News "Growing disparity" in Mac vs PC pricing

Only thing I've ever used a Mac for was video editing.. and I went cheap, got a G4, 500Mhz, 256mbs RAM. You know what though, it ran Final Cut Pro and OSX Tiger just peachy, was a tad slow at rendering.. took 37 hours to render 5mins of video, but hey, it worked.

But def. agree, Apple's prices are getting ridiculous, and the "build quality" isn't that great. I know quite a few Mac owning friends who have major problems with their Macbook Pros and my roommate even sent his in 7 times for major repairs within 9 months, he recently demanded a refund for it though.

Only thing I like from Apple is the iPhone, and that's it. But I'm sure a cheaper and better alternative will soon become available.

 

Macs have significantly lower maintenance costs than PCs.

I run four macs in my office, which require about 3 hours (for all four of them) of preventive maintenance per month - that's less than 40 hours of maintenance per year!

Besides, OSX is much sturdier than windows (I just had to reinstall Vista on my PC after SP1 thrashed the OS, I had an HP laptop that had windows reinstalled some 10 times in less than nine months!), which is very important on mission critical machines. Even in the event of a catastrophic system or hardware failure (my powermac G4 went through 5 hard drives), it is very easy to reinstall the OS without losing any applications, data, preferences or user accounts.

It is not without its faults, however. My macbook has a hideous intel GMA 950, upgradability is quite limited (on the macbook / macmini / imac you're limited to memory and hard drive upgrades, the mac pro / powermacs are more flexible - you can swap video cards, add PCI cards and in some instances even change the processor(s)).

As I see it, macs are great for work - particularly in the fields of architecture, advertising, graphics and media design. PCs are far superior for gaming and entertainment, but I wouldnt trust them with any critical data.

But being a multi-platform user (OSX, linux, xp, vista) has made me less of a bigot, so I find these heated debates on the superiority of either PC or mac very tiring. We could also argue that any self-built PC is far superior to a Dell or HP or Acer or whatever.

Be sure to know your needs and desires, and do not expect a machine to do what it is not meant to.

 

And every car just takes you from point A to point B and every watch just tells you the time...
I always like to point people to this picture when they compare a dell box to the iMac.
If you want to compare a Dell to a iMac, pick the Dell XPS One, then you will see that the iMac isn't that expensive in comparison.

 

the ONLY product i am willing to buy second hand from Apple is an iPhone.
want me to pay £199 + contract for iPhone 3G? NEVER!

for Apple computers, as people said, it's because of the branding. the hardware is P.O.S. to be honest, but the software is pretty good, with full driver support all round.

i personally would prefer doing research on hardware, then buy Hackintosh compatible hardware to have an Hackintosh with Leo4All install on it. (was going to try to install Leo4All until i accedentally made by 500GB into Dynamic volume by Vista)

 

People are willing to pay so much more for Apple products. I believe it is because of the brand. Apple has gotten so trendy now. Yes, the iPhone is slick, but if another company, say, Microsoft, came out with the exact same product instead, would it get nearly the same hype?

Same thing with iPods.

 

Putting them up against Dell isn't even fair. Dell uses made-to-break components the manufacturers won't even put their names on and they charge too much to boot. Stack an Apple computer against a homebuilt with exactly equivalent specs and see what you find.

 

Well just look at the Mojave experiment, people like Vista more when they don't know its Vista. Shows that Microsoft still has a long way to go.

 

The very high end macs are better value - the big eight-core Mac Pros, etc, price out fairly reasonably compared to a comparable server board and a couple of quad Xeons.

What's more interesting to me than the fact that they're overpriced (well, duh) is their greater popularity in the US. Certainly this is somewhat due to the greater disposable income there, and the fact that they're not quite so badly overpriced, but it's always surprising to my American friends that I don't own a mac nor do I know anyone who does. Any American will, if he doesn't have one himself, know someone who does. People in the US just don't seem to get how unpopular Apple are here because they're so painfully expensive.

P

 

If anything they should be less, i mean they cant play many games.

 

Hardly a fair comparison in that pic - the XPS allows you to change everything, not everyone wants a one-size-fits-all enforced scheme. You won't see people whipping the Mac open and slotting a new graphics card in when it's outdated in 12 months, which you will with the XPS.

That, and that cable management is dogshit. I'm sure most of us can have a desk looking much neater than that pretty simply. Besides, what does it really matter? You set a PC/Mac up, set the cables how they should be and that's it, you don't need to touch them again for ages. If you're that anal about not seeing the cables then you've got problems.

Oh, and the whole point of the article is a spec-to-spec comparison between Macs and PC's. Comparing those two is ridiculous.

Macs have their place, as do PC's. Macs are (imho) still overpriced. When they have a hardware refresh with new tech they're pretty competitively priced, but then it doesn't change for a year, leaving you with a hefty bill. Dell are constantly updating their prices and refreshing lineups.

 

my pc kills macs dead
so there

 

Maybe part of the deal comes in the way Macs are designed to work right out of the box with not a lot of configuring required. Call it opportunity cost. My parents recently bought a new laptop to replace an old, bricked desktop. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning all the unnecessary prepackaged junk off the laptop, then transferring files and settings from the old XP machine to the new Vista laptop.

If I had charged for my time, the PC would have cost much more than a comparable Mac. Of course, your mileage may vary, but that was my experience.

-monkey

 

apple is hardly the only company that makes something that looks better than the avg dell box. sony's lt for example linky. mac mini? nothing unique either, aopen minipc, linky.

Where the ripping off gets even worse is ram, seriously, apple charges 400$ for 4GB DDR2 6400 and what they sell you is what is referred to as stay away from value stuff. Kingston Value Ram 4GB DDR2 6400 costs 76.99$ at newegg. 76.99 ->400$, thats what I call markup and there is no fancy looking case involved.

 

indeed. i'm more than happy to pay the premium for what i perceive to be a better product for my needs. i don't really care if the cpu is 6 months old... in fact i'd have to check the spec of my macbook to tell you exactly what's in it

 

Yeah i know that the XPS allows you to change everything but thats not the point i tried to make. You pay more for the iMac because you get a more compact computer, its easier to build the XPS in the picture than it is to build the iMac.
I call the comparison in the research flawed because they compare a regular Dell with aniMac which is an all-in-one and not both companies all-in-ones like the iMac and XPS One, if you do that comparison the iMac gives you more spec for your money than the XPS One, Dells matching computer.

I didn't say anything about that Apple was the only company making computers that look better than the avg dell box. That Sony computer looks good but it isn't really cheaper than an iMac.
The AOpen MiniPC isn't bad either but the Mac mini haven't been updated in over a year and as said before Macs are good value when they are updated but the further you go between updates the more they lose in value.

I'm aware that Apple rips of people in the case of ram and it's kinda sad but most big companies charge a lot for ram so its hardly surprising. Also, you are only two screws away from changing the ram in an iMac so it's not exactly hard to do yourself even if you don't know anything about computers.

 

what's the point of adding RAM yourself? why not just buy a cheap local shop built computer, and put Hackintosh on it?

 

I have a mac laptop and a PC desktop. I have been using the mac for over a year now and have not had a single burp from the thing. It works as it should, and is easy to use.

I use my PC for gaming and Music organization. I have not ever, in all my computing experiences, had a windows based computer not give me some kind of burp or strange issue every once in a while.

Build quality is very inportant to Mac, and in my experiences it shows. They are still a little over priced though, I agree with you there.

 

How many non-Apple apps, drivers, add-ons, etc do you use on your Mac? How many non-Microsoft do you use on Windows?

 

the only reason they charge so much, is so Mac fanboys can continue to be elitist snobs.

Mac comic strip (NSFW language)

 

I'm sure that Apple is already starting to feel the squeeze... our economy is "entering" a recession (I think it already is in one). The housing market's bubble has burst, and people are getting less hours at work. Gas prices continue to rise, and many people are feeling the same squeeze that europe and other countries have felt for years and years. Folks that used to take their $50,000 dualie trucks out with their $50,000 toy haulers loaded with $20,000 of dirtbikes (all purchased on credit of course ) out for a 7 hour drive across state lines... now don't even have the money to drive to work.

Combine that with a increasingly stupid and worthless youth- my county's high school dropout rate is 54%, the state (California) average is somewhere around 30%. High school isn't even that hard here... it's a joke compared to other countries (I've got relatives in Scotland and Germany; I've seen their classwork loads). It's recipie for national economic disaster... everyone is spending money, but nobody is making it.

I truly hate companies like Apple... they force this sense of "entitlement to be entertained" onto the American populus, and now the country is entertaining itself to death. In fact, that seems to be the only thing that anyone, especially youth, are good at here nowadays... being entertained.


/rant



Anyways, on topic, my coworker spent every penny of his savings to get an iPhone, and then ended up having to take out a loan from my boss to get dental work done when he got a bad cavity. That's how in touch people are in America with their spending, and that is why Apple continues to charge the prices that they charge. It's just plain sad. I'm ashamed.


(sorry for all of the rolleyes, I feel they are warranted)