If you have a Mac, get Apple’s new Magic Mouse. It’s worth the £55.
Why? It’s a trackpad and mouse in one. You can move, scroll, zoom and more with almost effortless ease. Very simple, very effective – within minutes I forgot I was using a completely new tool.
The Microsoft Store (US only) has started selling desktops and laptops direct to consumers – with “90 days of Microsoft Support Services included”. If MS provides phone support for the complete package of hardware, software and online services, this could finally be the IT support solution for home users – and will offer competition to Apple’s integrated hardware, software and support offering. Since Apple makes the hardware and much of your key software it can – and does – provide a great telephone-based or in-store support service. Result: happy Apple customers.
Currently, Windows home users get their hardware support from, say, Dell; their internet support from the ISP, or not…; their software support from… er… google or friends. The providers are fragmented so the support is poor – fingerpointing, lack of visibility and control of other parts of the system, etc.
So you get an IT support company to front it all up. Geek Squad offers a menu of fixed-price jobs or a fixed-price limited support service (eg excludes £99 site visits). But that ends up expensive and its interests aren’t aligned with the customer’s. Only by including all support, including on-site, for a fixed price is the provider incentivised to reduce problems rather than making money by fixing more of them.
That’s what we do at Conosco: our fixed-price all-inclusive IT support service covers remote and on-site support, covers hardware, software, internet connections, online services, the whole caboodle. The fixed pricing incentivises us to reduce problems, which is what the customer really wants.
The problem is it’s designed for businesses with five or more users – below that the account management costs don’t work and one side tends to feel it’s getting the wrong end of the fixed price deal. But if you don’t provide a personal account-managed service, the quality of service is rubbish – the customer has to repeat their situation each time they call, etc.
So there’s a huge hole in the market for high quality IT support for home users that aligns everyone’s interests.
Even if MS supports only its own software and services and fronts the hardware support, it has sufficient applications for most users’ needs. And supporting an entire system, especially if you made most of it, allows you to provide a great service.
So what will MS charge after 90 days and how? With control of the OS, software and services, it is in a powerful position to offer high-quality integrated support. Just like Apple does…
UPDATED 20 Oct 09 for the new MacBook: 20% cheaper than comparable Dell – see bottom
Apple’s bumper latest profits are being explained partly by the old saw that Macs are expensive. Old assumptions are worth kicking and this one is not true, at least for laptops: a Mac is up to 18% cheaper on a like-for-like comparison.
Let’s compare a business-spec Mac laptop with a Windows one. We’ll include Exchange support, as it’s the dominant email & calendaring system of choice for most businesses, but also look at the cost for a Google Apps user.
My starting point is my own business laptop: a 13″ MacBook Pro. For comparison, the 13.3″ Dell Latitude E4300. I’m giving Windows the benefit here – Dells aren’t as well made as Macs but they’re good enough.
I chose the faster 2.53GHz processor for each, to get an exact match. To match the high specs of the MacBook Pro, I had to add many of the Dell’s optional extras (Dell specialise in low headline prices for barebones configurations): MS Office Small Business (£179), screen camera, 4GB RAM, 250GB 5200rpm hard drive, larger battery, backlit keyboard and Bluetooth. To match the Mac’s lack of antivirus, I downgraded Dell’s to a 30 day trial.
The warranty and support options are difficult to match. Dell includes a 3 year next business day warranty service that is sufficient if you also have an IT support company on hand – Dell’s telephone support is notoriously ‘offshore’. Apple includes only a one year warranty by default so you really need to pay another £170 for AppleCare – but you then get a very high quality telephone support service as well as a 3 year warranty. To keep things equal, I upgraded Dell’s support to ProSupport (+£112) to match the quality of AppleCare and added the latter to the Mac. To match Office, I added iWork (£47) to the Mac.
The prices for the key options are (£ excluding VAT, including delivery):
| Option | Dell E4300 | MacBook Pro |
| Exchange & Office apps, full support | 1,486 | 1,216 |
| Exchange & Office apps, 3 yr warranty | 1,374 | 1,216 |
| Google Apps users, 3yr warranty | 1,195 | 1,169 |
If you are an Exchange and Office user with an IT department, the Mac is £158 cheaper. If you need full telephone support, the Mac is £270 less – 18%. These gaps are partly because Macs now have Exchange support built in so you can use the much cheaper iWork for editing documents, whilst Windows users still have to buy MS Office to get Outlook.
However if you moved to web-based services such as Google Apps and drop Office / iWork, the gap narrows to just £26 in favour of the Mac. But as a bonus, this Mac price also includes better telephone support and build quality (aluminium casing, etc).
Is that the end of Macs being more expensive than Windows? No – if you’re on a tight budget you can get a low-spec Windows laptop far cheaper than the most basic MacBook. But if you’re comparing like for like, a Mac laptop is cheaper.
UPDATE for the new MacBook released 20 Oct 09:
The new MacBook has a better LED screen, more power, a 7 hour battery and the fabulous multi-touch trackpad. It’s still in a plastic body, but it looks more than suitable for a frugal business. The closest Dell Latitude to this is the E4300 with the 2.4GHz processor; although slightly more than this MacBook’s 2.26GHz, it’s near enough. The Dell, configured to match, costs £1,103 (net); the MacBook with superior warranty and support costs £864 – more than 20% cheaper. If you need Exchange support, the gap could double.
Can this be right? I’ve had to add luxuries such as a camera, backlit keyboard, Bluetooth and larger battery to the Dell to match the typically well-spec’d Mac; removing these saves £94. The Mac is still much cheaper (and you get the incomparable multi-touch trackpad).
Microsoft has announced a new version of Outlook for the Mac – for late 2010. This is good news for many Mac users, irrelevant for many others and might indicate some desperation at Redmond.
It’s good news because Mac users have never had a good way to connect to MS Exchange, the dominant mail/calendar server for businesses. MS dropped Mac.Outlook after 1998, offering OS X users the Entourage program – which was and still is a dog: it lacks many Outlook features and is horrible to use. The new Outlook promises to have the same features as Windows.Outlook whilst being a true Mac application – e.g. storing data in files rather than a huge database (source of most Outlook problems).
Why did MS hobble Outlook/Entourage for the Mac? Presumably because Exchange has been essential for most businesses, so this would keep business users on Windows and perpetuate sales of MS Office. Indeed, Outlook is theirreplaceable part of Office – powerful, effective and unrivalled. Up to now, this has worked – at Conosco we’ve discouraged our customers from Macs for good practical reasons.
So why this change of heart and why announce it now, more than a year before it’s due? FUD – the old MS trick of spiking the opposition. Within a month Apple releases the Snow Leopard upgrade to OS X, which makes the Mac’s native mail and calendar apps work properly with Exchange. And many are now moving to web-based services such as Google Apps and Zoho anyway.
Too little too late. MS has probably lost the Apple community now – if you can drop Entourage/Outlook, you can drop MS Office (there are already good alternatives to Word/Excel/Powerpoint). Macs are eating into the PC market – in the last few months we’ve suddenly started selling a lot of Macs at Conosco. The best hope for MS is that their new software+service version of Office can outflank the competition – but it’s not even in beta yet.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Let’s all take a deep breath and get some perspective – the sharpest commentary on Google Chrome OS…
Honestly, Google, is there anyone in charge over there? Is there anyone who knows how to criticize anything in that f***ed up little Montessori preschool of yours? I mean I guess it’s nice that you all get to spend 20 percent of your time dreaming up useless shit, and I guess you have to use the Montessori method and tell everyone that whatever little piece of shit they’ve created is just so wonderful and perfect and beautiful — but really, as I’ve told Eric before, that doesn’t mean you have to release everything these bozos dream up.
And Lionel Ritchie’s role in Unix is revealed.
Finally, Apple’s Mac OS X operating system should be easily usable for the vast numbers (50%?) of businesses with Microsoft Exchange servers – the soon-coming Snow Leopard OS X upgrade has Exchange support built into Mail, iCal and Address Book. Not before time.
Apple has even allowed you to use Exchange calendar’s room availability and scheduling features – showstoppers for many of Conosco’s IT support customers… at last we won’t have to waste time vainly dissuading execs from buying themselves beautiful Mac laptops, and then screaming when the syncing breaks.
Due out in September for $29 (upgrade).
UPDATE: is this the moment when Microsoft’s hold on personal computers in business is released? Until now, using a Mac with Exchange has been painful – you have to use Entourage, which is a dog and lacks some features. OS X is much easier to use and much slicker than Windows, even W7, and at last there’s nothing left to stop business users switching to it. MS’s hold on the server remains – Exchange rules, especially in its Activesync software that is the only personal-info sync technology that never seems to trip up.
Microsoft are finally releasing Outlook for the Mac a version of Mac Entourage designed to work with MS Exchange, the default mail-contacts-calendar system for businesses. Mac users have struggled with Exchange for years – it’s the main hurdle in using a Mac in businesses – so this could be a milestone in Apple’s re-colonisation of corporates.
Technically, the update (still in beta) drops the WebDAV protocol and adopts Exchange Web Services, allowing closer integration with an Exchange server and faster sync speeds. New features include
These should go a long way (with the new features in Entourage 08) in levelling the field between Outlook on Windows and Entourage on Mac. The main area that Entourage lacks is any Visual Basic support, but most smaller companies don’t use that anyway.
At Conosco, our IT support services are committed to making Mac users comfortable in corporate Windows environments, and this.
Apple’s hold on the music industry’s cojones -
One chit the company holds is the power of the iTunes home page, where it promotes music… “Whether the industry likes it or not, the iTunes chart showing the most popular songs in America is a major influencer of how kids today discover and communicate with their friends what kind of music they like… It’s a very powerful thing right now in American pop culture and immediately validates a hit song.”
Apple chooses who gets to number 1 in the charts
several high-level music executives… said they operated in fear of Apple’s removing a label’s products from the iTunes store over a disagreement
and who doesn’t
They also say that the entire Apple staff, including Eddie Cue, the vice president in charge of iTunes who handles the relationships with the record labels, do their best to follow Mr. Jobs’s style in their own negotiating.
ouch!
Trying out the new iPhoto 09, which arrived today. One of the headline new features is facial recognition – tag a few faces in your library and iPhoto finds that person in other photos. It’s more amusing than useful, revealing that certain male friends may actually be girls underneath… but in one case it tagged a four-year old as her mother, which isn’t so dumb.
Tim Cook, the unknown, ascetic, workaholic stand-in for Steve Jobs, is profiled by Fortune -
He can be brutal
“I’ve seen him shred people, he asks you the questions he knows you can’t answer, and he keeps going and going. It isn’t funny, and it’s not fun.”
unnerving
In meetings he’s known for long, uncomfortable pauses, when all you hear is the sound of his tearing the wrapper of the energy bars he constantly eats.
and as direct as Warren Buffett
“This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”
but he’s probably been as responsible as Jobs for Apple’s resurgence. He’s run the operational side for some time -
“Operationally, when you think about what they’ve done – a massive retail-stores ramp, an expanded sales-channel presence, delivering new products without glitches, and managing huge seasonality – all speak to a company that is exceedingly well run,”
and by driving inventory down, reducing costs and charging high prices (chart), he’s given Apple the vast treasury that allows it to lock up global supplies of strategic new components.
Conosco’s IT service supports Apple, but we try to be a little gentler with our customers.
