[RacerX]

Originally Posted by dmetzcher

I agree completely with fryke that Apple would do best by offering a bootable test drive DVD of the Mac OS. They have little on their Web site that really highlights the Mac OS because you have to be able to use it for a few minutes to see what it can do. Many will say, "tell them to go to an Apple store and test it out." Yeah, that's fine, but they won't, and that attitude isn't going to sell more Macs. It only reenforces the PC users view of the arrogant Mac user (i.e. - "We have the best OS. You are all stupid for using Windows. We don't really care if you switch, but, if you want to, you have to come to us, because we don't need you.").

Well, what if I was interested in switching to Windows? Is there a Windows test drive DVD that will run on my Mac? How is it any less arrogant for me to have to go to a PC store to try out Windows? I sure haven't seen this attitude hurting the sales of Windows.

Apple knows that as the other guys they don't have the ability to bully people into buying their systems. Further, they are very aware that first impressions are hard to overcome.

Which is why Apple spends so much of their time and effort on presentation.

Why did Apple drop Best Buy as a distributer back in 1998? Because the demo systems were in awful condition and it gave people a bad impression of Macs.

Apple isn't about to make the same mistake as Be. If you are going to try the Mac OS... it'll be in the best possible environment for the Mac OS. Period.


See, the amazing thing is, people form first impressions very early and very quickly. Once a first impression has been formed, people generally will look for ways to reenforce that first impression (they hate to be wrong).

Moving to Macs from another platform isn't easy. There are always problems. Now, if you formed a bad first impression of Macs, those problems are going to reenforce the user's negative views. But if the first impression was good, then users will be less likely to let problems deter them from their initial good impression.

This is why things are done this way at Apple. And even if you don't agree or thing this is totally wrong... it really doesn't matter, because things aren't going to change. Apple wants you in the perfect selling environment if you are a first time Mac buyer, not in some back alley attempting to get Mac OS X to work on a system it was not designed to work on.


And I can tell you from experience... the whole Mac on PCs thing is a pain in the rear!

I'm pretty well known as the Rhapsody guy on the net, and as such I get questions on how to install Rhapsody all the time. And usually it is from people trying to run Rhapsody on a system it was never designed to run on.

When I decided to run Rhapsody on a PC, I only bought PCs and PC parts that were listed as supported hardware. Did I have any problems? No.

These days I usually try to point people at the PowerPC version of Rhapsody because it runs great on actual Apple hardware. And I don't have to deal with people saying Rhapsody sucks because they never got a chance to see it actually running the way it should and they had gotten such a bad first impression trying to shoe horn it onto a system it should never have been on in the first place.


My reasons for agreeing with Apple on this matter come from my real world experiences with something like this... frankly, Apple really is doing the best thing!