The helpdesk in the IT department had about 9 people, all PC guys. There was a campaign to get a Mac guy on helpdesk. The IT department resisted big time. So the battle went all the way up to the president.
He asked how many IT guys were helping the PC owners. 9 was the answer.
And how many for Mac? Zero.
So he says: “Well the answer should be that we get macs for everybody and layoff the whole PC helpdesk department”
The Mac guy was hired in a week.

Spotlight is your friend.

If you’re familiar with use case scenarios for different professional fields, you’d recognize that “performance” is measured differently for each case. For example:

http://tinyurl.com/yt56bz

By definition, the Harvard IIC is composed of scientists with vastly varied backgrounds. The group thrives on differing perspectives which lead to novel approaches to both emerging and long-standing problems. A quick read of their project leads jumps from astronomers to biologists, neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, mathematicians, and of course, computer scientists. It seems far-fetched that this group could agree on anything, but most do agree on one thing — the technology that will help them achieve their goals.”

Goodman says, “I’d say 95% of the people most directly involved with Harvard IIC choose Mac as their primary platform. It is funny; if you walk in here, you would think we were sponsored by Apple.”

I’m sure some of those scientists are photographers, too.

My “silly source” is a highly-respected resource site for professional photographers. It reviews equipment actually used in the industry. Now, if you’re not familiar with the professional photography market perhaps you should educate yourself before making comments about what professional photographers ought to use. Learn why Nikon ED or Canon L-series glass is far more expensive than Sigma or Tamron, why a Gretag Macbeth EyeOne is more accurate than a Pantone Huey, or why a ProFoto strobe is more consistent than an Alien Bee.

“adults and adolescents have different priorities when it comes to spending money”

Adults also have different priorities in choosing the best tools to get a job done, because their hourly rates are quite high, and they can’t afford to have equipment not work in front of a demanding client, or spend otherwise billable hours troubleshooting stuff that was cobbled together. As we already know from PC Magazine and Consumer Reports, Apple hardware scores the highest reliability marks. Not Dell. Not Asus. And if a photographer uses Aperture instead of Adobe Lightroom, well, Aperture only runs on Macs.

So you’re right — if your use case scenario is to spend less on hardware because you’re not earning income from it then it makes perfect sense to go with Asus or whatever, so long as you recognize that your time has no economic value. If your use case scenario is to minimize hardware downtime and use what’s most reliable because your clients accept no excuses, then you go buy the most reliable stuff you can afford — and buy backups regardless. Now, a Hasselblad H3D costs over $30,000. Even a MacBook Pro is chump change by comparison. And if the gear is all fully tax deductible, the price premium for the MacBook Pro is worth the extra credibility with clients, and peace of mind on assignment.

Besides, there’s one big advantage Mac portables have over Windows PCs: they wake from sleep much faster, which makes a huge difference when shooting on location and you’re trying to conserve battery power between card downloads.

“Again, not everyone is a photographer.”

Oh, that’s for sure. As one workshop instructor at the Nikon School reminded us, most “photographers” are in fact just “people with cameras.”

The Macbook Pro 15.4″ has an LCD that does up to 1440×900 native, and you can choose between glossy and non-glossy screens. All of this is driven by an 8600M GT-based graphics card. That’s all the information provided. Your silly source only compared the new Pro with others Pros…literally LED and CCFL, the difference between which is obvious. No mention of a non-Mac laptop.

The Asus C90 15.4″ packs an LCD that does up to 1680×1050 native on a Color Shine-certified LCD, driven by the same graphics card as the Pro (upgradeable to double the GDDR-RAM, though that is irrelevant when discussing color reproduction and contrast).

So we’re talking the next step up in terms of widescreen resolutions on the C90, driven by the same graphics card, the C90 has a top-of-the-line Color shine LCD, and you’re saying that LED backlighting makes all the difference and then some? Let’s just say I have my doubts on that one. The extreme upgrade in pixel density alone when going from a Pro to a C90 means that color reproduction itself is going to be better; unless Apple has somehow gotten their pixels to display more than one color at a time

I have never heard of someone focusing on LCD quality as much as this. Again, not everyone is a photographer. Most people just need their programs to run faster, and that has nothing to do with LCDs. If you buy a laptop from a company the people know about, you aren’t going to get some completely unacceptable LCD screen. I’ve recommended CCFL and LED (usually the Dell M1330) to my peers and I’ve seen them both. The LED-based screen looks great, but so do all the other CCFLs.

I’m in my senior year of high school. So sorry if my summer jobs don’t do it for you but I have college to pay for and activities to do. Instead of using my time to make money during the school year, I play sports every season, participate in FIRST Robotics, and am active in Boy Scouts (I’m a month from my Eagle Board of Review). Does it make sense that adults and adolescents have different priorities when it comes to spending money?

Gabriel, I suggest you carefully re-read what you just wrote above. Let me put it this way. If I showed up on a shoot with an Asus laptop, the art director will not care that it’s cheap or outperforms a MacBook Pro, but he or she will certainly care about the quality of the LCD on which image approvals will be made, and right now, the MacBook Pro 15 with the LED-backlit screen has the best portable display available, period. If you had read the article cited in the second link, you would realize how foolish your entire post is, since you seem to equate “performance” with hardware specs, not including display colour accuracy and gamut. Now, since you’ve adopted a supercilious tone in addressing me, I will point out that if $1000 every two years is all you can afford on computer upgrades, perhaps you’re not making the best use of your time to earn income that might allow you to buy the finer things in life.

That goes without saying. For example, the hard drive on a MacBook Pro is difficult to replace. On a Toshiba Satellite, Lenovo ThinkPad, or Dell Latitude, it’s often much easier. By day I work for a company of over 23,000 employees, with at least as many PCs, many of them portables. Rapid access to hardware internals is a big plus for our IT support staff.