Litigation Support

Attorney?s debate Mac v. PC

By Blake Boyd

There was a great article published on the ABA Journal’s website today. Both the attorneys (Ben Stevens and Rick Georges) interviewed are listed in my blogroll. Both of their blogs are in my RSS Reader, and I believe both are very knowledgeable.

Some of the issues discussed truly hit home to me. I’ve been a PC user for 15+ years, during that time I was a typical “Mac hater” or “windows fanboy”. Then I got a Mac. And while I’m not an attorney, and parts of the article reference points and software that I would never use. There are some arguments that I feel strongly about.

“Aah, c?mon. price is most cer­tainly not an Apple advantage. In its zeal to be cool and proprietary, the new Apple ultralight, the MacBook Air, costs more than $1,700.

Com­parable specs are available on Windows machines for less than $1,000. And Apple is still a one-trick pony. There are a lot of companies building machines for the Windows market. Competition is a good thing.” (Rick Georges)

This might have been true before Apple switched to Intel processors, but it’s not today. There have been numerous price comparisons and you can go do them for yourself as well. Take a look here and here

“Apple promises three- to five-day turnaround and ?AppleCare.? Ex­cuse me, but if I want to repair my PC, I can do it myself or take it to my good buddy at the local com­puter store. If you really want to send your hard drive and computer to Apple for a few days, be my guest.” (Rick Georges)

I know for a fact that it’s nearly impossible to repair a dell, acer, gateway, compaq, or ibm laptop, as I have all of those brands stacked up in my office. All needing repairs that unfortunately are expensive enough to not warrant the effort. A mac desktop and a pc desktop are equally easy to work on. And if you’ve ever opened a Mac Pro, you’ve seen how well designed and laid out the internals are, very easy to work on.

“PowerPoint is the leading presentation software package. Enough said. Versions exist for both Windows and Mac. Keynote, the Mac competitor, does the same thing?so pick your poison.” (Rick Georges)

This is farthest from the truth. There is NO comparison between Keynote and PowerPoint. I wrote an extensive comparison here.

“However, for trial presentation, Windows is far superior. The lead­ing package, Sanction from Verdict Systems, has been around since 1999 and is a mature, functional product.” (Rick Georges)

Very true statement. There is not a trial presentation package (yet TrialSmart is close to getting to a competitive edge), that compares to Sanction or Trial Director for the Mac.

“You can either use a built-in technology called Boot Camp to boot your Mac into running Windows XP or Vista (which you must purchase separately), or you can purchase a third-party virtualization program such as Parallels or VMWare Fusion to run a Windows program in a separate window. For many, this is the key selling point. By purchasing a Mac plus a copy of Windows (and perhaps a virtualization program), you get essentially two computers for barely more than the price of one. No PC can make that claim.” (Ben Stevens)

I use Sanction in trial. But, as I sit here in trial writing this post on my MacBook Pro, I have the best of both worlds. On my secondary screen I have the presentation mode screen of Sanction running. I’m pulling up documents, video and Keynote presentations. All on one machine. Ben’s right, NO PC can do what I am doing now. And I can tell you one thing, the trial tech on the other side is green with envy, made apparent by “I wish we would switch to Macs”.

All of the other issues discussed in the article are not my Forté. But I do know that with Boot Camp or Parallels, one can accomplish anything on a mac that you can on a PC. And you can do it for the same price. Buying a Mac is like buying a hybrid, the best of both worlds.

Full post as published by The Trial Technologist's View on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).