your employees waiting for Windows to reboot or start up in the morning?

I'd be more worried about users who don't understand how to simply log out, if you value that time so importantly.

Also, most of the time rebooting doesn't fix the problem. It's standard troubleshooting for more than just Windows applications to fix things like memory-leaking applications and even user incompetence.

How much time is spent and how much money is spent by an IT department that takes dozens of support calls a day to only tell the effected employee to reboot their computer?

I work for a large IT department that oversees tens of thousands of WindowsXP seats. Support calls for problems inherent of Windows number very few percentage-wise. Offhand, I'd say the biggest problems are users forgetting passwords, Telecommuter's routers failing, Unix Mainframe applications crapping out, people dropping laptops, and users who don't know how to do their jobs. All these these things definitely outnumber Windows related problems in Enterprise IT.

3. Productivity
Beyond some of the technical support and reboot issues that I mentioned in the last point, I have found that I am dramatically more productive using my Mac. I talked to a good friend of mine last night who is a computer genius. I asked him generally how long it takes him to get a new PC up and running and configured just the way he likes it. "About a week." That isn't too far off of my experience.

From an objective standpoint this is nonsense. If you're missing an application you need, you install it. You don't like the desktop background? you change it. Your statement is not coherent.

Almost everytime I have gotten a new PC I have spent tremendous time setting up the computer, uninstalling all the garbage software, and downloading and installing other needed software (most of which require reboots after every installation).

1) You're buying crappy ultra-lowend hardware that most IT places are scrupulous enough not to order if crapware is that big of an issue. There are a number of Mid-tier vendors who will offer a clean install for business use.

2) Are you claiming OSX magically has all the applications businesses require pre-installed?

3) Exactly which software are you loading that requires a reboot? Very little in the way of desktop applications require or prompt for a reboot. the only exceptions are things that alter services and such, and on any system you would have to perform a reboot or restart those services.

After receiving my new Macbook Pro, I was completely done with my setup in about two hours and ready to work. Take that experience and multiply it across your business.

Work? with what?

4. Networking
Having worked in IT, I have come to believe that computer networking is one of the dark arts that involves seances and incantations. Once again, tremendous resources are swallowed up every year dealing with networking issues. One little episode with my Mac convinced me that Macs are superior for networking.

If one issue can convince you, then you lack objectivity. Networking issues are also not largely the fault of Windows, but of routers, hardware failures, and servers. Windows issues related to networking are normally fixed by a simple repair operation.

Over the years I have had many PC laptops from work that I would bring home. I was never able to consistently network my work laptop with my home desktop to either share my home printer or to share files.

It's very easy to do in XP. Share printers in XP? a few clicks. You can even queue the drivers for other workstations to install. Network Drives? easily mapped with a few clicks and a path. Shared folders? Easily done as well with very basic understanding.

Why should this be so hard?

It really isn't

5. The Lack of IT Upheaval every 5 years

This is a non-existant threat on the windows side perpetuated by paranoia that Microsoft just is bound to do something bad to it's core customers.

One of the biggest reason why I switched to a Mac was because of Vista and being forced to upgrade to a buggy OS from one (Windows XP) that was working perfectly fine for me. I have heard many grumblings from IT folks about not wanting to upgrade their company to Vista.

And they will not have to. Microsoft gives very long lead times for End of Lifing systems. It's currently set in 2014 for XP. It's also a foregone conclusion that they'll extend it by continuing to offer patches and security fixes like they have for other antiquated systems.

Contrast that to Apple who has in recent history End of Life'd systems with no prior announcement at all. They just stop posting patches and fixes. 10.2's last security patch was in 2004. When will 10.3 be end of life'd? Maybe it allready has as it's had no update since 2007. Panther had a life of about four years while Jaguar's was two. You simply cannot accept a platform into an Enterprise environment where you could all of a sudden not receive updates and be forced to roll out a completely new version.

And this conversation happens about every five years when Windows comes out with a new OS that has much higher hardware requirements, new drivers, not to mention additional training requirements for IT professionals. I suppose some IT people view this as a virtual job insurance but I can't imagine why anyone would enjoy the nightmare that often is a major OS upgrade.

You have described Apple quite well there.

The Mac OS on the other hand, seems to have more of an evolutionary approach to OS advancements, rather than developing an entirely new GUI on top of an old kernel.

You mean like an old kernel like Mach that was first developed in 1984?

Interesting thread. I agree with a lot of what JfW said, although I have not had any experience with Macs in the last 10 years or so. I currently have three Dell machines running Windows XP x64 (including a laptop) that are swimming along quite nicely. And XP x64 is a little more problematic as some applications are not designed for 64-bit systems. I tend to think that Macs are great if your primary needs are Windows Office type applications or picture/video work, and PCs are better suited to those that do computational work.

Also, as JfW pointed out, I find point #3 very odd, unless you are building your own machine from scratch--so to speak. It takes "about a week" to get a PC set up the way you want it? Who are you buying from, and what in the world are you doing to it? :)