The Best Windows PC Is An Apple Mac

I thought this was an interesting little finding: the best PC to run Windows on is an Apple Mac. OK, this isn't a 100% reliable test, it's not entirely and wholly comparable the test itself, but it does actually show us what we might want to do in order to get an affordable Windows PC. The finding is, really, that if you run Windows and only Windows then your PC will be much more reliable than if you run it with all the other guff the manufacturers like to put onto their machines.

The result comes from the PC management software firm Soluto and yes, of course they've released the information so that we'll all write about them. But by their tests it does turn out that a MacBook Pro is more reliable than any of the other PCs at running Windows than the others they monitor. As they say, this isn't an entirely and wholly direct comparison:

A main factor in this machine’s metrics is the fact that every Windows installation on it is clean. With PC manufacturers loading so much crapware on new laptops, this is a bit of an unfair competition. But on the other hand, PC makers should look at this data and aspire to ship PCs that perform just as well as a cleanly installed MacBook Pro. One could argue that we should not compare a cleanly installed MacBook Pro with an OEM-imaged PC from Acer or Dell . There’s sense behind this claim, and one of our next reports will include a separate comparison of only cleanly-installed machines. But – for this first report we simply compared the real PCs in the field, some with original images and some reinstalled by their users. We believe it’s more representative of reality.

Which leads us, of course, to what we can do to aid ourselves in getting a clean running Windows machine. As they note the number two box, an Acer (and not a top of the line one either) is one third of the price of the MacBook. So, one could get the MacBook, one could get the acer, do a clean install of Windows without all of the extra manufacturer's software and there we are, something with fewer blue screens of death than we're all used to.

Over and above this though is the question of, well, why is there so much (ahem) "crapware" loaded onto new laptops? To which the answer is, well, what else do you expect manufacturers to do? There has to be some product differentiation, somewhere after all.

There are levels of hardware out there, yes, but there's not much differentiation within a price band. Sure, there's people using Intel 's latest and whizziest, more RAM, bigger screens. Or AMD, less and smaller. But within a particular band of PCs there's really not all that much difference in the hardware. This is the great joy of WinTel of course, but for the manufacturer it's a curse. Given that there are what, two processing chip makers, a handful of screen, disk and RAM makers, there's really not much you can do to differentiate, in the mass market, the basic hardware. Perhaps some nice design can be added: but of course the OS is going to be exactly the same, that's part of the point.

So that's where hardware makers do try to differentiate: in the additional software that they add onto the OS. All of which, obviously, given the market fragmentation, gets less testing than that OS. But HP hopes to differentiate itself by all those "helpful" little extras that you get only on an HP machine, Samsung on a Samsung and so on all the way to WeBeCheap and their offerings. It is these very attempts at product differentiation, something the PowerBook doesn't (and doesn't have to) do which reduce that reliability.

Hmm. Maybe there's room in the market for the Plain Vanilla OS Notebook Company?