DESPITE REPEATED attempts to market the Mac to corporate customers, it never caught on as a general-purpose business computing platform. Some blame the esoteric Mac OS for discouraging application development, while others point to Apple's limited range of systems and comparatively high prices.

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But Apple has been busy. The open, standards-based Mac OS X has replaced the proprietary Mac OS. A new hardware catalog line reaches from economical desktops and notebooks all the way up to the Xserve rack-mounted server. The server edition of OS X serves unlimited users for a fixed price -- a rarity these days -- and includes Java, Web, mail, and database services. The question is, what can businesses get from Apple that they don't already get from IBM, Sun, HP, and Dell?

Tom: While Apple has taken huge steps in the right direction, it still has ground to make up before it can make a bid to replace a Unix or PC system. Let's start with the server. Xserve is a sound, basic rack design with some nice innovations such as 64-bit PCI, Gigabit Ethernet, and FireWire. My beefs revolve around the absence of SCSI, the lack of out-of-band ("lights out") management, and the price/performance relative to Xeon. In a rack server, UltraATA/100 drives will not get it done. If the box is invisible to the LAN until the OS boots, admins will have to give the Xserve in-person stroking the rest of the rack doesn't require.

And while I admire the PowerPC CPU's efficiency in a desktop, I want servers that pack maximum firepower into minimum space. A PC rack box with dual Athlon MP or Xeon CPUs will beat Xserve senseless on overall performance, for less money.

P.J.: Sheesh, Tom. SCSI is so 1980s, but if you insist on wrestling with fat cables, look-alike terminators that can fry your hardware if you choose incorrectly, and ID numbers, go ahead and install a SCSI card. The Xserve has an extra PCI slot for just that reason. Apple's new storage array connects via Gigabit Ethernet, which even you must admit is a lot easier to work with than SCSI. Frankly, the main reasons to have lights-out management are flaky OSes and flaky apps.

The new Apple gear is stable. I've been trying to crash mine for a week (see "No worms here"), and the best I can do is snarl the boot process for a while. Finally, I feel better knowing that the core of OS X is the open-source Darwin. Those who care about such things can go through the source and verify that it's free of security pitfalls. Try that with a Redmond OS.

Tom: Open source is a fun flag to wave, P.J., but what relevant problems does it solve for businesses? It doesn't prevent bugs and it certainly doesn't keep hackers out of my data. I credit my understanding of OS internals to the access I had to Unix source code early in my career. But not every IT admin can or should follow that route. Top-down learning is more efficient, and Apple's OS X Server administrative tools encourage that approach. In fact, they put a fair bit of glass between the administrator and the Darwin knobs and switches the source code might uncover.

And before you get too misty over Apple's open-source generosity, remember that it runs out just before things get interesting. The Aqua user interface breaks a lot of new ground. It's a marked improvement over X Window, except for seamless GUI networking, which Aqua lacks.

Aqua could actually knock Windows off some desks. I'd love to see that happen, but it won't because Aqua only runs on boxes with Apple logos. Any user-facing app, including a server app with a management GUI, has to be written expressly for the Mac, as always.

P.J.: Since when should a server application care about the GUI? If you want to manage a server app on the server itself -- and weren't you just asking for lights-out management? -- then the application should use Java, which runs so well on OS X that even Sun is impressed.

Economics come into play on Apple's side as well. Even the most flint-hearted CFO has to like the pricing for OS X Server; unlimited users for $999 looks real tasty when compared to the latest Microsoft licensing scheme. From the desktop perspective, I have said for over 15 years that Macs are more reliable and simpler to use than Windows-based PCs, and don't even think about putting a novice on Linux. Granted, you can't build a white-box Mac. But most people want a computer that works when you unwrap it, without fussing over drivers, registry entries, or hardware conflicts. On the Wintel side, it's still "plug and pray" in my experience. If you're a cheapskate, or a masochist, keep buying Windows PCs. If you want your employees to get work done without having personal IT trainers, buy them Macs.

Return to the Special report: Apple unpeeled package.

Forum: Pick a side in the debate between Test Center analysts P.J. Connolly and Tom Yager over Apple's enterprise worthiness.