Office Observations, PC vs. Mac

No, this is not a story about the age-old battle of PC vs. Mac, but rather a simple observation about transitioning from old equipment to new when Macs and PC's are involved. The week before last, our boss decided it was time to upgrade our office equipment. Our office is all PC, but for the past year, I'd been using my personal MacBook. With that in mind, my boss gave me the option of getting a shiny new 21.5" iMac...an option he also gave the rest of the office. Naturally, I took him up on his offer and ordered the iMac; my colleague, while waffling about which way to go, finally opted for the PC option since that was what he was used to.

It was decided that I would order my iMac while my colleague would order the Dells for the rest of the office. I promptly went to MacMall, found my iMac, and placed the order...about 10 minutes spent. My colleague, on the other hand, went through a 3 hour ordeal with Dell, going back and forth between a US-based sales department and one not US-based. Eventually, though, he got the order in. All of the Dells were ordered without monitors since we have a plethora of LCD's laying around here, but even with that, the price for each Dell without a monitor and with basic specs rivaled that of my iMac. I suppose the days of cheap PC's for the office are long gone.

Two days later, my iMac arrived. I unpacked it, plugged it in, and performed the basic OSX setup steps and updates...about 15 minutes of time spent. After that, I copied the home folder from my MacBook over to the iMac, logged into MobileMe to sync my settings, downloaded a couple of my usual apps and installed them (the licenses are all per user, not machine, and were already present thanks to my settings being in "the cloud"). In all, I spent perhaps 45 minutes total setting up the iMac from start to finish. After that, it was back to work on client projects. It was, in a word, a snap.

A few days later, the Dell gear started trickling in with the arrival of a new fax machine, then a laptop (going to a work-at-home colleague); finally my colleague's PC's showed up. He was tasked with setting up both his and the boss' new Dells. Problems came right out of the box; the monitors we had on hand were not compatible with the new display port standard on the new PC's...so much for saving money on monitors. The Dells sat over the weekend while a solution was sought. On Monday, the boss and my colleague drove over to Best Buy to buy monitors and cables (what a racket they have with those cables) and was finally able to start setting the Dells up (the cost for each of the PC's was now over the cost of the iMac, which had better basic specs than the PC's to begin with). Well, here we are on Tuesday now and my colleague is still working on setting up the FIRST PC...that's right, all day yesterday was spent doing setup on one PC...there's still one to go. it's no small task to install and setup each application on a PC again and also deal with the licensing for each, then you get to the personal files for each one.

The long and the short of this post is this; my iMac took 45 minutes to setup, one of our PC's has taken one day and is still counting. Which would you prefer? My colleague has been left second guessing his choice...