"I've heard a horrible rumour that Prophecy uses Apple equipment…. Please say it's not true"

Apple Macbooks. We love Apple, and we love laptops - and therefore it follows that we love Macbooks. Now, I know the majority of our customers are screaming in terror at this statement. “OMW, Apple’s are such a rip off, the Prophecy guys are crazy to buy Apple, I’ve lost all respect for them!”

Well, firstly - yes, by many measures they are a rip off. If you look at a pure, spec for spec comparison Apple hardware is expensive - no doubt about it. And every time we buy a Macbook / Macbook Pro, we feel a little bit like we are being ripped off. But specs aren’t everything especially for a work system. We use a lot of software that is only available for OS X (Coda, Mailplane, Process, Navicat), and we benefit hugely from the stability, reliability and consistency of OS X. As an example - Juan, our developer, had 89 days uptime at one point on his macbook. One day he just noticed that his system was starting to be slightly laggy, and I suggested maybe he restart. When he couldn’t remember when last he had restarted we checked the uptime - 89 days. I just asked him now - and his current uptime is 23 days. (Henk and I both restarted recently for the Safari 5 update).

This kind of stability and reliability, from a software perspective, is tough to achieve on Windows. And beyond the software side of the equation, the hardware is awesome. Yes - you pay a premium. However, you get a system built to a very high standard, and that can survive bumps and bruises. Looking at Henk’s original Macbook Pro (which Ivan now uses), and Juan’s Macbook Pro - both systems about 3 years old - they look much better than the average Windows laptop we see. Yes, there are Windows laptops built to a similar quality (think professional grade HP and IBM systems), but they are few and far between. 

Of course, for gaming there is no doubt that Windows is the way to go (my gaming rig at home runs Windows, and Henk and Juan dual boot using Bootcamp for gaming), and for desktop systems the “Apple tax” is even higher.

Which might lead you to ask, why do we go for laptops? Why not stick with desktops? We get a couple of benefits out of laptops that would not be possible with desktops:

- Portability #1 - the ability to work at home, and to be available for emergencies over the weekend / on holiday is a huge plus. Who wants to go in to the office just to get an hour or two’s work done?

- Portability #2 - when our ADSL lines go down, or we have sustained load shedding, we can still keep working. We simply relocate to someone’s house / a coffee shop, and leave a skeleton crew to answer the phones and the doorbell. It still affects our productivity when the power or internet is down, but at least we can keep working

- Battery backup - with the possibility of load shedding always hanging over our heads, having a battery backup is a hugely important factor. Laptops come with built in batteries, and draw much less power from a UPS once they have run down. The Macbooks are particularly good in this regard - ours get between 4 and 7 hours productivity, and the latest generation add a couple of hours to this.

So there you have it. We aren’t rabid Apple fanboys (well, at least not most of the time), and we aren’t trying to force Apple down anyone’s throat - however, we are very happy with our Apple products, and for people with a similar use case, we would definitely recommend going Apple!

Comments

[Firestarter]

Nothing wrong with Mac.
Even when it gets to the gaming arena.
More and more support for mac around, albeit not the most hard-core releases.

My iMac outperforms my Desktop (Same specs down to the GFX) by a good margin when playing the same game(Win7 and OSX).

On the uptime thing, my little toshiba laptop had an uptime of over 140 days using XP ;) <3

[Adminstrator]

That's a great uptime! My best on XP was in the 30 to 40 day range, never easily got beyond that.

PJ