Savings Over Headaches

Sometimes saving money just leads to headaches. And the biggest market you can see this is in the PC industry. The reason Apple only has a small fraction of the market share (though a highly profitable share) is that people claim that they're so expensive. Sure, those sweet ass Apple computers are 2 to 3 times more than what you'd pay for a Dell or a Gateway. You can buy towers from those manufacturers for 400 bucks easy compared to a $1500 Apple computer.

So thats why most people buy them. But they are also buying this gigantic anti-virus headache. Running a windows OS is like painting a big target on your ass and holding a "come and get it haxxors" sign planted in your rectum. So now you have to go out and get yourself a fairly expensive anti-virus program. And if you're extremely paranoid, several anti-spyware/adware/pop-up utilities to run at the same time that you're running your anti-virus program. That whole "more is better" way of thinking gets our customers in trouble, since all these programs will start trying to remove each other.

This is the majority of the calls that we deal with here. I know we would be out of a job if everyone suddenly switched from those crappy, cheap, PC computers to Apple systems. So I'm just ranting about it. If you people want to keep this constant state of paranoia going . . . keep using your Dells and Gateways that you got at the flea market. Knock yourself out. Seriously. Grab that computer and beat your head in with it. That would be much more painless than having to call one of the anti-virus companies trying to get tech support from them.

Not that we're terrible at helping people. It's just the volume of calls that we get here is just too much to handle. We're not big like Norton/McAfee (but we did beat them out in the last test PC World ran on the virus programs), so of course there's going to be a long wait for tech support. And when they get to me, the glorified filtering process, they get pissed because we can't offer free telephone support for single license users.

But oh well, work is work and paying the bills is a good thing. It just never ceases to amaze me how people put themselves in this situation. People are just gluttons for punishment.