Creative Reaction

Following up on an earlier post on Business Productivity, taking into consideration the often unmeasured and therefore under-accounted benefits of productivity. The first point was to buy Macs.

Being an Apple consultant myself, I’m almost blind to how much Macs improve productivity. I use Macs in practically every waking moment of my day, and my clients are Mac-only environments. It’s a no-brainer.

This article in CIO magazine lists a number of financial reasons why Macs cost about half as much to operate as similarly-equipped PCs, though it barely factors in the productivity gains, which are akin to the iceberg below the water’s surface.

It’s easy enough to find evidence of Macs requiring one-fifth to one-third of the man-hours compared with supporting Windows boxes. What few people notice is the downtime involved for the Windows users and the 2x - 4x more uptime for Macs!

Another study summarized here points out additional advantages in using Macs:

Mac OS X offers less “user interface friction” than Windows.

Mac OS X simply is faster when performing specific tasks compared to Windows.

The Mac OS X interface is more logical and intuitive.

It’s crazy to focus on the costs of hardware, software, support & training and not consider the value of ease of use and reliability (productivity) per creative times the creative’s salary per hour/day/week/month/year!