“Coming from the guy who’s software was so bad, drove 30% of his market share to Apple.”
Yeah, I “saw the light” back when Apple had only the Plus with the 9” screen and a floppy port. I worked for a startup company that ended up with more than 1,000 employees, all on Macs with an IT department that was about four guys. In 9 years, I had one HD failure that took minutes to change with no loss of data. Then I moved to a “well known company” that’s across the street from HP HQ in Palo Alto that was PC based. Nothing worked! The IT dept. ran around with their hair on fire trying to make a bastard network of every variety of PC ever produced run without crashing. And back then, PC’s were still non-GUI when Macs had been GUI for years (Windows 95, like Apple 1987). People who like PCs are similar to those who like British cars. They have to have at least two of them so there’s the possibilty that one will work at a given point in time, plus they can spend their weekends fixing the one that’s broken down.
I had experience maintaining a bunch of computers for an institution in the late 1980s as well. Almost all of the computers that I was responsible for were identical. It is always far easier to keep a bunch of identical computers running well whether in a network or not. It also doesn't matter whether they are Apples, PCs or some other variant.
I had a bunch of family and friends constantly relying on me to keep their computers running. It finally got to be much too time consuming. I finally put together a whole batch of computers with identical hardware that I sourced and was able to get a quantity discount on. Once I set up the first one I was able to make an image of the hard drive. Everyone who wanted my ongoing assistance had to buy one from me. I purchased additional hardware for spare parts and additional machines which all ended up getting used eventually. These were not sourced with expensive hardware but there were very few failures and I had a very easy time keeping everyone running.
I have assisted some people with their Apple products over the years and quite frankly in my experience they have never delivered the same bang for the buck. Their dependability has always seemed to directly related to the lack of variety not superior products or innovation. This is especially true in networking situations. However, I do appreciate Apple products very much; typically if someone contacted me with a problem with their Apple product I could just tell them that they would have to get ahold of an Apple expert and they would leave me alone.