'Leave Mac-making to the experts'

Gartner's suggestion that Apple should quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell has met with a furious response from silicon.com readers.

News of the analyst house's report - titled Apple Should License the Mac to Dell - provoked a big response from readers, with the vast majority convinced Gartner has got it wrong.

The report was slammed by readers such as Eric Bartels, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands who said: "The Gartner report shows how out of touch most business analysts and venture capitalists are with what really matters in this age of branding."

Simon, an IT worker from Cumbria echoed this view: "I think [Gartner] show a complete reality failure here… The result would simply be a mass cheapening of the brand and ultimately a loss of market share."

The comparison between Apple and Dell was too much for one anonymous engineer, who said: "The Apple persona is its devotion to making a complete high quality product... Dell's agenda is to make cheap, very cheap adequate computers. The two do not mix."

A creative director from Tampa said: "This may have been a good idea in 1998 but now Apple is selling an experience, and that is really catching on. Apple is the BMW 7 series, Dell is the Chevy Cavalier."

And while none of the posters agreed with the Gartner report, Craig, a web application developer from Edinburgh, jumped to the defence of Dell.

He said: "I've owned and used a great number of PCs from a variety of manufacturers, including custom build over the years, and time and again Dells win out for reliability, cost and features."

But he added: "On the other hand I do look at Macs enviously - their design is breathtaking, beautiful even and the user experience is a mile ahead of Windows. But no one I know uses them for business because businesses don't buy things because [they're] cool.