Green IT Toolkit

Is Apple on the way out?

David Berlind ZDNet.com

Published: 13 Oct 2004 17:45 BST

What about Internet Explorer? As it turns out, Safari, Apple's built-in Web browser, doesn't work with the open source-based WordPress blog authoring system that we use as well as IE does. I had similar problems with Opera. WordPress has been my only problem so far, and to overcome the problem I will download Mozilla.org's Firefox because I've been told by almost everybody that it solves the problem. Other than that, Safari has been great. This leaves me with one outstanding problem -- my Visual Basic application that relies on Outlook's programmable classes. But this isn't a problem that most people have and I'm now looking into redoing the application in Java. OS X is not only a great system for running a Java virtual machine, it's supposedly a great system for developing Java applications (more on that in another column).

What else about OS X is a factor in my decision? Aside from the 100 percent freely included XCode integrated development environment (IDE), I'm loving at least two other built-in features to OS X.

First is the built-in support for the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS). Right now, I use one of my Linux boxes as a print server and printing to it from Windows has not been without its problems. Linux includes a technology called SAMBA for Windows-based file and printer sharing, but it's tricky to configure and use. With OS X's support for CUPS, sharing the Linux printer was a no-brainer. This made me especially happy since the printer is an HP Deskjet 5550 photo printer and iPhoto (OS X's built-in photo editing and management application) allows me to generate some nice output without running out and buying PhotoShop.

Second is OS X's built in support for X Windows. There are some GUI-based apps such as Ethereal that I like to run on my Linux boxes. Accessing them remotely with Windows was impossible without buying an expensive X Server. Thanks to OS X's built-in X Server that problem goes away.

Apart from my VB application, one question remains. Now that I've switched, would I recommend that others do it? For me, and I suspect others, the answer comes down to a question of acquisition cost and hardware. I say "acquisition cost" because I have heard that over the long run Macs -- with zero-configuration focused technologies like Rendezvous -- have proven themselves to have a lower total cost of ownership than Windows-based systems. I say this with the major caveat that I haven't seen any recently published studies that take into account recent improvements in the manageability of both OS X and Windows. Many would argue that just the security situation alone is enough to paint OS X in positive TCO light (rest assured that if OS X were as big a target as Windows, it would have its share of problems). Assuming that each has their strengths and weaknesses from a TCO perspective and that their TCO nets out to be the same (a conservative assumption in an attempt at an apples-to-apples comparison), we have to look at the hardware.