Reprinted with permission from Jason Calacanis (www.calacanis.com), CEO of Mahalo.com and co-founder of the TechCrunch50.com conference taking place on September 14-15th in San Francisco.
About six years and $20,000 ago, I made the switch to Apple products after a 20-year love affair with Microsoft. That love affair started with the humble PCjr and ended with an IBM ThinkPad. From DOS to the first version of Windows (the run-time version that only loaded one program), and on to Windows 95 and XP, I dealt with the viruses, driver incompatibilities and other assorted quirks of Microsoft’s wildly open ecosystem.
It sucked to have to buy anti-virus software and reinstall Windows every 12 months, so moving to Apple’s rock-solid and virus-free OS was, in a word, delightful.
Sure, everything on the Mac platform costs twice as much, but considering the fact that my entire career centers around a desktop connected to the Internet, it really doesn’t matter if I spend $2 a day or $20 a day for my hardware. I replace everything at about a two-year pace (i.e. phone, MP3 player, desktop and laptop). So, at $10 a day, what some folks spend on Starbucks, I have a two year budget of $7,500 for my gear. In fact, the only things I don’t replace every two years are my 30″ and 24″ Dell Monitors, which I tend to keep for five years.
Over the last 12-18 months, my love affair with Apple has waned. Steve Jobs’ peculiar, rigidly closed, and severe worldview have started to cramp my style. It’s not entirely Steve’s fault, as Apple’s style and grace are a large part of what drew me to the platform initially. My collection of Mac products now includes seven iPods ($1,500), four Mac laptops ($8,000), two Airports ($500), a Time Capsule ($500), two Mac towers ($4,000), a Mac Mini ($600), two iMacs ($4,000) and all three iPhones ($1,500).
The cost of these items is just over $20,000, or about $3,300 a year. That’s almost exactly $10 a day–what I budget for technology in my life. Half of that is personal, half of that is probably business. While I know I am a high-end consumer, since I do this for a living, I think there are many folks putting $5-10 a day toward hardware. Blogger Robert Scoble of RackSpace must spend $20 a day and Leo Laporte of This Week in Tech must spend $40 a day!
Key Point 1: For the past six years, if Steve makes something, I buy it. Sometimes, I buy two (one for my wife).
Key Point 2: I over-pay for Apple products because I perceive them to be better (i.e. Windows-based hardware is 30-50% less–but at 38 years old I don’t care).
The Love Affair Ends
===================
Steve’s a great guy, and the love affair has been wonderful, but I’m starting to look past him and back to Microsoft for a more healthy relationship that is less–wait for it–anti-competitive in nature. Read the rest of this entry �
Entries (RSS)