John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has written a great column about Paul Boutin recent story in Salon entiled "Flipping the Switch". The gist of Boutin's story is that Linux is going to take over Mac in terms of market share and people will start switching from Windows to Linux rather than Windows to Mac. He thinks this will lead to software publishers similiarly abondoning the Mac platform for Linux. The good news is that Gruber disects and refutes this piece of crap story paragraph by paragraph. In the end I was satisfied that my original decision not to read Boutin's story was justified.
Also, I thought it might be fun to test one of Boutin's claims. In paragraph 4 and 5 of his article he compairs a $1,999 1.6Ghz G5 desktop to a $248 Walmart Linux desktop. Gruber correctly condems this comparison as unfair and compairs the $248 Walmart Linux desktop to a Apple eMac at $799. I thought it would be fun to compare the 1.6Ghz G5 to a Dell Precision workstation with a 2.0Ghz Intel Xeon processor with Red hat 9.0 installed. The Dell Precision came to about $1,700. There are a few things missing from the Dell workstation. First, it doesn't have the DVD burner the G5 has. Also, as far as I can tell it doesn't have any Firewire (IEEE 1394) ports. Finally it has a standard ATA-100 IDE rather than the G5s faster serial ATA drive. If you add a DVD burner and sound card with Firewire to a Dell Precision with Windows it would cost an additional $240 (although this is not an option on the Linux version). This would bring the total cost to $1940. This is only $59 cheaper than the G5. So contrary to Boutin's assertion, comparable Linux and Apple workstations are similiar in price.
Posted by Noah Brimhall at June 27, 2003 08:48 AM