Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Um... huh?
This one I don't get. This guy on MacNewsWorld is talking about the price of Macs vs. the price of PCs. I think he's nuts. Here's why:
I just took my PowerBook G4 (about 2,800 bucks, plus $380 for AppleCare) back to the Apple store. A very sad day, indeed. However, I've replaced it with a Dell Inspiron 9200, complete with a 17" screen, 1 GB RAM, an 80 gig drive, 3 years support, Bluetooth, Wifi, DVD burning, and an upgraded battery for a bit over $2,700. And they throw in a printer (though they do make you buy the cable). Maybe the processors don't compare. I honestly don't know, and frankly, I don't care. I couldn't percieve any difference in the operating speed between them. If the Mac's processor is faster, and it could be, I don't see it in the types of things I do, like spreadsheets, email, basic photo editing, and updating my web site.
Now here's the kicker. I own Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver, and Quicken for the PC already. That's probably another grand worth of software. Additionally, I use a couple of really cool text editors for doing HTML. The best text editor I could find for the Mac (the excellent BBEdit), costs $180. Whereas the two that I like best on Windows, EditPlus and HTML-Kit, are $30 and free, respectively. I can use Firefox on both, iTunes on both, Office on both, vi on both, Perl on both (vi and Perl at the terminal shell on the Mac). They're both excellent machines. For people who don't have a legacy on PCs (and the software that goes with it), I'd easily recommend the Mac. I may yet break down and buy an eMac to satisfy my Mac jones. If you want to argue which provides the greater value, I might get onboard. But to compare Macs to PCs and conclude, out of hand, that the Mac costs less is simply a fiction.
¶ 7:31 PM
I just took my PowerBook G4 (about 2,800 bucks, plus $380 for AppleCare) back to the Apple store. A very sad day, indeed. However, I've replaced it with a Dell Inspiron 9200, complete with a 17" screen, 1 GB RAM, an 80 gig drive, 3 years support, Bluetooth, Wifi, DVD burning, and an upgraded battery for a bit over $2,700. And they throw in a printer (though they do make you buy the cable). Maybe the processors don't compare. I honestly don't know, and frankly, I don't care. I couldn't percieve any difference in the operating speed between them. If the Mac's processor is faster, and it could be, I don't see it in the types of things I do, like spreadsheets, email, basic photo editing, and updating my web site.
Now here's the kicker. I own Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver, and Quicken for the PC already. That's probably another grand worth of software. Additionally, I use a couple of really cool text editors for doing HTML. The best text editor I could find for the Mac (the excellent BBEdit), costs $180. Whereas the two that I like best on Windows, EditPlus and HTML-Kit, are $30 and free, respectively. I can use Firefox on both, iTunes on both, Office on both, vi on both, Perl on both (vi and Perl at the terminal shell on the Mac). They're both excellent machines. For people who don't have a legacy on PCs (and the software that goes with it), I'd easily recommend the Mac. I may yet break down and buy an eMac to satisfy my Mac jones. If you want to argue which provides the greater value, I might get onboard. But to compare Macs to PCs and conclude, out of hand, that the Mac costs less is simply a fiction.
¶ 7:31 PM
