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Apple's Leopard Strategy to Kill Microsoft and Dell?
RX8 writes "A Digital Trends article suggests that Apple's Leopard agenda is to get Windows users to use Apple hardware then convert them to the Apple camp and that Apple will also be directly targeting Dell by offering a better experience when it comes to media and related tasks. Lastly, they suggest that Steve Jobs held back on showing more Leopard features so people would not get too excited and stop buying in 2006. 'If you get too excited about what is supposed to be an incredibly amazing product you simply won't buy a new Apple this year.'"
Price.
People buy Dells because they are cheap, and they work.
They're not particularly good computers, but they do the job.
They're not even in the same market: Apple isn't competing with Dell's primary market to begin with.
And here I just purchased my first Mac (MacBook, black) and now you tell me it'll be obselete 2 weeks after I just bought it?
Too bad the warranty doesn't cover that!
Sugapablo
...Apple will also be directly targeting Dell by offering a better experience when it comes to media and related tasks.
Until those converts from Windows run into how OSX handles Windows Media Video files and end up comparing it against what they saw when they used Windows instead. Don't forget about one of the largest multimedia formats, and how poorly it runs under OSX. I haven't seen Jaguar, yet, so I don't know how good it's WMV handling capabilities are, but I do know watching a 640x480 WMV on OSX is like upsampling a 160x120 video into 1080 high-def - UGLY.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Apparently, you missed it. Apple's new Mac Pro is cheaper than a comparatively configured Dell workstation machine.
But, on the overall, I agree; Apple's not fighting for the bottom dollar, Apple's positioned themselves as just a tad bit more expensive than the baselines from the Big Three, but with an enormous amount of extra features that make it that "bang for the buck". That factor alone could be considered a part of the "pricing war"; for all you get with an Apple computer, it'd take you not only longer to find a way to configure a competitive machine, but it's unlikely you could do it for cheaper without a ton of rebates, mail in coupons, etc.
So really, it is the price. Apple won't beat Dell at the bottom, but in the middle and top, Apple's already got them beat.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Of course apple is trying to convert users away.. However, why would they expect people to run Windows on Apple hardware? People switch to a Mac mostly for OSX (Altho the hardware is nice looking).. In addition, Dells market is very different from Apples, Dell is cheap to the masses, Apple is for the few...
Apple has made forrays into the cheaper market (the mini) and Dell takes a poke at the top end (thier quad graphics solutions/purchase of Alienware), but they both have primarily differnt markets.
People shouldn't assume that Apple want's to be the dominant controller, just because other companies think that way, there is much profit to be made by being select too (I would imagine Apples profit per unit sold is much greater then Dells, much like Nintendos standard "make a profit not control the market" stance grants them)
'If you get too excited about what is supposed to be an incredibly amazing product you simply won't buy a new Apple this year.'
It really is very delicious Eve, I promise you, after you take a byte, well, just a nybble perhaps, you'll know everything about We . Then you'll know everything about good and evil and never be allowed into the garden again. We will make sure the angels put up some fiery walls so you cannot enter again.
There are Apples and oranges and pears and plums lying around, just beware of the Micro- scopically-soft ones, they may give you a tummy-ache.
Apple is competitive on price-- the low-end just doesn't go as low. So Dell sells a $300 desktop, and Apple doesn't compete in that market. But you can't compete with Dell in that market, either, because they sell high-quality cheap crap in massive quantities, and they get as good prices as anyone. The only way to get a computer out the door for less than Dell is to sell low-quality cheap crap, and you'll probably still need to take some losses. The profit margins on those $250 Dells are just miniscule, and you can't under-cut that very much. So if you're waiting for a $100 Mac mini, you'll be waiting for a while.
Ain't got scratch enough.
I must say, however I do like what I've seen. And I've spent enough years fighting with Windows, it only helps the Apple cause.
most secure operating system, ever! please stand by for 6,000 critical security flaw patches...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
go watch the developer keynote. they ARE competing on price.
Apple is slightly cheaper or equivalent to Dell on same spec machines. the only difference is that Dell also sells cheap shit that Apple wouldn't dignify with their logo.
woa, wait a second! one business is trying to get the biggest market share possible!? NO WAY!!!
sorry for that sarcasm, this is one of those "no shit" moments.
move away from one closed system to an even more closed system. With Apple I'm not only stuck with their OS, but I'm also stuck with their hardware.
However I wouldn't purchase anything Apple again unless OSX runs on generic Intel hardware out of package without tricks or scams to get me to purchase overpriced Mac hardware. I purchased the eMac 2 years ago, and with over 1700 USD in repairs (paid for under warranty), it tells me a LOT about quality control at Apple. The basic premise for me is that 'features' or not Apple quality is bad at best and they don't deserve my money again unless they include 3-5 year warranty standard on all devices and hardware, and at least 1 major upgrade for free on an OS that is basically 18 years old in the making. Then and only then will I purchase 'features' in a commodity market place saturated with also-rans.
So, uhm, Apple is, uhm, trying to compete, uhm, with, uhm,their competitors.
Thanks a lot for this insightful article Mr. Enderle....
Don't forget that the author is Rob Enderle, who tends to defend Microsoft and SCO with all his heart and bitches regularly on Apple and Linux... Do a quick Google on him...
If you want quality, you have to pay for it. If you want crap, enjoy your e-machine or low end Dell.
This is an article written by pundits, not Apple. If you disbelieve the premise, attack the pundits, not Apple.
Like a lot of these types of articles, it's all supposition and theorising. Nothing concrete, just ideas. These are the same people who confidently predict the iPhone is coming soon, or for years predicted the imminent demise of Apple (any day now!) so they've got little to no credibility in my eyes.
Now just deliver them for a price I want.
There's a paradox at work here
History has shown that the best product doesn't always capture the greatest marketshare. BetaMax was far better quality then VHS, but look which survived. The original Mac beat Windows 3.1 hands down, but again look who has 95% of the desktop market? I think you really can get what you pay for, the paradox is people too often expect awesome for cheap, then buy cheap and expect awesome. If you want it, buy it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wow...so many of you shop on lowest price...the WAL-MART mentality. I shop on performance and design features, price is down the list. Is this how you shop for medical care, or insurance, or your home? I mean you can buy cheapest provider...i prefer to get real value. In case you havent noticed the new Intel based macs are very reasonably priced, but you probably havent noticed since you were so busy getting crap on sale at walmart on your way back to the trailer park.
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
They already do, Apple's machines are competitive with Dell's offering of the same price (depends of the rebates you grab though, but Apple's price are lower than equivalent Dell machines without rebates), and you get OSX + slick cases (versus ugly dell cases).
They just don't compete on the very low end stuff (dell goes much lower in price/configurations quality)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
FTFA:
"However, Steve Jobs is the master of being your best buddy while planning to stab you in the back. His biographies are filled with stories that do more than suggest that if he wants what you have, you'd better grab it and run for the hills."
Please. History is littered with the corpses of companies with which Microsoft formed a "strategic partnership"-- The MS people stick around and play nice for a while, then one day the other company gets notified that Microsoft wants to go in another direction so the partnership is over. Then a couple months later Microsoft unveils a competing product and kills the company with which they partnered.
The best historical example I can think of is Go Corp in the late 80s/early 90s-- Microsoft partnered with them, stole their stuff and created Pen Windows to crush them. You can get accounts of it from both sides if you read these two books. However, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing right now: They are desperate to take marketshare from iPod/iTunes. To that end, their partnerships to make portable players and sell music under the "PlaysForSure" moniker have been miserable failures-- so now, they are screwing their partners and rolling their own solution in-house, Zune, which is stated incompatible with all the PlaysForSure stuff.
~Philly
"If you get too excited about what is supposed to be an incredibly amazing product you simply won't buy a new Apple this year."
Doubtful, just look around the office (assuming a non-tech business). How many do you think read Slashdot or similar sites for news to plan ahead?
That's the job of Puma.
Then Ocelot will take out HP.
Marmoset, once released, will end IBM.
Finally, Mr. Whiskers Boddington (the name of Jobs' childhood cat) will make Google irrelevant.
Then we'll get those full-screen iPods everyone's been wanting. wheeee
A very well thought-out article with one big problem - perspective. Apple will certainly make inroads with the PC world the way they are going, but the end result is ridiculous. Even assuming Apple did lure people with BootCamp, etc., most people still won't want the bother of choosing an OS at the start. I'm guessing the problems between systems would be incomprehensible. A good friend of mine, a smart person, couldn't really understand why you couldn't run a Mac program on a PC and vice versa.
The other nail in the coffin is the third world runs on pirated Windows. Since IBM bailed out to Lenovo there will be billions of users who never even see a Mac.
On the third point, possibly Steve saved some good stuff in Leopard for later. But what we saw was not over-impresssive. He certainly knew about the SEC news yesterday and making a bigger pronouncement would have taken some of the sting out of that in the stock price. My guess is that this financial stuff is why he looks pale and drawn right now.
This login name for sale.
Could you please flag articles by this unmitigated idiot so I don't wast the click. Reading his drivel is not worth anybodys time.
Considering Apple has experienced a 15% INCREASE in market share I think its actually much more likely now that theyre running on Intel hardware.
One of the main reasons why Microsoft Windows has the market share that it has is because of Dell. It would take a lot more than promoting Windows on a Mac to make consumers want to start preferring Apple computers over Dells. Also, lots of people get Dell because they are able to sell computers at very reasonable prices, and everyone here knows that Apple isn't exactly the best at doing that. Also, from what I've noticed, I think that most people buy Macs more to find alternatives to Windows. A lot of Mac buyers that I have talked to over the years have bought Macs because using OS X was easier than using Windows, or that Windows was too insecure for them and they were looking for options that were not Linux. Even though having a closer PC feel by integrating Windows will attract a few members of the PC target audience, I don't think it's going to cause a massive swing in the opposite direction. Macs are not iPods; these are $1000+ computers that can do and perform the same things as a regularly-priced Dell PC. I don't even think that putting themselves in direct competiton with Dell or any other major PC retailer is part of their plan; I think that if they really wanted to do this, they would have made the switch to Intel earlier and started diversifying their hardware base to make prices more flexible.
Walmart
Wow, that's a stunning endorsement for PC's. How stupid of me. I guess I'll have to ditch my Mac kit, because Walmart sells PC's...
p.s. news for you kid, not EVERYONE uses PC's. Get ready to get jumped on by heaps of Linux and Mac users...
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
The article is written by none other than Rob (I wannabe John Dvorak) Enderle, the same clown who supported SCO's claims in their ongoing lawsuit against IBM. He now appears to be trying to get page hits by trolling the user communities of both Microsoft and Apple with outlandish opinions.
The whole idea that Apple could 'kill' Microsoft or Dell is too far-fetched to even consider. The only way either company could die is by suicide.
Let me know where I can get a dual core small form factor PC for significantly less than $800. Not from Dell, not from HP. HPs offering comes in at $650 after the rebate, but doesn't include things like wireless or even a dvd burner, it eats more power, and is huge. Dell rings in at 1200 but does come with a 20" monitor that you can buy for $400, so total cost is about $800, same as a mac mini. Both have shared mem video cards, again the Dell lacks a dvd writer(but it makes up for that by coming with a gig of ram standard) but it is a bigger case and uses the Pentium D chip. You would be hard pressed to even build one from newegg for that amount(you can if you don't mind the behemoth case, but I do). So yeah, you are right, Apple doesn't even come close on price :P
Monstar L
I would broaden it even further and say they want to "kill" the rest of the computer industry not just Dell and Microsoft. The keyword is want. Imagine marketshare where you control both software and hardware. That is what Apple has and is continues to aim for. 1% of Apple marketshare is probably worth more than 5% of Microsoft/Dell marketshare. Apple will continue to pursue this goal until they get really beat down. At this point, they will either morph into a software company (license OSX) if they get beat by Dell, HP, etc, or morph into a hardware company that doesn't make most of their software. More likely scenario of course, is probably just more of the same without overextending where they implode.
Most users simply hate changes on their system or the way the work - so they will stick to what they have known for years. XP and Office will do the trick for most, so will a 'normal' laptop from 'traditional' PC vendors.
A dual boot option would confuse most users and create unnecessary work / something new to understand. Tech people don't seem to understand that Mr. or Ms. Office just wants her work done - and they don't give a damn about fancy designs, Mac OS or any new geekery.
Two problems:
(1) I don't want to buy a 32-bit processor. Yes, I know that 32-bit is good enough for a long time now. But 64-bit is just what I want. It'll make me feel better.
(2) First-release Mac products are often rife with problems. The first-release aren't out yet. So I'm going to end up waiting at least 6 months for Apple to get most of the bugs worked out of the hardware.
Once that's all taken care of, I'll be getting a light Mac notebook.
First: What is the actual differences with a Dell notebook? I have a E1705, and it's basically a Powerbook. The differences are so minor, they are superficial (in my opinion) Second: Everyone says Apple is a hardware company. Then why is Apple not releasing their OS as open source? They are actually a software company. Apple should sell the OS as a competator to Microsoft, and then they would have a large market to grow into. Anyone can make a Intel box. Geez.
Apple's Leopard Strategy to Kill Microsoft and Dell?
Yeah, that's their strategy. I was talking about it with Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa over breakfast from the alien spaceship this morning. The next thing I knew, the cow had jumped over the moon and Mao Zedong was trumping up capitalism.
Then I woke up and swore never to eat pizza before bed again.
FTFA:
Another of the primary reasons Apple isn't being forthcoming about Leopard is the fear that if people get too excited about a product coming early in 2007 they will stop buying in 2006"
Uh, yeah, that might apply when you're talking about an expensive product. Mac OS X costs $129, and Leopard will run on any Mac sold in 2006 (and probably several years previous). Anyone who is paying attention to what's coming out of WWDC knows that and can likely afford $129 to upgrade. Everyone else who's interested in a Mac now will happily buy a Tiger system and probably not even notice when Leopard ships.
Furthermore, Microsoft has been talking up Vista for five years. You didn't see Dell or HP go out of business for lack of sales because people are waiting for Vista, did you?
~Philly
Because they are cheaper.
Umm... No. A Dell with the same hardware as a Mac pro is more expensive.
They run the same applications. They run more games.
Um... They can rame the same applications and technically the Mac can run more games because not only can it play Mac OS X only games but it can also boot into WinXp and play any windows game there.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Even if Apple does kill Microsoft/Dell where will all those 3rd party companies go? Apple likes to run a tight and closed ship with finite hardware options and regularly copies 3rd party apps into their OS. Most of these companies would not be accepted by Apple, and would simply turn to another OS and prefab computer company. I doubt Apple will kill Microsoft or Dell just because their OS is flashy, they would have to provide a much more flexible environment to foster outside development.
--postmodern
Back in the days of the original iMacs, iBooks and the Blue-and-White/Graphite minitowers, everyone bagged on Apple for building "Fisher-Price" computers out of that thick ABS you used to only see on toys. Guess what? Those machines wore like iron. My iBook and my Blue-And-White were both purchased in 1999. Guess what? They are still 100% functional and run modern Mac OS X. I also was able to acquire a third-generation iMac from around the same era. Aside from a couple of pen marks, it was pristine.
And the thing about Apple is that the inside of these machines are just as good as the outside. The Apple Minitower design that was only phased out in favor of the aluminum "cheese grater" minitower was amazing. You unlatch one of the sides and pull it down, and you are inside the machine. No stupid sheet metal slidy doors or inverse-u shaped cowlings that are a bitch to tear down and even more of a bitch to replace right. And the parts used are good, sane parts. Not "hacked by Chinese" crap. You don't hear about explodey caps or random shorts with regard to these old machines. Yeah, you hear about explodey batteries on laptops, but let's face it, everyone except IBM has had problems with LiIon batteries, and I'm waiting for the reports of burning Thinkpads that I know will eventually come.
Apple builds to last with good solid parts and also by patronizing good facilities. Foxconn, ASUS, they don't deal with the Elitegroups of the world. If a top-tier Asian facility is unavailable, Apple has its own factories run to their standards.
Hell, people still use Mac SE30s after all these years. Why? They are BUILT.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Yeah, but does a out-of-the-box PC have the same quality of applications (iLife, iTunes, iCal, Mail.app, etc) with the same level of seamless integration? Sure PCs come with Music Match, some basic calendar app, Outlook Express, and other bundled software, but it is nowhere near the quality of the Mac's bundled software; in fact, some of that bundled software may be spyware. Does an out-of-the-box Windows PC have the same security as OS X's out-of-the-box security? Once again, if I bought a Windows PC, I have to worry about installing anti-malware tools (which is basically a high memory tax), installing Firefox, and keeping up to date with every little Windows update. And don't get me started on Windows default admin mode, lack of full multiuser support, lack of user permissions (that work the same way as Unix permissions), and other stuff.
Apple doesn't compete on the low-end scale, so that is the reason why PCs are much more common; you can buy a nice Athlon 64 box for $600 or more (depending on the specs), or a decent Celeron M laptop for the same price. They are quite capable machines, and they run Windows/*nix very well. Apple would make a big sweep if they competed on the low end (imagine a $300 Mac Mini to counter those Dell $299 specials, or a $699 MacBook with a Core Solo processor). Not everybody needs a dual core laptop, for example. However, when configured at the same price, the Mac is usually a better deal, unless you must need Windows for your job, or you are a serious gamer (I admit, I'd rather game on Windows than OS X; my favorite game, Sim City 4, costs $60 on the Mac but $20 for the exact same version for Windows. Eh?).
PCs may be more popular, but there is a reason why Mac users buy Macs. It comes with a well thought out package of software that complements each other quite nicely with no hiccups.
WMV's look identical on the Mac as they do on Windows. Its the exact same file. They can be played through QuickTime using Flip4Mac, VLC, or mplayer without problems.
WMV and Real are just as good on the Mac as they are in Windows.
For proof that this post is rubbish, look at the fact that the poster refers to "Jaguar" That was the code name for 10.2. That was many years ago.
Debunked.
I don't like the way they're going about this. I'd prefer they offered deals including cheaper upgrade paths rather than just not tell people about Leopard in order to increase 2006 sales. Buy our stuff now, and get a damn cheap upgrade later! I assume it's easy to actually upgrade from one to the other relatively painlessly ;)
>Apple's Leopard agenda is to get Windows users to use Apple hardware then convert them to the Apple camp I either spend retarded amount of money on a Mac system with a snazy OS or I stick wth my current hardware setup which is running Win200K and download a free Linux distro to replace Windows.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
what does this say to anyone at all, not much, apple have always sold macs, just because they are now intel-based, everybody seems to be making a fuss, if they had chosen to go over to the sparc there wouldn't be "apple tries to kill sun" news would there? So could someone explain to me why this is news?
Waits for audience applause... not a sausage.
Because Apple is a hardware company first and foremost, and many of Mac OS X's strengths stem from limited hardware diversity.
Read more about it.
~Philly
Still waiting to buy my first Mac.
I want something between a Mac Mini and Mac Pro. There is an extemely large gulf between these that really needs a mainstream model that will at minimum accept a video card and regular size HD.
I am not interested in a built in monitor mac. I am picky about screen types and run dual screens, so this doesn't fly for me. Fine for my Mom when I get her a new computer, but not for me.
I suspect Leopard will be here before Apple build me a mid range mac. Someone at Apple must see this gap in the product line. The mini is just too underpowered with integrated graphics and laptop Hard Drive; The Pro is total overkill (and overpriced) for my needs.
Hey Apple. I am ready. Build me a machine.
You've never switched underlying ISAs either. twice.
It's about the applications. I've played around with Knoppix, and set up a RedHat box a couple of years ago. And you know what...I can't do productive shit on them. Apple is the same way.
/. just covered it). Or I could pay someone (who is reliable) five figures to come in and do the testing for me. Sad part is, I can't afford either. I can't imagine a system so legacy-burdened and OS-entangled as (for example) AutoCAD running reliably, every day, without a possible hiccup, with all the little goofy add-on shit it needs to be functional, on something other than native MS. Hell, it's not completely stable in it's native environment. Is it worth losing a client worth 20% of my gross income just so I can have a pretty machine on my desktop that is slightly less likely to be totally wiped out by a virus? In 25 years of using IBM PC systems, I have yet to have an unrecoverable failure due to virus. Sorry, betting my salary, plus guaranteed loss of two years of company profits to re-buy and retrain me and my employees in new apps, against something that hasn't happened in that long doesn't make financial sense.
You see, it has nothing to do with the 10-30% price difference in an Apple, or the fact that Apple (C)Won't compete in the entry level systems (my small office runs on a $200 dell server that's three years old an hasn't so much as sneezed in all that time). I can't use Apple (or Linux) because I can't afford to (a) relearn how to manage the OS, (b) relearn all new applications for my technical work, (c) force all my clients to figure out how to interact with my non-industry-standard applications. Most of that stuff is MS only. Oh, sure, I suppose I could spend a few months figuring out if every single one of my dedicated engineering apps works with Wine, or (um, shoot, can't remember the Apple one...
I'm stuck with MS at work because most of the vendors only write for MS. I use MS at home because I use MS at work. I can't afford to re-buy my apps for home. I use the same apps both places (mostly in conformance with the EULAs, by god damned fair use if not). When that changes, we'll re-evaluate.
Tell Steve he has more work to do.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"...High-Quality cheap crap..." What???
Suicide is not an option. It would only result in a corporate zombie.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
well yes I suppose if mercedes wanted my business all they'd have to do is drop a zero off the end of the price tag I suppose.
Does that mean it's sensible for them to do?
Apple, like any business, sets their price point for maximum proffit. If they drop the price 10%, they will get maybe an 8% increase in sales, which will not quite make up for the drop in price, and their net proffit drops. If they raise the price 10%, they will get maybe a 12% drop in sales, which again cuts into proffit sufficiently to drop their bottom line below where it is now. I'm sure Apple spends a lot on market research to make sure they have selected the optimal price points for their products. Your decision as to whether or not to buy based on the current price affects the optimal price point, so a Macintosh's price is not actually set by Apple, it's set by me and you, the consumers.
You just want good hardware on the cheap. There's nothing really wrong with that until you start saying it would be to anyone's benefit besides your own.
In an ideal world, if you paid more for a product it would be better, higher quality. If you paid less for it, it would be a poorer quality. It doesn't always work this way, but that is still the general idea. Keep that in mind when you want to "have your cake and eat it too". Reminds me of the production manager's motto: "fast, good, cheap, pick two."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
From my original post:
"So really, it is the price. Apple won't beat Dell at the bottom, but in the middle and top, Apple's already got them beat."
And of course, there's the fallacious point of "Apple's computers starting at $1000". Apparently you haven't heard of the Mac Mini, coming in at $599, just $199 more than Dell's "Bottom Line" and offering a ton more features.
Price is only the deciding factor right now because Dell set that one up a couple years back. Now Dell's cut so many corners on their machines their profits are beginning to fall, they're on the other side of the price slashing curve where quality isn't beating out quantity anymore. Apple's only cut margins slightly, and completely rebuilt their platform to make their machines entirely more marketable. All they have to do is show you the differences and let you play with the machines a bit.
With 50% of new purchasers being new to the Mac, we can assert their plan is working.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I'm sure Apple is competitive on price for what they sell now, but all of the affordable computers they sell are non upgradable (mostly in regard to gfx) and non of them have a nice high-end graphics card to begin with. Which means I would have to buy a new computer every year if I want new programs to run on it. Most computers sold today have a single or dual CPU and an x16 PCI express slot. Thats also what most people want. And Apple don't compete in that segment. Which means most people can't buy Macs. Thats your hard reality.
And please don't come and tell me that most people wouldn't want or need nice graphics. It's obvious Apple don't sell those boxes because it would cut into their high-end machines. Which is possibly a good bussinesmove but the computers they sell don't suit me and alot of other people.
Heck, I'm not even a gamer but every now and then me or my girlfriend want to game and on my cheap shity low-quality spare-parts PC it's nice that I can. If I want to get the same performance out of an Apple copmuter I would need to spend at least 3 times more and then I would get a 4 cpu monsterbox which I totaly don't need.
Apple could gain 95% of the market share if they helped game developers (instead of snubbing them) and offered their OS for computer makers like Microsoft does.
It's not like it would be hard either, you just set those minimum system requirments, certain video card, certain ram, certain speed processor and you are off.
I love the way people keep trotting out the 'same price an an equivilantly specced dell machine' line.
How about you try the other way round? Go have a look at Dell's cheapest laptop, then go & find an 'equivilant' Apple notebook.
Dell's market range is huge, Apple only competes with them in a few areas - pretending otherwise is.... deluded.
Dell competes on price, Apple competes on quality (that's one of the reasons why you hear about Apple defects so much).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
There's no reason this should be true to the extent of the current price differentials. The hardware on both Apple and Dell machines is standard 3rd party hardware. Apple is not putting in better video cards, better processors, better (or more) memory or anything else. I suspect Apple cases are more expensive than Dell plastic boxes. I don't think Apple needs to beat Dell pricing, but the few hundred dollar difference on comparable models is 85% profit. Shaving this differential would create a larger user base. Apple charges more because the market will bear that. If they want to grow their consumer market share, at least, I think they'll have to drop their prices. The value of the Apple machines is the OS; it strength is based in large part on its being locked to particular hardware. Apple also excels because of its marketing and the glossy finish of its products.
One thing to note: The "low-quality cheap crap" that Dell sells will come with Vista at no additional charge. Also, Dell will have convieniently loaded Vista and installed all relevant drivers, a new-computer task that quite a few people would like to avoid.
My quick math:
Vista full version = $200
2 hours of labor to install vista and drivers = $100
Total additional cost of haveing Vista on your Mac = $300
Mac Mini (cheapest version = $599) with Vista = $899 or $800 if you supply your own labor and your time isn't worth anything.
Now, I still think Apple could kick Dell's a**. The hardware is gorgeous to look at and fabulously effcient in space and layout, something modern consumer highly value. But in order to get past the ugh factor of loading your own OS and the "holly crap, I have to pay $200 more!" factor of buying that new OS, they're going to have to preload.
Oh, BTW, there are a lot of sales to be had in the business world with slick Mac notebooks. That won't happen in significant numbers until Apple ships with Windows preinstalled.
TW
It's only a paradox to those who don't understand it.
The best product usually wins. The question is what constitutes "best" and the best in your mind isn't always best in the market. The world doesn't always want glitz.
There are Mac OS X only games? Somebody has a stunning business model...
I am probably a typical switcher and I am not looking back. I admit, I only bought a mac since it is an Intel machine and i _could_ install Windows (my primary platform) on it if i wanted to. And I am sure I am not the nly one going this route. So i gave OS X a chance and it's probably one of the most polished OSs out there. The BSD core even satisfies the geek in me while the GUI is just tight. I have tried switching comepletly to a linux desktop but i have just not found myself to be productive in it. Too many little quirks to work out to get everything working, which just costs: time. So for now and the near future, count me in in the Apple camp. Hope i don't sound too fanboyish ;)
I want a desktop with drive bays and expansion slots, and I don't want to spend $2,500 plus monitor and warranty. Please show me an Intel Mac that meets these specifications. I can show you hundreds of Windows machines that do.
For more information, click here.
Yes, Fortune 500 businesses are all set up in trailer parks.
"In case you havent noticed the new Intel based macs" are 100% PC with Apple skins. That's opposed to 98% that the previous Mac's were. Makes sense that they're sold right next to the Gucci boutique.
Good to know you're such a discriminating shopper.
How much for the 500GB hard drive upgrade? Oh yeah, you can't get one because the mini can't use real hard drives. Great comparison.
The reason you can't buy a mini from HP or Dell is that they don't have a market for it. HP and Dell know their markets better than you or Apple do.
The writer of that statement, in explaining why Apple must have dumbed-down their product announcements of late, attributes strategic genius to Steve beyond the pale. The suppositions behind such a statement is that
- Apple could never release a dud
- Steve is incapable of a less-than-stellar product introduction
Therefore, the thinking goes, it is master strategy to sell more this year so that people won't tank the stock (*ahem*) this year by not buying current inventory. Problem with this is that Apple has always led with its best foot forward: they announced the move to Intel before there was an Intel-based product offering, as a case in point.Attributing a master strategy as the reviewer in question has done is akin to Coca Cola aficionados who attribute New Coke as a masterful ploy to boost "Classic Coke" sales and loyalty over Pepsi Cola. Yeah, it turned out that CC pulled their butts out of a tight spot with the re-introduction of Coke Classic to appease the revolt, but calling it master strategy is revisionist history at best.
Let's just leave it at this: Apple has broken its string of amazing announcements (amazing in the marketing buzz generation sense) with a slight dud; expect more goodness in the future as Apple redoubles its efforts to overwhelm us with goodness.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I've had more than enough of all these Apple vs Windows and vice versa stories. All this speculation is good for nothing. As long as the software is vapourware I'm not going to let myself be made crazy. I'll wait for Bill and Steve to show us their stuff.
-- Cheers!
The problem is that the "cheap crap" does what most users want, thus they buy that instead of the Apple machine that costs 2-3 times as much.
Apple isn't competing in price. In order to compete in price you have to be cheaper than the competitors lower end products. To use a car analogy, Kia competes with Honda on price. Mercedes doesn't compete with Honda on price, even though you could certainly say their lower end models featurewise are equilivent to some of Toyota's high end models at a similar cost.
Actually, when I installed Windows XP on my iMac and installed drivers it only took an hour. Most of that was the actual XP installation. It was also probably one of the least painful windows installations I've ever done, sadly enough. I'll admit, I've only ever done it on a home-brew machine before.
Help I'm a rock.
This is just something that's never going to change with Apple. They have a standard of quality that makes their brand quite valuable, and that's due to not stooping too low and slapping the Apple logo on a piece of crap. If you get their cheapest Mac, you can still rest assured it will be an awesome machine in its own right. You get the cheapest Dell, and you're just in for a poor experience.
Besides, remember the $100 laptop project? Steve Jobs offered OS X for free to run on those things. The project rejected the offer because they wanted it to be open source, then went with Red Hat (who just so happened to have donated to the project). So because of them, the world missed out on having a $100 Mac. Ugh.
"Sufferin' succotash."
To be fair, VHS has better sound quality than BetaMax
Help I'm a rock.
I wish I had mod points. I have two iBooks, a G3 and a G4. The G3 had video problems and had to be sent back 2X. Then, just after the 3 year warranty ran out, it up and died. Just got a beep, and nothing else on boot. Tried everything, and nothing worked. I had to rip out the hard drive to salvage all my work. No problem there, but accessing the HDD is a 2 hour operation (or close to it) and basically fsck's up the computer. Now, the G4 has had repeated mouse problems. It's been on repair 2X and the thrid time I just said fsck it, I'll use a USB mouse. The screen also has brightness problems, sometimes getting darker. But hey, I'll deal with it because OS X is sweet. But, why haven't I bought a new MB? Very simple. I don't trust Apple hardware enough. And recent reports of all kinds of problems I think justify my hesitation. I am seriously thinking of scrounging up a good ThinkPad on ebay and installing Ubuntu.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
...since their ads focus on everything you can do with a Mac with just its included applications: Buy it, take it home, spend five minutes hooking it up, and then make a movie. Or burn a CD. Or create a song. Or make a web site. Or write a paper. Part of the message of the ads are: If that's what you can do with just what ships on the machine, imagine what else must be out there!
As for your argument that you have Windows-only stuff, part of the reason Apple is playing up virtualization is because it lets you move to a Mac and take your Windows-only stuff with you, if you must. Parallels Desktop kicks ass, runs at nearly native speed, and the VM runs all the Windows productivity apps my clients have thrown at it like a champ. I have more people asking about it every day.
~Philly
Apple is competitive on price-- the low-end just doesn't go as low. So Dell sells a $300 desktop, and Apple doesn't compete in that market. But you can't compete with Dell in that market, either, because they sell high-quality cheap crap in massive quantities, and they get as good prices as anyone. The only way to get a computer out the door for less than Dell is to sell low-quality cheap crap, and you'll probably still need to take some losses. The profit margins on those $250 Dells are just miniscule, and you can't under-cut that very much. So if you're waiting for a $100 Mac mini, you'll be waiting for a while.
==
You get what you pay for.
I would love to buy another mac, but a Mac Pro is just too much (money & power).
I was hoping Apple would have produced an in-between system. Maybe using a single Core 2 Duo chip and calling it a Mac2Pro (two core). Then the quad core one just introduced could be named Mac4Pro.
There are many users who would not purchase a Mac computer but who would purchase OS X to install on their PC. I do not understand at all why Apple is actually taking efforts to prevent Max OS from running on PCs. This is pathetically stupid and makes no sense.
Well then, let me clear it up for you.
Apple is not a software vendor, Apple is also not a hardware vendor. Apple is an experience vendor.
To get you the "Macintosh Experience" for which you're paying the big bucks they need tight control and integration between the hardware and the software. The reason why MacOS X is able to give a better useability experience is because Apple knows exactly what hardware it'll be running on unlike Microsoft does with Windows.
With a PC there are thousands upon thousands of motherboards, CPUs, hard drives, video cards, sound cards, network cards, etc, etc, etc. The combinations are endless and people expect Windows to not only work, but work well, on every single combination.
I would be surprised if the number of macintosh computers that are currently supported in Tiger reached beyond double digits but even if it did it is still a lot smaller than infinity. Because Apple knows exactly what hardware the OS will be running on they can take full advantage of it whereas on the PC side of things you still have for example: 64bit CPUs running 32bit OS's and the latest version of Windows not even supporting SATA, a 3+ year old technology, out of the box.
Think consoles: PS2, XBox, GameCube, etc. They are severly underpowered if you compare them to a PC, yet they can push out graphics rivaling them, why? Because the developers know exactly what hardware they are coding for and can take full advantage of it.
That is why Apple prevents OS X from running on just any beige box. It wasn't designed to, so if they allowed it people would try it, it would crash, not work right and people would say that MacOS X sucked.
That business model (Mac-only software vendor) does quite well. Those vendors typically understand how to make Mac software more..."Mac like" than say, a primarily Windows software vendor who ports their software over to work on a Mac. Many Mac users like the specific user experience they get with a Mac because of the particular way the software interacts with the O/S. There a lots of companies (ex; The Omni Group) that do well because they specialize in that market. Nothing wrong with knowing and specializing in a particular market. Not every software vendor has to be a supersized-take-over-the-world-large company to be successful. I for one, look to Mac specific software companies for software first, as they will typically implement it in a way that is more useful to me, as a Mac user.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
Thank you for your agreement that Apple competes on quality, not price.
As to your second paragraph, I know you're trolling, but for anyone who thinks you might have a valid point:
Besides, remember the $100 laptop project? Steve Jobs offered OS X for free to run on those things. The project rejected the offer because they wanted it to be open source, then went with Red Hat (who just so happened to have donated to the project). So because of them, the world missed out on having a $100 Mac. Ugh.
Jobs offered OS X to the one laptop per child program late in the day, knowing that it was unsuitable due to lack of source. It was simply grandstanding on his part. Frankly, I can't think of a non-malicious reason for Jobs to make the offer, (why knowingly offer something useless?). Job's crack at the OLPC project wasn't as childish & pathetic as Gate's, but make no mistake - it was similar jealousy that prompted it.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It's not that simple. One of the best things about Macs are that "they just work"... If they suddenly had to run on any old piece of hardware, using drivers from god knows where, they are going to lose one of the big edges they have over Windows/Linux based machines
There is more than the two extremes of Apple and the cheapest Dell crap. I can get a quality machine with the performance and features I want without paying Apple prices for it by building it myself*. I'm pretty much always cheaper than the OEM PC makers too. The only time I find to buy OEM is the extreme low end - I can't build a $300 system as nice as Dell can, or if I want something like a really small form factor - in which case you can't beat the Mac Mini.
*Of course, Apple makes this easy when I want things like expansion slots, not integrated with the monitor, and more than one 3.5" harddrive, given the price of the cheapest PowerMacs.
Honestly, with all the 'problems' I've read about with the MacBook and MacBook Pro, plus the problems I've experienced with Apple portables since the iBook G3, it seems like Apple sells "low quality cheap crap" for more than Dell or another PC vendor. Just because Apple charges more for their hardware doesn't mean its quality is better, and as Apple has proven time and again it usually isn't.
The best product usually wins. The question is what constitutes "best" and the best in your mind isn't always best in the market. The world doesn't always want glitz.
Not often have I seen the best product win.
The hard lesson taught Sony by Matsushita was (slashdotters should love this) open your standard to adoption by the greatest number of manufacturers, shear numbers will win out. Sony had charged a high licence fee for Beta technology, so very few bit. Crappy VHS at one point was 8-1 in sales ratio, while the market was in it's first year. It didn't take long for those who sold machines, made tapes of films and initiated the vid-rental market to decide upon which side of the fence their fortunes would be best made.
My person experience with Personal Computers began with the Commodore Amiga. A truly fantastic system in 1985. Sadly mishandled by the Commodore marketing department (Ready. Fire! Aim.) Imagine the world of PC's today if Commodore had opened up the hardware to as many vendors as wished to get involved and focused upon developing the operating system. Could be a different picture today.
Apple tried something like this under Jean-Louis Gassée, but mishandled things so terribly they brought back Steve to save them.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Apple positions itself as a high-end vendor, as do many other companies. Why does that concept confuse so many people only when it applies to computers?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Apple already competes on price, for similiar configurations.
They just don't compete on the bottom, because it's not worth it to them. I can understand.
I never got why 50 people to a thread constantly bitching about the price - if it's too much, buy a dell or whatever. No one is holding a gun to your head:/
Why then hasnt someone written a plugin for mplayer or mpg123 or when open source implementations of MPEG4/h.323/whatever it is exist?
And dont answer "patents", all those flavors of MPEG (including MP3 audio) are patented and the open source players implement those so I see no reason "patents" would stop them implementing VC-1 too...
That's great if you really want or need a small form factor computer. A lot people are willing to give up a bit of space for a computer that is cheaper. Or comes with a bigger and faster 3.5" harddrive. Or expansion slots. Or has a better video card (or atleast makes it easy to add one). Considering that you can get that for Mac Mini prices in the PC world, but you have to pay a lot more to get that in a Mac, I could say that Apple doesn't come close on price either :)
Since 1992 when I started buying Macs for our company, the numbers are about 250 PCs and 175 Macs I've learned that the prices are about the same when you consider the add-ons to the PCs to make them the same feature-wise (VRAM, etc).
Any hard-core gamer will tell you that a tricked out PC will cost much more than a Mac. So your argument doesn't float because of varibles like usage.
Software and peripherial vendors on the other hand do charge more for Mac products in most cases because they sell fewer, supply-demand.
Each has it's place, usually software requirements/preferences. But where most people compare computers they could easily replace each other - Internet.
Reliability and ease of use goes to Mac, which means less training, and less tech support. This with the constant threats from viruses, malware, etc and the cost to install and update these puts some PCs more costly than their Mac counterpart.
Some day start reading "impartial" magazines like infoworld.com - some of the best minds in the computer business are writers there, Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of ethernet and founder of 3Com was a writer for years... read something other than PC World or Macworld to see what products do in the real world.
Our Macs can easily mount a PC on the desktop. With Bonjour (what a name?) for Windows makes them real plug-n-play, a term Microsoft started using with Windows98 but didn't deliver for years until XP.
Personally I still use my old but reliable ThinkPad PIII Win2000Pro, and love the totally silent Mac mini at home (+ Compaq TFT5000LCD), which I replaced a Wintel with and 1 more Mini on the way to be our entertainment control center - streaming wireless music etc. (ipodisfun.com) When people visit my home office they ask where is the computer? They see the old Tower sitting on the floor and assume that's it, but when they see OS X on the screen they scratch their heads, a PC running OS X? The mini is placed sideways looking more like a bookend.
So for our company, we live in harmony. PC and Mac, they both work hard to make our company work better.
Exactly - thank you for your agreement.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
'If you get too excited about what is supposed to be an incredibly amazing product you simply won't buy a new Apple this year.'
What a strange comment. Are there features of Leopard that need special hardware support, features that prevent Leopard from showing it's true potential on all Macs except 2007 models? I seriously doubt it. So buy a Mac whenever you want, then upgrade the OS when the next version is available. Sure, it will cost you $129, but that's little compared to the cost of a new Mac notebook (plus AppleCare, which is a requirement these days).
Afraid of honest debate?
*sighs* - what is slashdot coming to when people can anonymously bash other posters? Oh wait!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Your experience doesn't represent how all Apple hardware works. I have a 1Ghz G4 which has only kernel panicked twice and nothing else.
Jonathanjk.com
I hope they dont sell OSX for any old PC. My Mac works out of the box because the OS is part of the box. I for one would hate to back to the windows driver/upgrade hell that caused me to go mac in the first place.
On raw specs, this is true, but my experience has been that Apple *systems* have generally been of higher quality over the years (compared with Dell). I've had several systems from each (mostly at work) over the years, and the random-crapout factor has been substantially lower on the Apple systems.
So yeah, you get better specs for the money with Dell, and if you plan on only keeping the system for short-term use, that's dandy. But in my experience the Apple price premium isn't *entirely* due to the brand-name factor; there does seems to be an overall better system quality.
Dude, I feel your pain.
I can only respond by saying that's the opposite of my experience, and of most of the folks that I know... I've never had a piece of Apple hardware fail or be lemon-ish; pretty much all of them worked fine up until they got retired due to being obsolete, performance-wise.
I thought this was a neat trick, since I wasn't aware that Intel were shipping 2.8GHz Core Duos. The Dell site is a horrible mess, so I wasn't able to find the machine you were looking at. I did find the Dimension 9200. This was $1,574 with a 1.86GHz Core Duo. I also found the Dimension 5150c, starting at $779 with a 2.8GHz Pentium D as an option for $50 more.
The Pentium D is based on the old NetBurst microarchitecture which (in case you missed the last five years) is slower than pretty much anything else clock-for-clock. It's also very high power and hence heat, so needs more cooling, meaning it's likely to be louder.
If you are going to compare like with like, then please do so. Please post links, and please at least try to have slightly more clue than '2.8 is a bigger number than 1.8 so it must be better.'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
... so what we should take from your Betamax example is that Apple should offer more porn than Dell?
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
What "current price differentials"? You mean the Mac Pro being priced $1000 less than a comparably configured Dell?
So a Mac pro with a Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 (just one of many graphics adapters that can be configured into the system) isnt good enough for your gaming? I would love to know what game your playing at the moment that needs more.
Easy. Make it suitable for the living room but with far greater IO capability than a mini. Use a Merom to keep it silent and it won't compete with the Mac Pro. It may destroy the market for the mini but the mini isn't that great anyway.
The problem with Apple's headless solution is that it doesn't have sufficient IO. The size of the mini isn't sufficiently attractive to make up for that. If it were, Apple could afford to offer both machines. As it stands, Apple doesn't have a media PC offering at all.
You wrote a totally false statement and repeated that statement several times with made up facts.
You facts aren't made up, just misleading. The $1200 Mac is a Core Duo with Mac OS X, the $1200 Intel is a Pentium D with Windows MCE.
So you get a faster clock, but less performance -- and the Mac can be upgraded to new chips whereas the PC is using an end-of-life architecture and a retarded version of Windows.
Fortune 500 companies buy desktops for their workers, who they shove into cube farms and treat like crops. I think a trailer park is a pretty good analogy on a lot of levels, actually.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Actually, Apple's pricing is very competive. Let's compare Dell and Apple. Mac Mini is $599. Cheapest Dell Duo Core (Dimension E510) is $799. MacBook is $1099. Cheapest Dell Duo Core for Laptop (Inspiron E1405) $1381 with 80gb hdd and 1gb ram. Mac Pro and iMacs are a different class but are priced competively. Mac Pro is a Dual Duo Core with ability to have 4 500gb hard drives installed. If you really compare apple to dell then use computers that have similar hardware.
\
Yeah, the low-end Dell Dimensions are cheap crap. Among other cheap crap, they're pretty high-quality cheap crap, but they still aren't nice computers. This as opposed to... I don't know... Gateway or E-Machines, which, last I checked, were low-quality cheap crap.
I wouldn't recommend the low-end Dimensions to anyone who could afford better, but I would recommend them to someone who couldn't afford better. Low-quality cheap crap, on the other hand, I wouldn't recommend to anyone under any circumstances, even if it's $25 less.
Have you tried Vista, though? I wouldn't run that crap if it came pre-installed for free. In fact, it puts the "crap" in "cheap crap". (not the cheap, however)
Tell you where Dell does make their money: "optional" extras. Which tend to be absolutely ridiculous.
I buy Dell, and there the prices shown are indeed very cheap, but the disks are "optional extras". My account manager sent me a screendump of their system to demonstrate the cost of a hard disk without first obscuring the profit margin (which I'm sure was a mistake, but I'm not under any NDA)
The Ultra Wide 320 SCSI hard disk - you know, those ones which cost 3 times the amount of IDE disks per GB - those ones which are supposedly that much more expensive because they're more reliable - had a retail price of around UK£200, of which around £120 was profit.
I agree there as I use a G3/350 iMac for my general home usage. I have 10.3 on it and it is basically my "grandma" computer, you know, email, web, etc. Nothing fancy. I keep all my personal info on it, so I don't have to worry should my laptop get lost, etc. Plus, I have two firewire/USB hard drives for music, video, backup, etc. I also have a G3/233 that is in the kids' room and hums along nicely. The wife's mini has been almost flawless for a year. My mom has had a G4/700 iMac for 4 years run perfectly and my dad's eMac for two years do the same. My sister uses powermacs at her production studio and her powermacs at home like wise have not had hardware problems.
Given my experiences, I'd say that mac desktops are top notch but their laptops are flaky. I'm a teacher and need a good laptop. I love Keynote which I use daily in class, and as I teach programming as well, OS X is the perfect platform. However, right now I only need java for the AP Comp Sci and next year (hopefully!!) or the year after we're going to expand our comp sci offerings. I'll be using python, ruby, along with AMP and javascript so nothing will be windows centric (i.e. no VB!!!) and linux will work equally as well. It pains me that I've had problems with their hardware, but that's just been my experience. And, as I mentioned, Apple has had quite a few problems as of late. I'd buy a new iMac in a second but I need the portability. Perhaps when Leopard comes out, the kinks will worked out of the MB's and I'll feel more confident. Until then, I'll wait.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
High quality manure at low prices.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
They tried that.
$1200 isn't low-end. We're talking $300 machines that businesses buy in bulk. Apple can't compete with that.
You're forgetting that Macs come with a great OS (the best, in my opinion). Why do they need to have Windows? I understand that there are a few major applications that don't run on Macs, but OS X is far better than Windows for most people.
Windows is just a waste of space on your hard drive, unless you really need it.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Apple's US market share increased to between 4.6-4.8%, depending on who you ask.
Irrelevent to me either way, but if you are going to spout numbers please try to get them right.
Of course an entire machine is better than just an OS. The beauty of the PC is the ability to customize it exactly to your liking. Mac can never beat that.
Is anyone else tired of hearing the hardware comparisions, with umm no you are wrong attached to them? Some one please PROVE your comment. Apple computers are more expensive by Dell every time that I compare them. No matter what machine you are talking about. I just priced up a an Inspiron 6400 vs Apple MacBook Pro base model. Same basic stats except that Inspiron only would a min of 1GB RAM and 120GB HD and I upgraded the video and display so it would be closer:
Apple MacBook Pro $1999.00
Inspiron 6400 $1212.00
I don't see this Apple is cheaper with same equipment comment. Looks like I save $700 dollars with Dell. And if I don't care about the 128MB ATI video card and Ultrasharp monitor it drops to $1073. I could even throw in Windows XP Pro to really even the OS and I still save $550/$750.
Am I missing something?
If you are going to compare like with like, then please do so.
Please note that Dell only offers the Core 2 in the Dimension (I don't think any of their desktops used the older Core Duo) & the Apple is still the older Core Duo model.
Let me know where I can get 10 new Macs for $300 each for my new business, I'll give you and address and you just start shipping.. cheque is in the mail, you'll get it when Ig et the macs.
My guess is that there will be every bit as much failure rate as any other Intel/AMD based machine.
If you have any experience with Sun machines, you'll know that their non-Sparc based machines have as high a failure rate as any other Intel/AMD based machine.
When you start using cheap off-the-shelf parts, and don't kid yourself - that's is what is being used, you're bound to have higher failure rates.
Pricing as similar a machine as I can (replacing the ATI card with a quadra FX 3450, match RAM, lose monitor, add DVD-RW, add ethernet) I get $6282 before tax.
So, are Dell gouging an extra $2033 (or 47%) profit from their customers ? Or is it what the market will sustain for them ? Or is it that this time Apple managed to get a better deal on parts ? Who knows... It's pretty certain that if it were the other way around it would be Apple's "high prices".
Now my pricing includes a small discount, but since it seems Apple have to compete on price against Dell's discounts normally, I'm sure no-one will object to me using Apple's discounted prices against Dell, yes ? Even with the discount removed, it's still almost $1400 difference in Apple's favour.
My point is that you have to compare like with like. Sure there's no low-cost tower. Deal. If they don't sell it, you can't buy it - though in fact I'd be surprised if the gap wasn't filled soon enough... I'd expect Apple to launch the high-end towers first so there's a good population of high-end machines out there, and to exploit the pent-up demand. As soon as that demand starts to wane, I (if I were Apple
Simon (who can't wait for his new machine to arrive
Physicists get Hadrons!
Actually, I've talked with various people who have worked with both Macs and PCs by other companies, and they've invariably said that the number of problems they've had with their Apple hardware is significantly lower than the number of hardware issues they've had with their PCs.
Furthermore, the problems that occur with Apple hardware are neither more common nor unusual amongst PC manufactuers--defect rates are actually about even. You're more likely to hear about a problem with a Mac due to the zealotry of its community getting on everyone's nerves.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
On the high end of notebooks, Apple competes with Dell so-so. I just spec'ed an E1705 to be comparable to the standard 17" MBP in the way a Mac fanatic would (i.e. put in XP Pro, the GeForce Go 7900 GS, the 1920x1200 display -- all this because the lesser offerings don't quite compare to the MBP; never mind that the latter two are better -- and in the case of the GPU, significantly so). The price w/o the instant rebate is $2631, and the standard MBP is $2799. Ok, I didn't quite do it like a Mac fanatic. The more unreasonable ones would price it against an XPS, which is just ridiculous.
The "mid range" notebooks (which really have a CPU too expensive to be considered mid range) are similar, though the E1505 can't quite compare to the $1999 15" MBP. I don't think the Turbo Cache and Hyper Memory cards will work as well as the x1600. The RAM is also peculiarly 533 MHz... So, I think the 15" MBP would at the very least be comparable to the $1837 E1505 w/o rebates.
On the "low end" (again, CPU choice is the issue), the 13" MB looks like a steal compared to the E1405. I had to bump up the RAM and HD size on the MB this time (surprising, because Dell usually offers lower options), but the MB was $1249 compared to the E1405's $1543 w/o rebates. (Even with the instant rebate, the E1405 was $1234).
So it looks to me like Apple competes much more favorably in mid range thin and light notebooks than on the high or low ends (well, it doesn't have a low end product; if there were options to use a Core Solo or even a lower clock Core Duo, it might compete).
Perhaps Apple just needs to grow more before it can offer more competitive rates and more options. I feel like at every level the CPU is one step high and the GPU is one step low, but maybe that's because I'm a gamer, so I tend to value GPU performance over CPU. I bought the E1705 with standard display, GeForce Go 7800, 1.66 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM @ 667 MHz (alas! 2 DIMMs), and XP MCE w/ CD, and it cost me $1550. Those specs aren't fit for the enthusiast, but I think Dell still has the competitive edge for the gamer.
The desktop line is another beast, and no matter how hard someone tries, you won't be able to compare the two lines. Until I can find good benchmarks comparing Woodcrest to Conroe somehow, you won't be able to make them similar. However, one thing's for sure: there's a big gaping hole in Apple's current desktop lineup for middle range. I hope they decide to fill that gap sometime soon.
A Mac Pro is 2500$ and for a NVidia Quadro you add 1650$.
I assume that's not the price range the GP had in mind when saying "all of the affordable computers they sell are non upgradable"
Meh, be happy with your bargain basement PCs till the power bill comes. Then you can tell me how much cheaper the PCs you bought really are.
Monstar L
You probably want to build your own machine. Most people will never use expansion slots or extra drive bays. They just take up space.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Yea, I know what you mean, I feel the same way every time I use xp and have to close 25 ad-ware popups to find the menus at the top of the windows instead of the upper left corner of the screen. I try not to blame M$ too much I know they had to make some changes to the screen to keep from have an exact copy of the Mac OS. The recycle bin does not bother me much but Trash is a more descriptive term.
well yes I suppose if mercedes wanted my business all they'd have to do is drop a zero off the end of the price tag I suppose. - Yeah! Drop a zero, and the one before it. Also drop the first digit, then I'll be able to finance it IF the interest is not too high.
You can't handle the truth.
You've read about a few problems that occur on a small minority of computers. People whose computers have problems are a lot more vocal than people whose computers do not. And you'll notice that Apple fixes these problems without charge or fuss.
My first release MacBook Pro hasn't had any problems except a defective battery, which was replaced quickly and for free.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
On the long run I do not think Apple's Operating Systems will survive. If the Open source community chose GNUstep instead of GNOME Apple would be history or liberated today.
You, sir, have just said that "Apple is beleaguered" and you are not the first person to do so. But I will remind you, and everyone else like you, that this is 2006 and Mac OS X (beta) debuted in 1999. Macintosh has been around since 1984.
Apple's Operating Systems will be around for a lot longer than you think.
Perhaps, but I am not interested in quality computers. I want em cheap. Sure they will not last as long but then I can get a new faster machine. Why pay 3 times as much for an Apple computer? Say my cheap computer last 2.5 years this means that the apple computer has to last 7.5 years (and not be more obsolete than the cheap computer paid for 2.5 years ago).
Freedom or George Bush
Well, you may have read about Apple portables and Dells, but I've purchased several of each. The failure rate is roughly the same, which is roughly the same, in my experience, as HP and Sony. That is to say, generally they're fine, sometimes you get a system with a glitch or two, and every once in a while you get a total lemon. I own a Macbook Pro, and there are no problems.
Other vendors have pleny of design flaws, especially when they make big hardware changes-- it just doesn't make news.
And the whole thing of Apple machines being expensive is largely a myth. Yeah, you can show me that those cheap Dell Dimensions are cheaper than the cheapest Mac, but those cheap Dells are terrible little crippled machines. Price out an Optiplex ultra-small form factor machine with similar specs to a Mac mini, and tell me whether you get it cheaper than a Mac mini. Last time i checked it out, as similar as you could make them, the mini was $100 less.
Compare the Mac Pro with a similarly configured Dell Precision. Compare the iMac with a small form-factor optiplex with a wide-screen 20" LCD. Macs aren't even more expensive, it's only that they're on-par with Dell's high-end line, not their cheap $300 computers.
You can get Tiger *now*.
I guess they should list IQ in the System requirements. =)
Hate to break it to you but Steve Jobs doesn't want your business. Fries computers has your kind of machine selling for $150 to $250. Apple has no intension of bottom feeding. Dell can have the name brand bottom as far as they are concerned. Ever work on one of those Dells? They're junk, slick but junk. I'm sure Apple would be thrilled with 10% of the market and I can see them having the potential of grabbing 30% of the market with very few changes. I'm not saying they'll grab that share I'm saying the potential is there if people would take a serious look at the Macs and objectively look at their requirements. The real problem is expectation. It they are told 95% of what they use for software can run on a Mac they'll go with PC for the 5% they rarely if ever use. Given the advantages of Mac it's a poor reason. I do high end 3D graphics and I'm finding I can make the switch with few if any consessions. I read an article recently that gave percentages on driving. 85% of all driving is less than 50 miles in a round trip. A poll the next day asked if people would consider a car that had a 100 mile range. 90% said no. They were talking about electrics that get the equalvalent of $.60 per gallon. People weren't even willing to consider a car that would handle the vast majority of their driving even when it cost 1/5 of their present car to operate. Ultimately software vendors will hold Apple back. My primary software will all run on Mac but most plug ins won't. I don't have a serious need for most of them so I won't let that drive my descision. Personally stability is driving my descision to switch. All the cool apps that come with OSX are just a bonus. I kept reading reviews insisting Leopard is a rip off of Vista. Have they even looked at a comparison of the features? I did last night and got a serious laugh. Vista's Gadgets is a lame rip off of Dashboard which has been around for a while now. Several other things looked suspicously like Mac features. Most of it was security and system upgrades. Over all it didn't look that different than XP. I'm sure it needs all the new security but I have to question why? My new Mac has little in the way of security yet I'm had no problems. I have an XP notebook that if I leave on line for more than 15 minutes gets zombied. Apple bit the bullet and redid their operating system so now they have a solid powerful OS with lots of potential for expansion. The Windows OS is getting old and bloated and full of holes. Microsoft has a monopoly on OSs so it's hard to make a dent. Mac is likely to expand it's base with the new hardware and Leopard. It's a smart strategy letting people run both OSs on one machine. I have several machines most Windows but the newest is a Mac and if I have my choice I go straight to the Mac. My best PC is much faster for rendering but the Mac is a lot more stable and more fun to use. Now that the Intel Mac towers are out I'll be picking a few of those up and I expect my PCs will soon be collecting dust. My suggestion is don't listen to anyone. Look for yourself at the features. I strongly recommend trying a Mac out. I think if people would spend a month switching back and forth between a Mac and a PC 9 out of 10 would switch entirely to Mac. That's what Steve Jobs is betting and it's a smart bet.
Plagiarize detection mode on - this sounds a bit familiar
, but maybe you forgot to mention that you read it the the New York Times?Confession is good for the soul!
."Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
knowing that it was unsuitable due to lack of source
Only if you believe that lack of source makes any difference. I personally believe that if these $100 laptops are generally used to hack operating system code, they're wasting all their potential. And that it's what you DO with the operating system that's the real revolution these machines could have brought. Instead, we're stuck with arguably the least capable software bundle just because of the religious (ie. "it must be open-source") beliefs of the project's director. Bleah.
And if you want to argue that the "it must be open-source" belief isn't a religious one, then show me the data that says these machines will help these people more if its operating system is open source rather than if its operating system is easy to use with a large application base.
E pluribus unum
BMW drivers typically don't tell everyone to buy BMWs no matter their driving needs, either. It's not the machines, it's the users.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Not in the US. But in Germany where it's Opel not chevy, you might be surprised. Oh and try to buy a carbureted push rod V-8 in a BMW, you can't. Similarly try to purchase a normally aspirated V-10 that gets ~100 hp/ liter of displacement in a chevy road car. So perhaps this is nothing like Dell and Apple selling Intel based computers.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Personally, I wouldn't even recommend an XPS to anyone...They're just glorified Dimensions and Inpirons...
Gateway's nominally better in quality, but they get weird quirks when they go wrong. E-Machines is just a second-hand Gateway anymore. About the same quality as a Dell, perhaps a little more, so decent for someone who has a very limited budget and knows next to nothing about computers (the biggest advantage an E-Machines has over a Dell are the in-store warranties and services a consumer can get from buying an E-Machines at a physical store).
With as low of a profit margin that there is on computers, it's a wonder Dell is still in service...
It is far from that simple. Getting the average person to install a new OS on his or her existing machine, wiping out existing software in the process, is asking a lot. Most people just use what came on their machine and stay with that. Microsoft knows this well, as the biggest competitor for Vista by far will be Windows XP, and in that case people wouldn't even lose software compatibility when upgrading. Or think of it this way. Firefox is a free download, and there are a lot of reasons to use it over Internet Explorer. Yet, what is the browser share of Firefox? About 10%.
So I doubt that there is any immediate gain in unleasing OS X for sale to any random combination of PC components out there. Support costs would be very high, and those who install the Mac OS on their Dell are not going to get help from Dell, now are they? It is far better for Apple to just sell them a new machine with known, tested components.
As much as I loathe Apple's manufacturing and QA practices, if you bought an Intel Mac, you could easily run Windows XP without resorting to VMWare or VirtualPC to do it. So, your complaints seem largely baseless in light of the new generation Apple computers being able to run Windows natively.
If your engineering applications require hardware specifications an Apple can't offer, okay. Use Windows, please; nobody is twisting your arm. I use both Windows and Linux myself, but I can meet my Windows needs by running Windows inside of VMWare Player or QEmu, and I use Linux for my day-to-day computing. If Linux couldn't meet my day to day computing needs, I wouldn't use it; it's that simple.
Your experience doesn't represent how all Apple hardware works. I have a 1Ghz G4 which has only kernel panicked twice and nothing else.
The claims against low end Dells are not accurate either. I've seen dozens of $300-400 boxes that have run just fine for years. Some in low end roles and that have remained as equipped at the factory, RAM upgrade excluded. Other that were essentially purchased as barebones and had RAM and video upgraded, some hard drive too, USB 2.0 added, etc.
This is indeed a valid point. Supporting a vast array of hardware is a daunting challenge for an OS. Indeed, I mentioned this in my post, that one of the things that prevents people from having OS choice is the fact that most drivers are written for windows. This is a pity, since the hardware cannot be used on any other OS. Perhaps there should be a universal device driver API of some sort. I suppose different kernels have different internal designs so it may not be practical to try to implement a universal kernel API, but perhaps some compatability layer could be devised? Perhaps each OS could have its own native kernel API but also a universal API that is built on top of that. This way, manufacturers would have one API to program for all OSs. There might be a performance hit or, perhaps not. A manufacturer could still write versions of their driver for certian native APIs as well as the universal API. I say, however, it is better to have complete good quality hardware drivers that may be a little slower, than none at all.
If you want to run that list then fast, yes. It still takes windows god awful forever to just simply shut down. Startup time is excruciating. Applications launch slower also. Open a folder with 400 folders in it. Select all. Open. Now go get a sandwich while it tries to open them all. Windows faster? I think not. Mac isn't fastest, but it's not slow by any description, and is certainly faster than most. Whenever I am forced to use windows it seems I am forever waiting for a window to open (or draw!) and the hourglass owns the mouse most of the time. Part of what makes mac os 'feel' faster is that it is responsive almost all the time. Unless you have the colorful pinwheel, anything you click on is accepted. It may be a few seconds before it can get around to handling it, but you can click the buttons, drag the objects, or type as you need and they will be handled. When you have the hourglass on windows, whch happens quite a lot, you can't click or drag anything.
good. well, that's subjective, but any impartial comparison you read usually says somewhere in the article that yes, mac os is good. usually better designed, more intiutive, and easier to use. that's what most practical people look for in an os. Is it that much better? Or is it more image and window dressing than anything else? Hard to say for sure. What I do know is that the majority of people I know that work with mac os and some other os prefer the time they spend on mac os. There will always be zealots in either camp, but the impartials do seem to prefer mac, at least if cost is no object.
cheap. heck no. never has been, never will be. This is the odd man out in the "pick two". Like I said, you can't have all three. A lot of R&D and marketing is behind that Apple label, and that has to be paid for. I believe the mac users get their money's worth.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Apple's problem started back in the 80's when they chose to bundle their hardware witht he OS. The whole reason Intel/AMD based systems have pretty much been the only game in town for persoanl computers is the fact that IBM allowed clones to be made. IBM computers were hella expensive. The clones were not. Guess which machines everyone and their mom went for? Then you have Microsoft who doesn't force vedors to fork over their left testicle and first born to create software for their OS. This combo is what has made Microsoft the jugernaut it is today and Intel/AMD systems so dominant. You can't expect someone with a bunch of software they already know and love to switch to a whole new platform and more than likely be forced to look for other apps to fill the holes left by the apps that simply do not exist in the Apple OS universe. OK let's say that Apple can compete on price. (snickers) Can they compete with available software libraries? The answer is no. :-) I seem many windows apps with ports to Linux and Unix but very few to Apple OS. Why do you suppose that is? Lack of market share. Apple, try as they have in the past, is not mainstream. It's actually loosing ground. The places where it traditionally reigned supreme (schools and Multimedia) are being taken over by Windows boxes. Let's try to remember the only reason Apple is aropund to day is that Microsoft (Bill Gates) saved them. They invested 150 million in Apple. I suspect to avoind even more chrages of being a monopoly. Had that not happened Apple would not be here to day to make these wishful boasts. If Apple really wants to gain marhet share they will have to drasticly change the way they do business.
It doesn't matter what you or your parent poster believes about source making a difference: the creators of the project wants the computer to run open source only, and that was a well known fact by then. Whether that is a correct decision does not matter for this particular point.
Taking that sidetrack however, I can only see good things where people who will probably never be able to buy neither support nor software have the total freedom to change things on their systems freely. No, not everybody or even most will be able to do that, but everybody has the chance to learn that, and get a potentially valuable skill (and a lot of fun!) in the process.
The "least capable bundle" is indeed arguable and most definitely comes down to what the needs are. If your favorites are unsuitable, it's game over. With open source, not necessarily so.
Spine World
IT's probably worth pointing out: BetaMax failed because the tape lengths were too short at first, so VHS with its 2 hours tapes got support from the studios. In other words, the awesome people wanted (movies on a single convenient tape) didn't exist in BetaMax. In otherwords "technically superior" does not mean "better." BetaMax lost because it didn't do what the market needed and by the time they fixed that it was too late, the stigma of it not serving the market was already firmly cemented. Why do I quibble so? Because the same principle applies to macs. The original mac might have been prettier than 3.1, it might have been easier to use, it might even have been faster, but what it wasn't was capable of running the applications the market at the time wanted. I used to run the mac lab at the university I attended, back then and running that lab was a dream - the macs practically took care of themselves and the network was incredibly easy to manage. However, it was also a nightmare: I was lucky if I saw 3 students on any given day because they flat out couldn't run the apps they needed for their research on my macs. The apps didn't exist. People wrote off macs then and many of people still remain unconvinced - the pricing on a Mac only helps reinforce the stereotype of the mac being an "artsy computer" in their minds. Yes, that's totally not true now a days, but like BetaMax, it doesn't matter. The damage is already done. It's not a paradox, as you imply, it's human nature. Once we make a judgement it's very hard to change our minds. Apple's definitely on the right track, though. There's no doubt Macs are way more accepted than BetaMax ever was. That's the difference between a company like Apple that tries to keep in touch with what the market wants, and Sony, which tries to dictate what the market wants.
Core 2 Duos are in the low-end Dimension line and also the high end Precision line.
Oddly enough, it's cheaper to buy the equivalent machine through the Precision line rather then bumping a Dimension up to the same specs. The Precision includes XP Pro by default, the Dimension adds $140 to the price for XP Pro.
(I was spec'ing dual-core 2GB Win XP Pro systems.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Wrong. A sale is a sale, no matter when it happens. Apple won't go out of business in the next 6 months just because some users delay purchasing until next year.
Sure, you make more money if someone buys a new Apple today and pays for the $150 upgrade next year, but a good product is a good product, and software enhancements aren't a valid reason for putting off a purchase.
Apple's strategy is much more focused on building loyal customer relationships, not just making a one-time sale. Actually, all companies worth their salt have that strategy.
Excerpt the article: So, while initially Apple will likely promise Microsoft that their OS is safe, the actual plan will probably be more like this: once customers are comfortable with the Mac UI, they will gradually train them to use the MacOS exclusively, and then use the then very robust emulation technology to run a declining number of Windows applications without running Windows. Of course this depends on Microsoft not seeing the plan coming and, given the history between the two firms, Microsoft will probably be skeptical to begin with. But, even seeing it coming, given the European Union problem what can Microsoft do about it? ________________________ What I think will happen is users will demand and receive most of what they need in Native OS X applications. M$ will OEM XP/Vista to companies like Parallels for about the same discount that Dells receives. Wine which uses API to replace XP OS will never get past the hobby I tried it stage. M$ is probable using Office profits to pay for the development of Vista. Besides what can M$ do? Block it from running on Apple hardware because they know once people have had the OS X experience, they will never settle for anything less? I don't think they are ready to admit the possibility. It is probable starting a trend but M$ will be the fat cat for many years to come and about the only change will be that MacBU will make more profit for M$.
$675 is the lowest my institution (a very large state institution using a "State Aggregated Purchase Initiative"/Contract) pays for a for a GX620-820/1GRam/80GSata/16xDVD+/-RW/17inch/XPPro/3 yLimWar.
How big should the "bulk" be to get a $300 machine?
The "least capable bundle" is indeed arguable and most definitely comes down to what the needs are. If your favorites are unsuitable, it's game over. With open source, not necessarily so.
You act like MacOS X doesn't have a free, included IDE with every copy, or distributes all its developer documentation for free, with free updates over the 'net. Or that MacOS X doesn't have most of its basic services, compiler, and (once again) kernel as open-source. It would have been a really, really great things for these people to have been able to use. Instead, they're stuck with RedHat for, again, religious reasons (unless you have a pointer to that data showing open-source to be a demonstrably better criteria.)
E pluribus unum
"That's cool, I can't wait to get my new mac and start playing..oh..uhm. I guess I better buy a console or something to go with it."
* Bootcamp, Parallels, etc.
* Xbox360 is the same as a video card that plays Oblivion decently, and it'll also play Oblivion decently (as well as other PC titles, since Xbox360 == little PC).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
That's a bad idea for Apple. They might get customers in the short term, but they might very well kill themselves in the long term. Bootcamp and these Windows installer programs are meant as a temporary stop-gap for people switching over to Mac OS X. Really, the OS is the reason people by a Mac, it's the heart of the "look and feel" of the Mac experience, which is Apple's selling point. The last thing Apple wants is a bunch of people buying their machines specifically to use windows, because it will slowly erode into the mindshare of people using OS X. After OS X is dead, people will wake up one day and say to themselves, "Oh, now Apple's just another PC company like Dell, just more expensive with nothing unique to offer, except for superficial case designs."
Currently, Apple has something REAL to offer people that is different and, IMHO, a whole lot better than the competition: OS X. The last thing they want to do is jeapordise their mindshare by selling it beside Windows. Because, let's face it, if you have both Windows and OS X on a business computer, the fucking IT people at your company will FORCE you to use Windows, because most engineering staff seem to be windows jerks. This is especially true at my company, where simply bringing in my mac laptop to work gets the evil eye from the head engineer (my former boss), and I work in video production!
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Opera vs. Firefox
Although in the first example, this battle isn't over yet.
Dell has a $485 laptop. With a 1.6 Celeron. And a 4-cell battery. And XP Home. Will ship ten days from now.
Please.
No one here would tolerate this machine for more than three days.
No one here would recommend it for anyone they don't want to hear from a week later and every week after that.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I want a desktop with drive bays and expansion slots
You (and the slashdot crowd as a whole) are pretty unique on that point. Most people wouldn't touch the insides of their computer if their life depended on it. Between a major multi-hundred dollar upgrade and paying the Best Buy guy (or the neighborhood geek) for a few man-hours ($75-100 or so) to install it, the price tag for a general system upgrade climbs to the point where another computer is more worthwhile.
Exceptions: geeks, gamers, professionals.
You mean the Mac Pro being priced $1000 less than a comparably configured Dell?
You've apparently swallowed the Apple Kool-Aid on that one.
I saw Apple's slide of that part of their presentation. On the face, they looked like comparably equipped systems... until you spent the time to look a little closer. Among other differences, the Dell had a Quadro graphics card vs. the Apple's GeForce, and the Dell had a warranty 3 times as long as Apple's.
In other words, Apple basically configured a Dell system with the same hard drive, memory and CPU, then loaded up the Dell with a bunch of high-priced add-ons that the Mac Pro didn't have and called them "comparably configured" to make their price look better.
When MS uses these kinds of marketing tactics, they get slammed to the wall here. When Apple does it, people quote their marketing as if it's gospel without even checking whether or not it's true.
This is what is so absurd about all these price complaints... SIMILAR SPEC'D MACHINES from Apple aren't any significant amount more than other OEM PCs (and certainly ONLY comparing to Dell is absurd, given that the majority of PCs are NOT Dells (still), and IBM/HP/Toshiba continue to do OK)
The only difference is that Apple is ONLY using Core Duo chips (and now Woodcrest), which is definetly a MID-RANGE chip. It is obvious that there was a decision at Apple to standardize on Core architecture, with SSE3 instruction set
(if you check out the x86project, they need all sorts of hacked patches to run OSX on pre-SSE3 chips (which they do anyway)).
and until then, feel free to check out osx86project for PC models that have high OSX compatability!
Two 2Ghz Dual core Xeon 1GB (2x512MB) RAM 160GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI) 16x double-layer SuperDrive that burns and plays both CDs and DVDs 4 hard drive bays - up to 3TB storage. 8 RAM slots - up to 16GB RAM. 4 full-length PCI Express expansion slots. $2124 But I bet that's still not good enough for you. What do you do with all this expansion you crave?
as per steve ballmer
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This sounds interesting.
Can you expand on your theory or provide a scenario for comparision with some examples, figures or some links?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Standard 3rd party hardware, maybe, but it's standard 3rd party hardware that's made by different companies. Until Apple's switch to Intel, IBM and Motorola made most of the parts (don't know who they have making the new Intel hardware). Dell, on the other hand, uses other various manufacturers (the proof is on the mobo). The quality difference stems from the processes and resources that went into the making of each company's systems. Apple is also more than just a website and a warehouse, unlike Dell.
The PowerPC architecture was one of the main reasons Apples were more expensive, because it was proprietary (we'll probably see the prices drop as time goes on with the new Intel systems). And I beg to differ on your "better video cards..." statement. There's a reason why graphic design and animation studios and schools went for Apple computers, the PowerPC archetecture simply handled it better. Also, compairing x86 hardware to PPC hardware is like compairing an Athlon XP (~1.5-2.0GHz) to a Pentium 4 (~3.4GHz). The Pentium has a faster clock speed, but the architecture of the Athlon makes it more efficient (Wikipedia). The different architecture of PPC hardware offers different software results than comparable Intel systems.
Yes, there is probably a difference in the profit margins between Apple and other electronics companies, but unlike the other companies, Apple doesn't specialize as much as Microsoft, Dell, or AMD. AMD only makes processors, Dell only builds computers, Microsoft primarily produces software (they do have some keyboards, mice, and webcams with their name). Now, I know Apple doesn't do everything, parts of it is outsourced, but that goes with every company, but from the Apple company comes hardware and software, computers and electronics. It's like having all your funiture from a company that sells it all in what can become one, giant set, or having your dining set from one company, a couch from another company, and a chair from yet another company and getting a hodge-podge, though possibly matching set-that-isn't-really-a-set.
Actually, I've talked with various people who have worked with both Macs and PCs by other companies, and they've invariably said that the number of problems they've had with their Apple hardware is significantly lower than the number of hardware issues they've had with their PCs.
I'm not going to doubt your second-hand anecdotal experience, but I work in a company that runs on a mix of Apple and PC hardware and we have had just as many breakdowns with our Apple hardware as with our PC's, if not more. We have five editing suites in my office with, until recently, a G4 in each, and at one point every single one of them was down with dead hard drives simultaneously. Individually, they would go down at least once per week. We finally replaced them with G5's about 6 months ago and haven't had any further problems so far with those particular machines.
However, just a month or so ago I noticed another encoding machine we have (a dual G5) was ouputting stuttering video from Sorenson Squeeze. I ran a hard drive check and discovered that - surprise! - the hard drive was trashed.
So that's six Macs out of probably 20 at our company with dead hard drives. That is not a great ratio.
There is really no reason why Apple even *should* be more reliable than other PC companies, except for the fact that they claim to be. But their laptops are built by Asus, which is just a Taiwanese PC hardware maker. Their desktop hardware is the same stuff in every PC - Seagate hard drives, Intel CPU's, probably Samsung memory, etc.
My company pushes our Macs pretty hard, but then Apple markets these machines as being for creative professionals. The problem is they don't actually use any special hardware that's designed for durability, even though such hardware does exist. They use the same cheap ATA hard drives as everybody else, for example, even though Seagate and others have plenty of other options designed for enterprise-level use (some of which aren't very expensive). They don't even give you an option to upgrade for reliability; the only options are size options.
Anyway, so you said in your post that "invariably" you've only heard from people in mixed environs that their Macs are more reliable than their PC's, and now you can't say that anymore. I'm telling you that my company's Macs have been a nightmare to maintain and have eventually just needed to be replaced, and even the newer G5's are wearing out much faster than they should be.
Before you call others "retarded" you might want to brush up your reading comprehension skills. GP was talking about removing the harddisk from a G3 iBook , and that is an operation that's not trivial. In fact, having performed said operation myself I'd call it an absolute bitch.
Having said that, I should also note that my general experience with Apple's poducts has been far more positive than the GP's.
sig? Oh, that sig...
My wife works in market research and you are correct. Apple spends ALOT on market research. At least they used to.....
All points of time and space are connected.
"I can only see good things where people who will probably never be able to buy neither support nor software have the total freedom to change things on their systems freely."
Nice sentiment, but I doubt that they're going to bundle a complete development suit and include the source for the OS and every application into a machine into the 500MB of flash memory those things are slated to contain. As such, the "total freedom" of all of those peope is a bit limited..... by reality.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
why would you want to spend $300 on a throw-away unit?
I bought the $300 throw-away Dell was selling about three years ago. It got me a 2.5G P4 Celeron w/ 256M RAM and a 30 gig HD. Saved some money opting for FreeDOS instead of Windows, and just installed Linux on it. It serves me VERY well as a spare bedroom PC, internet access for my wife (when I'm using the laptop), private network caching DNS, IMAP mail, web server (for off-site webmail), etc etc. It's also gotten a Hauppauge PVR-350 and another half gig of RAM last year to become a MythTV frontend. For $300, and since I couldn't afford anything else at the time, it worked beautifully. To run Windows on this thing would be somewhat stupid, but certainly possible if it's what I really needed. At the time, though, it was a good buy.
Wait a minute...
Mac Pro
dual 3.0Ghz Xeon woodcrests
16 Gigs RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 4500
23" cinema display
Mac OSX
$11,648
Dell Precision Workstation 690
dual 3.0Ghz Xeon woodcrests
16 Gigs RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 4500
24" widescreen flat panel
Windows XP x64 edition
$9,908
Guess it depends on how you configure them, doesn't it?
Apple is trying to sell on quality and experience they want you to have, not just the minimum hardware needed to run MS windows. That's the key difference between Apple and everybody else. Apple is trying to do their own thing, everybody else is keeping to the MS line.. too far ahead and MS does something different so it's wasted money; so it's just a race to the bottom of cheapest cost.
As someone who recently had his HD replaced on AppleCare (a four-day turnaround), I think Apple puts some very lame hard disks in its computers. My super-duper top-of-the-line G5 shipped with with a Western Digital crapfactory, and of course the applecare replacement was another WD. At lest they stopped putting DeathStars in them. OTOH, my old Performa 6200 had a Quatum in it from the factory, it was in use for about four years with nary a problem.
Stupid question: You're using DiskWarrior, right?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Betamax had better video, but who had a TV set that could display it?
I have a brand-name color TV from as late as 1990 that doesn't have an S-Video input. Betamax entered the market when the RF output for video games and home PCs was still the norm.
Windows 3.1 was released in 1992 and was backwards compatible with twelve years of MSDOS software.
The MSDOS and Windows PC could be had in any configuration and price point the market would support: rack mounted for industrial use, stripped to the bare bones for routine office work, or maxed-out for gaming. It is and remains an incredibly adaptable platform.
So you are telling Apple to f*** off because it is more difficult to get the Mac OS on your PC illegally than it is to install Windows illegally.
In case this didn't occur to you, you are not exactly a good customer. Apple doesn't give a crap if you stick with Windows.
Oh, and be careful. That place called the grocery store? They want you to pay too. I know, f*** them!
apple won't be competing on desktops anytime soon. If you notice their cpu scheme they use only intel notebook and server processors.. NOT the desktop ones. That automatically keeps them from price waring with Dell for components with Intel management. They don't have to pay MS tax, (remember MS gets 85%+ profit per copy so the actual dev cost of Windows on a PC is only $15 or so) so that's $60+ more bucks to negotiate with for extra BOL cost of using better parts. It also pumps up the volume of mobile processors and server processors they are purchasing giving them the buying edge they need to get them first. Apple is probably the biggest individual seller of Core duo right now and will probably be the biggest seller of the new Xeon as well.. because the Windows crowd is busy using the cheapest bulky, power hungry, desktop processors they can use.. and has warehouses full to clean up before they can compete with what Apple is offering.
You expect people to whine as much when a $300 PC has problems, compared to a new $2000 notebook? Mac users, myself now included, tend to be a lot more vocal when problems crop up, and considering the price, I'd expect just that. But for as hot as my MBP can get (it's actually fairly cool right now, though that's unusual), it's still consistantly more responsive and stable than any PC I've ever used, including my own considerably more expensive custom-watercooled desktop. You hear more about Apple defects because people expect crap when they buy a $300 PC or a $500 notebook, so they don't whine when it starts getting fucked up. Only time my Mac has bluescreened, or really had any software issues for that matter, is when it was running Windows via BootCamp (oddly, Parallels seems more stable).
And the Mac users bitching moaning about problems also tends to get them fixed, unlike Dell users. Steve has too much to lose by not keeping his customers happy, unlike the big PC OEMs. It may take a while sometimes, but almost if not all of the early MB/MBP problems have been dealt with in some form or another.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
apparently, someone never heard of sarcasm. And you are right, it is a bitch removing the HDD's from the G3's. The G4's are a little better. I hope Apple has made it easier with the new MB's. Maybe my experiences are unique, I don't know. I really hope they are as I love OS X, not just for the *nix but for the iApps as well. Hey, i've got kids and there's nothing that compares to iMovie!!
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
But does Honda compete with Kia on price? Isn't this closer to the analogy of Apple v. Dell?
I completey miss your point, but I also completely disagree with the "2-3 times as much".
Of course Apple machines cost more; good quality, long lasting, intelligent products do. But 10-20%, not 2-3 times.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Actually, I find the iBook (and the MacBook, once the first-version bugs are ironed out) to be a very reasonable entry-level product, at least in the not-confined-to-Windows market. A bit over a year ago I got a 1.2 GHz G4 iBook with an 80G HDD for 1,200 EUR; the cheapest comparable laptop with guaranteed *nix compatibility I could find was a ThinkPad with a similar price and slightly lower specs (and the added disadvantage of not having the sexiest GUI around).
True, Apple can't compete in the bargain basement sector, but if you want a notebook you can actually get some work done on (and/or just one that runs some flavor of *nix) Apple's low-end laptops are pretty competitive.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
If Apple truly wishes to take over the market, they'll need to embrace the Open Document Format. Their current proprietary formats just can't do the trick.
So you get a faster clock, but less performance -- and the Mac can be upgraded to new chips whereas the PC is using an end-of-life architecture and a retarded version of Windows.
You mean there are other versions of Windows that aren't retarded? That's news to me...
*sigh*
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
I would rather pay more for hardware that doesn't make high pitch noises (I have sensitive hearing) that I can hear and doesn't have a horrible support that won't fix the problems.
Apple care has sent me back non-working hardware telling me it's fixed a few times -- Other times they told me they fixed the problems, and the problems were still there when I got the hardware back.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
MacBookPro is a single Core Duo chip (for now). I wrote I wanted a Core 2 Duo chip. A few more bits there. Also, I do not want a compact,portable,all-in-one,desktop (formerly called laptop) computer. I want the tower with the all the bells and whistles that come with it (no shortcuts for portability, exploding batteries, ignitable external power connections, etc.).
Huh???
But does Honda compete with Kia on price? Isn't this closer to the analogy of Apple v. Dell?
No, not really. Honda costs more than Kia. They also cost more than Chevy, Ford, Dodge, and even the likes of Nissan. They compete by providing a superior product.
I completey miss your point, but I also completely disagree with the "2-3 times as much".
Of course Apple machines cost more; good quality, long lasting, intelligent products do. But 10-20%, not 2-3 times.
People tend to decide what they want, then they go shopping for it. Most people just want a car that'll get them from point A to point B, in relative safety and comfort. They buy a Honda because it can do that at the cheapest cost. Sure, the cheapest Mercedes can do that too, and to equip a Honda in a similar fashion puts the cost about the same. But both cars are too expensive to the buyer. They are both similar, and include features that are nice but the buyer doesn't want to pay for. So they buy a basic Civic or Accord.
Same applies to the Mac vs. the PC. The buyer sees a PC system that can do what they want for $300-$500, and the Mac Mini for $599+keyboard/mouse/monitor, and the PC is 1/3-1/2 the cost. So they buy the cheap PC. Sure, there is some PC that is more similar to the Mac that costs about the same as the Mac, but they don't care about all this "equilivent PC" crap Mac users like to talk about. To them, the Mac *IS* quite a bit more expensive.
Often Windows systems come with the most popular software, such as Nero burner, Cyberlink DVD player, Photoshop pro, Microsoft Office etc. They might not be very well integrated with each other, but they aren't just some knock off applications either.
On the other hand, we have Linux systems, that generally come with everything (bloated installation unfortunately, but at least that can be changed easily) which includes proprietary drivers/software too (Often the reason why people 'diss' Linux distros for not having on the install cd funny enough).
Then there are those smaller companies, which provide cheaper computers, but are also the minimalists. Probably at most you get is Windows, OpenOffice, Firefox (and other free software) with these.
I think most newly sold windows computers have somewhat decent security out of the box, they come with anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewalls, while Mac, just comes with a Firewall. Currently it's a bit behind Apple, because users still run as administrators, but that's going to change in Windows vista.
Most new computers do come with the majority of those programs (usually Opera instead of Firefox in my experience), and windows update is automated (like the update manager on MacOSX).
As for the high memory-tax, avast doesn't seem to be taking much here.
Don't worry, thatll be gone in VistaSorry, no idea what you mean by lack of 'full' multiuser support, example please?You do know that POSIX's permissions system is more primitive Windows's. It's why there has been so much work on compatibility hacks with ACLs, trying to get them working nicely on *nix filesysems. My favorite issue.
How about that PCs come from more than just one vendor. I also don't see many low-end scale PCs often. Another interesting thing, is that HERE, where I am located -- the people who know what windows is, have probably heard of Linux, but most have never even heard of a company called Apple.
There's a reason why I still buy Amigas...My Mac experiences were not so enlightening.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Configure a Mac Pro and Dell with the same specs including an upgrade to a more expensive Quadro which Apple does provide as an option. Notice the price? The Mac Pro is still cheaper and it includes more media software. Now add three year Apple care or Call Apple up and inquire about Procare. Is the the Dell cheaper? By how much? Is it 50 bucks or less? Is it really cheaper when you consider the bundled software?
The low end quadro is irrelevant and probably no more powerful than the gamer card even with CAD apps. I think you fell for marketing names and buzzwords.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I'm not really sure how to respond to your post, but I really enjoyed your sig.
There has been talk of the elusive "killer app" for years on the internet but I believe that these new frameworks (Core Animation), existing frameworks (Core Image/Video, Data and Audio) will usher in a true "killer app" that developers will struggle in vain to reproduce on windows and other linux. Some may manage to create a pale copy of it but it will not be so tightly integrated into the OS and you will not be able to easily share data with other apps. I would also venture that it would take 10X as much time, money and manpower to develop.
We can all "oooh and ahhh" all we we want about the flashy features in OS X or Vista how easy it is to implement innovative applications in a particular OS will determine which one has the attention of the public and media IMO.
I think the keynote only scratched the surface of the power the collaboration features in Leopard will have on the development landscape.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I won't defend Windows and I didn't offer comments on it, but there are attempts on the internet to benchmark the performance of the kernels of popular OS'es, and those results show OS X to be slower than others including Windows. Your examples include booting, shutdowns, and explorer (finder) performance, none of which are the kernel itself.
I have a MBP and it is quite slow and unresponsive at times. Yes, if you don't have a color wheel then it responds. I see the color wheel quite often and for long periods. I don't make great demands of the machine and have 1G or RAM as well. My MBP is not fast by my measure.
"but the impartials do seem to prefer mac"
according to you they do. Good is subjective as both of us have said. I don't agree that OS X is better nor do I claim it is worse. I feel it is prettier and is frequently more consistent. I don't care for it's clickiness nor its tendency to require lots of mouse movement. I can live with OS X but I don't feel burdened by Windows.
If Vista ships with a full iLife suite the posters here will be crying foul. Wah! It has an integrated browser! Wah! It has a media playe!
But you don't buy the Vista PC because it ships with a calendar app, you buy it because MSDOS and Windows have been in your home and office for as long as twenty-five years.
The availability of hardware, software and peripherals is unmatched. You can buy or build a Windows PC in any configuration imaginable and at any price point and customize it to your heart's content.
You can pay full retail list for the latest and greatest FPS, or bag Fallout and System Shock at a garage sale for 50 cents.
If you find Ubuntu capable of running "all" of the software that "you need", good for you. Ask the average joe though and they will give you a blank stare if you mention linux. You may also find that the average joe does not give a shit about the GPL if they are not able to run the software they want or need to use.
Fuck myself? No, I'd rather fuck some hot chick.
PS. Your mother wants you to move out of her basement and get a fucking job already.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Dude, check the facts on the $150,000 investment Microsoft made in Apple. When that happened, Apple had something like $4.5 billion in cash in the bank. CASH. Check it. They could have kept running the company for two or three years and not sold anything. They didn't NEED $150,000 to survive. It was a settlement to keep Apple from suing Microsoft over stolen QuickTime code and other things. Apple also wrested the continued development of Office for the Mac for 5 years in exchange for planting Internet Explorer on shipping machines. If that software swap didn't happen, Apple may well have tanked because there were few viable alternatives. That $150,000 didn't save anything except a lose-lose court battle. So far as market share, I've seen nothing but people drop kicking their home PCs left and right and buying Intel Macs. I know this because several times a week, I'm helping someone move their Outlook Address Book to their new Mac and training them how to get around it. Apple is also meeting the software community half way and creating machines that will support virtualization more easily. When Crossover Mac comes out in a month, that's when I'm completely switching and dumping Windows all the way.
Most of the stuff on
"they suggest that Steve Jobs held back on showing more Leopard features so people would not get too excited and stop buying in 2006."
Why would any one wait to buy hardware for an OS update? Its not coming for atleast 6 months.
This is you if you owned a game development company:
crossmr: We're only going to develop this game for PC only.Lead Developer: We've already developed it. In fact, we developed it in a way that allows us to port it to other platforms quite easily.
crossmr: That's unpossible! Did I ask you to do that? No! PC only! And who's he?
Guest appearance by Steve Ballmer: DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...
Here's a supportive anecdote: Which airline consistently leads the industry in customer satisfaction? Southwest. That's right, the bus with wings. Low expectations are easy to satisfy.
"Just $199 more" = 50% more than $400. In other words, "just" is not an appropriate term for it. As the other poster said, you still need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Also, from your original post that got modded higher than its parent for some strange reason:
It truly doesn't matter whether Apple wins the high end. Most of Dell's market is low end. Apple could dominate the $2000+ market, and they still wouldn't make a dent in Dell. We can talk about Dell Precisions all day, but the fact is, most consumers don't even know what a Dell Precision is.
Thats not why I am saying fuck Apple. Also, fuck microsoft. I would buy their software if it wasn't way overpriced and crappy as all hell. As soon as linux can play games nativly, i'm switching, and I'll pay 50 bucks for redhat or suse or another distro. Fuck apple for making my iPod suck ass. Batery stoped lasting over 2 hours withen a few months, fuck em. I expect my purchases to work without me having to call customer support millions of times and having to take shit back. All the PC shit I get always works, but Apple products I have purchased, no so much. Yes I'm on a incohearent rant, and I can't spell and don't want to bother pasting this into Word.
Because Apple isn't really all that, and the comparisons to cars are irrelevant, tiresome, and disingenuous. Apple is using the same Chinese commodity crap that all the other manufacturers are, and use a TPM chip to make what would otherwise be a WinTel PC in a pretty case into an expensive dongle for an improved version of BSD Unix/NextStep.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Well, listen here, Mr. Schmok, you can install any OS you want on a Mac, including, but not limited to, Windows and Linux. The only question is why you would want to run an inferior OS.
As for the hackers "rebelling" against the monopoly, how much success have htey had the last 20 years? None. Zilch. Nada. Nil. All they have done is to create a plethora of viruses that make the PC experience similar to taking a shit, but people still use the shit.
The more creative hackers have made OSS, but have only have limited success in the tech savvy server market.
Mac being closed is the advantage Apple has against others, since they control the software/hardware combo, which makes for a stable system. If the current trend continues, Macs will have an impact in the general population, by its stability, superior experience, and -- as of late -- its competitive pricing.
I suspect that is why we see a lot of "innovative" ideas from Apple. They are spending a bundle on market research, and that extra cash they spend gives a return in coming up with intutitve and attractive designs.
Puck mouse excepted of course. I wonder how THAT one got past them?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I disagree - I, for example, value the hardware customization you can get with a PC (not just a Dell - or rather anything but Dell), while you seem to value the software suites Apple bundles with their Mac systems. It's all a matter of personal preference - again, since I don't give a crap about having iMovie and the rest of the iLife junk (it's junk to me anyway) adding to the cost of a machine, so it would simply seem like overpriced hardware.
So for me, I consider my HP Pavillion a1129n ($7xx when I bought it, now about 12xx or 13xx): Athlon 64b 3400, 512ram (+1 gig), the Geforce 7900gt I dropped in, 200gig default HDD (+300gig secondary I dropped in) - is far better than any of the entry level Mac desktops (not the Mini) would compare to at the same price. And another thing - since I value hardware so much, you can probably see that I'm a gamer. So I'm actually happier with WinXP than I would be with OSX since just about every game I have or could want from over the past 8 years or so (hell, even the ones I run away from) require XP. How many apps and games are compatible with Mac compared to XP?
However, I gotta say, the only thing that has me thinking of switching to Mac is when I took a look at Vista about a month ago - theres no other way to describe it other than I hated pretty much everything about it (I'm sacrificing how much of my CPU or GPU for those half assed transparent windows??? I think not...)
Only if you believe that lack of source makes any difference.
You're obviously a "give a man a fish" type - rather than wanting to teach people how to fish. *shrug*
then show me the data that says these machines will help these people more if its operating system is open source rather than if its operating system is easy to use with a large application base.
I imagine saying "show me the data" makes you feel smart? Try showing me the data for the opposite, or any data concerning third world children & a mass cheap laptop initative. You can't 'cause that data does not exist.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Even if they get it from exactly the same sources, Dell will get it cheaper because of the volumes they purchase. Dell negotiates with its suppliers kind of like Walmart does. But the biggest reason is that Apple still cares more about margin than market share.
You may want to check your power to those machines. I don't doubt that you have problems with them, but that number of problems for that few machines seems odd to me - and I've managed an account that had thousands of Macs, thousands of Windows machines, and thousands of various UNIX machines in one facility. My statistical analysis of the reliability of the various machines/OS environments leads me to believe that you suffer from some bad power to those machines (low voltages, dirty, etc.).
I for one can't wait for OS X 10.9 Pussy to hit the shelves. I hear it will be dead sexy.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Um. David Pogue's latest _Circuits_ newsletter in the NYT reads: "Why? Because the market-share figures includes sales of computers to corporations, which buy hundreds of PC's at a time. And the corporate world long ago standardized on Windows. It makes no difference how superior Mac OS X or Linux may be; the world's I.T. staffs will switch their entire companies away from Windows the day Rush Limbaugh votes for Hillary Clinton. After all, the I.T. people know where their bread is buttered. If Macs are indeed less trouble-prone and complex than Windows PC's, they're doomed in corporations; the last thing the I.T. guys want to do is obsolete themselves. The only legitimate fight, therefore, is for the souls of individuals and small business owners who actually have a choice of platform--people whose computer choice is dictated by their corporate employers. But these are just market-share scraps. Apple does seem to be winning the scraps, by the way; Macs have actually picked up a couple of points of market share recently. But big companies will always buy Windows. In my view, the die was actually cast the day I.B.M., supplier to corporate America, chose Microsoft decades ago. And when you accept that fact, this business about an Apple-vs.-Microsoft feud for dominance looks purely symbolic." Apart from the change in the last line, it looks like a pretty close correlation. Who needs Pogue when we have the /. transcription service?
In the New York Times, David Pogue makes the argument that Apple will NEVER win the desktop war, because MS went for the IT departments of the world, the guys who can buy 100 or 1000 systems at the same time. MS has saturated the office desktop, and that's not about to change any time soon. They are poised for a major jump in market share, but they can't take the main market for Microsoft, the computer every clerk for the DMV has on his or her desk. "Name?" Type, type, type. "Birthday?" Type, type. "Wait for a minute, sir, it's stalled a bit." "Oh, I see. Is your first name Glen?" "No." "Is your birthday in 1992?" "Nope." Etc.
That computer is running Windows. It will be in the future.
Long term, Microsoft will choke on its own tongue. Just like IBM, which dominated computing for a generation.
When I look at the home market, I cannot figure out why everyone tries to shoehorn a "business" PC into the home. Why did the IBM PC and compatibles take over the home? It's not like they were better suited to the home compared with the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. If fact, they were the least suited to "home" applications.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
If you used Google, you could rebut all of your arguments yourself and we wouldn't have to do it for you.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=107Way to go, grandparent. Was it just not possible to read the article, internalize it, and present your own opinions instead of ripping off the printed page?
"Retarded version of Windows"?
MCE 2005 = XP Pro + remote + Media Center + it's newer - Active Directory.
So I guess it's retarded because you really wanted AD for your house, right?
Just to clarify, Windows 3.x still required DOS, so of course it ran DOS programs; it was a GUI that ran specialized applications. 95 was the first Windows that was also its own OS aside from NT.
> Apple computers are more expensive by Dell every time that I compare them
You're forgetting the _software_ that actually makes the machine usefull...
1. How much would you have to pay for iLife equivalents on Windows though? GarageBand? iDVD? iMovie? iPhoto? Disk Utility?
2. I'd take Finder's ability to drag any folder onto the Toolbar _any day_ insead of the stupid hard-coded locations in a Windows Dialog Box: Recent Docs, Desktop, My Docs, My Comp. I'd take having ONE menu bar at the top with "infinite" height, then wasted screen estate for _each_ application wasting space for a menu bar. I'd rather have Expose that moves all windows out the way to show the desktop, then stupid Explorer Its touches like this, that need to be factored in, and how much _time_ you save using the machine.
3. It's about the integration... Mail.app, iCal, AddressBook, iChat, etc.
--
]PR#6
]CATALOG
DISK VOLUME 254
APPLE ][ FOREVER
*T 001 STUPID FILE/OPERATING SYSTEM DESIGNS
T 001 MS-DOS: NO SPACES, 8.3 CHARACTERS
T 001 WIN XP: NO COLON, CANT END WITH PERIOD.
T 001 *NIX: hello.c != hello.C (WTF??)
T 001 ALL: ' ' not interchangeable '_'
Another post from the future. Not to mention that you think that somebody would want to install Windows Anything on a Mac - or a Dell for that matter.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If the Apple is hardware is so consistent, why do people forgive Apple quality problems as a first generation clitch? Using that as a basis for forgiveness, how do I not percieve the same problems with IBM/Lenova or HP laptops for example. Those companies release probably 30-40 models each a year. I agree some are simple upgrades of previous models but I's estimate at least half of them are completely different and a new internal design as they change MB mkaers, CPU sockets and video chipsets. You would expect HP and Lenova to have at least half of there new systems falling under that "first rev" problem but they do not.
I view Apple just as I do Bose. They market and attempt to price there components just above the average to give the impression of something above the norm in quality. Both also have very strict pricing guidlines and inventory control at the retail level and you never see Bose on sale or 10% off and non sold stock is returned to the parent company, not sold at a discount by the retailer. I can not pinpoint Apples marketting staegy but Bose always pushed the direct reflecting (which imho sucks) and size. Ever sit in on a Bose demo? There is no competeing brands and they wow you with how much sound such a small speaker can produce. BFD, put a pair of Infinity full size speakers in there for half the price and compare the two. Your hearing characteristics and quality of sound has NOTHING to do with the size of speakers but yet people think it sounds awesome only because it is so small and our amazed. Apple kind of does the same exact thing with the size and colors but the computing experience is not anything great for many of the models. Look at the mini, for its size, it is great. Yeah but that enemic video card? Come on. Don;t be mislead by the size and automatically assume, awesome!! If you want something small, go for it. If you want to compare power, speed, flexibility, price, then compare those and make an informed decision.
So here's my configuration, going down the page options at Dell's page
Base price is $2358
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5160 3.00GHz, 4MB L2,1333 [add $930]
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5160 3.00GHz, 4MB L2,1333 [add $1,279]
4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS) [add $870]
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA [add $525]
500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst Cache(TM) [add $400]
16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD(TM) and Roxio Creator(TM) Dell Ed [add $20]
No Monitor Option [subtract $149]
Broadcom NetXtreme 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet controller-PCI Express card [add $49]
Dell Wireless 1450 (802.11 b/g) WLAN USB 2.0 DT Adapter [add $49]
For a total of $6331 - must have missed something last time. I don't see how you can get $3592 with the same specs. Love to see how you did it!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
you don't know too many BMW drivers, do you?
It is technically possible to port Mac OS X in order to be executable on general cheap Intel-Computers. But they do not want it. You know that GNUstep aimed at creating a runtime plattform for Linux, Windows and Mac. So it should not be a problem for Apple to provide software which makes OS X apps run on Windows but they just don't want it.
Of course Apple doesn't want Mas OS to run on just any hardware. Maybe you're like most people and don't know Apple is as much a hardware company as a software one. At one tyme, from '95 to '98 Apple did license Mac OS to third party computer manufacturers. Here's a list of companies that had clones, MacOS-Compatible System Specs (Mac Clone Specs). This was when Jobs was gone, but when he was brought back he stopped it. Apple was loosing more from the loss of hardware sales than they were making from licensing Mac OS.
FalconShould there be a Law?
here
Now this isn't a consumer device, I want it for development and for FPGA place-and-route work, but still you said "every time"...
In a followup, I detail the exact spec of the Dell I was comparing with (because someone disputed my numbers). As far as I can see, these are pretty much identical machines, and one is $2000 cheaper than the other...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
... it would do all the spell-checking for you without you having to load up Word. It's a system-wide facility for any NSText-derived object...
Sometimes the small things are what make the difference.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Apple still cares more about margin than market share.
Apple is like Nike. If Nike busted out Air Force Ones for $20 a pair (probably still 100% above cost), do you really think everyone would own a pair? Maybe at first they would sell but the shoes would loose their status. There is a reason many pairs of shoes are over $100 and hard to find but yet sought after. That reason has nothing to do with quality, value, comfort, construction, R&D, labor costs, shortage of materials, or advertising. It is the perceived status of owning them. Oddly enough, most kids will admit to having specific shoes for status, most Apple users will flat out refuse to even think that played a role and attempt to justify it with the same reasons I said above that are not probably not factors. That is why those justifications are typically personal in nature and VERY vague and not measurable or repeatable, like snappy, just works, cute, fast enough, feels good, slick, elegant, does what I need, I don't need that option, etc.. Not quite the information someone might be able to use to compare products is it?
To be fair, Apple does not make a 300-1000% or more like Nike does but the same concepts apply, only on a smaller scale.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I don't agree at all. Apple does compete on price - but only in the markets of its choosing.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Make it $1,000. And I'd like a way to add whichever optical drive becomes popular next.
(Waits for the inevitable Mac mini + external enclosure post as littlefish disregards how utterly shitty the Mac mini is compared with a $1,000-x PC)
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What has the OS community brought into the mainstream?
What has the OS community brought to the mainstream? Let's see, much of the software that runs the net is or originates from OS software. We wouldn't have the PCs and other personal or business computers we have now if OS hardware and software hackers hadn't been there. A big hand is deserved for those hackers who were part of the Railroad club at MIT in the '60s and '70s. Amoung other things they inspired those like the Woz, Steve Wozniac to create the original Apple. If you really want to know some of what open source has been responsible for reading Steven Levy's "Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution" will give you an idea.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Isnt there room for more then one OS? People have different needs, and each product serves a different mrket.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wal*Mart has a PC for under $400 in stores in my area. I wouldn't mind having one, it is a Compaq Presario:
- AMD Sempron Processor 3200+ (1.8 Ghz/1600 Mhz System Bus/256 KB L2 Cache)
- 512 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM Memory
- 80 GB HDD
- CD-RW 48x32x48x
- 17 inch CRT Monitor
- small speakers, mouse, keyboard.
They don't say, but it probably has XP Home preinstalled.I would need to somehow partition that drive for use with linux. Either that, or just add another drive, easily done. Having said all that, I realize that for a little more, I could get a box with more power, and get to choose some of the hardware, so that would work with linux.
One has to remember that they sold over 20 million VW Bugs (air cooled), because they were inexpensive. I still drive one, it has 370K miles on it, and can get 49.5 MPG on the highway.
It is an absolutely frightening driving experience, to be sure.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
Hey, I didn't say they were *dumb* to concentrate on margin over quantity. There are certainly perils on both sides. For Apple, the peril is that they must constantly convince consumers that they are worth more, that you should bother spending that much on a computer. That means that quality must be kept constantly high, and in the 90s when that wasn't the case, they suffered. Dell, on the other hand, has to keep constant pressure on their suppliers and maintain top efficiency of their entire operation. So it's not like there's a right answer there.
I do tend to agree with your points. The funny issue to me is that of status. I think a lot of Mac users would admit it. They love that it makes them some sort of exclusive minority. They love to think that they're smarter/better than PC users. And I think that this is usually an effect they're aware of.
As far as the margin vs. volume dilemma - some companies try to do both, with (say) a high-end and low-end brand. That has the risk of brand dilution, as you allude to with the status thing, but it can be pulled off (Gap/Old Navy, for instance).
Oh, and for what it's worth, I own a powerbook. However, I do not drink the kool-aid. I do not deify Jobs. I don't read the rumor sites. All I wanted was a unix box that made a good laptop that would also run MS Office. And I still think Apple makes the best machines that satisfy that. The old-school Mac-heads drive me nuts.
No. Southwest leads the industry in customer satisfaction because they streamline their processes, actually bother to think about longterm planning (fuel hedging), and actually subject the consumer to less BS and just plain mechanical problems than their old school competitors.
It's also hard to beat being able to reuse all of your flight credits with ZERO bs.
Airlines like American act like you're their captive rather than their customer.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
They have to do more than appeal to the masses. They need to appeal to game makers as well. Gaming is a big business and arguably what has pushed ahead a lot of computer innovation. People aren't ready to give up on computer gaming and until they are, Mac has nothing.
That brings up two things I keep hearing from those who haven't tried a Mac. One camp says the only thing you can do with a Mac is play games, meanwhile a second camp says there are no games for Macs. Though it's been several years since I've really used a Mac, I have played games on them and used them for productivity. I first started using Macs to write papers for classes back in 1984/5. At the same tyme I was using PCs with MSDOS in a programming class. Now, all the computer science and programming classes used PCs, they didn't teach any programming or information classes with Macs. However Macs were all the art classes such as graphic design. That makes sense, Macs were graphic machines, however I didn't and still don't understand why no programming classes used Macs. As for games, when I got my first computer it was a Mac, in 1992 and I also got some games for it on floppy.
Fact is is there are both games and productivity apps for Macs. Maybe not as many games available as for PCs but there are some. And in many graphics design shoppes you will find only Macs. Other productivity apps? MS has Office for Macs. There are communications apps, DBs, and spreadsheets available as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They already preload the best OS in the world.
I could give a fuck about Windows.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Apple competes on price but doesn't go below a certain level of quality. I don't know why this point is difficult to grasp.
Translation: You have no counterargument, so you're going to accuse me of "trolling."
A complete load of crap. It wouldn't be "unsuitable" due to lack of source, and you don't explain why it would have. Someone buying a $100 laptop doesn't care if they don't get the friggin' source tree to Aqua. Besides, Darwin is open source.
The project simply went with Red Hat, because they made a large donation to the project. We could have had a $100 Mac, and they blew it due to unrealistic ideals that everyone in the world wants source code, when they don't.
And I'm the one trolling? Again, you have yet to prove out it would be "useless" without source. OS X is quite useful.
There was no "crack," you made this part up. I suspect the only jealousy here is coming from you.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Unfortunately, Apple did not fix my iBook G3 without fuss or without attempting to charge me. When I first phoned Apple to send my iBook G3 (with a flawed logic board) in for service, the CSR told me the only way I could be experiencing such symptoms was if I had dropped the machine. I had to take the machine to a 'local' Apple certified technician (who was about an hour from me) to have it inspected; he agreed that the problem was not one I had caused. It took a further 4 weeks to get the logic board replaced. Repeat this process three more times within the first year of ownership. Instead of replacing the iBook with a non-defective run, they continued replacing defective parts with defective parts. I ended up without the machine for a grand total of 10 weeks during the first year I owned it.
There wasn't much of a second year. The logic board failed as soon as the warranty expired (and because of the way Apple chooses to sell AppleCare as insurance instead of an extended factory warranty, it was unavailable in my state), and the display's backlight went shortly before the logic board. It turns out that there was an issue with that particular series of iBook where the sharp plastic molding in the hinges abraided the wiring providing power to the display every time the lid was opened or closed, which eventually led to the connection being severed.
A few months after I had already purchased the aforementioned Dell, Apple finally instituted their logic board replacement program, but they still wanted to charge me $499 to repair the display problem. I gave the machine to my brother, along with an old CRT (with a Trinitron tube, those things last forever, btw), and after the logic board died again, I couldn't be bothered to send it to Apple for replacement yet again.
Dealing with Dell is something like being in purgatory or the first circle of Hell whereas dealing with Apple is like being in the sixth or seventh circle of Hell. Dell is certainly imperfect, and I've had my share of hassles, but whether it's a personal machine or one used by a family member's small business, I've not experienced the same level of downtime and outright refusal to repair design flaws.
They haven't released the details to any new great features yet. It's because they don't have any. And all they are doing with allowing dual boot, is migrating mac users to windows.
Like the PowerPC was any different. Please!
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
OS X ships with Xcode. Your strawman argument is officially on fire.
And where is your data that a $100 laptop without source code would be "useless?" This is just Slashdot geek mindset run amock, thinking that ANYONE in a country poor enough to have to resort to a $100 laptop would:
1.) Give a shit that the source code isn't included.
2.) Want to waste hours trying to hack Linux into working properly when they could get OS X and not only have the Darwin source code and free compiler suite that kicks the butt out of anything on Linux, but would also have access to a larger application base that includes Office and Photoshop as well as the OSS alternatives.
You're just an Apple-hater with a handful of tired, decimated arguments.
"Sufferin' succotash."
It is retarded because it is Windows.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
It's funny, because the Mac fanbois at least hate Windows because it sucks and they can give reasons. Apple haters just seem to hate Apple and the logic is missing.
Ok, note how the Mac users are fanbois, and hate windows 'because it sucks' But the windows users are 'Apple haters' and have no logic.
Very subtle, but none the less a good way to twist things around and put you on the defensive.
Learn from your mistakes grasshopper, and remember, he's baiting you because he uses a mac and needs to try and feel superior. It's like little dog syndrome.
Deep down, it's only because he's esentually using a glorified dvd player and thinking it's an actual computer. Kind of like linux users, thinking that Linux-HobbyOS Wicked cool version 2.0 will one day be a real desktop OS that someone outside of IT would actually want to use.
(bow)
The Blue screen of death is also much less prevalent. You might want to look up the definition of FUD. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a bluescreen...I can it was xmas 2003, I received a bad motherboard for a PC I was building for my father. Before that, I think I was running Windows 98SE.
Your last BSOD was 2003? Same as mine. It was on a brand new Dell running XP. I got a BSOD on the first day of a class in Java. I turned on the Dell when I entered and sat down for class. While it was booting up it froze then the BSOD popped up and I had to pushin and hold the power button for it to turn off. When I rebooted it was fine, so I don't know what happened. It may of been just a freak but it wasn't a good first tyme use of XP.
They need to do more than say "we're better than MS because we don't have viruses and spyware". Somehow I'm betting that may significantly change if they were to suddenly have 50% desktop share.
Agreed! While I believe OSX is more secure than Windows, as Apple's share of computers increase more and more blackhats, crackers, and others will write more malware for Apple. This would be true with any OS that has a significant market share.
FalconShould there be a Law?
How do they not help game developers? I just got back from WWDC, there were sessions on game development. What do "game developers" want that they aren't getting?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Apple chooses not to compete in the "build your own computer" market. They don't have a microscope big enough to find said market.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I don't even both comparing the price of a Mac to any other computer. I want a Mac and I don't bother looking at anything else. I honestly don't know what a PC costs because I have no use for a Windows PC.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Cheap PCs use more power??? I'm a Mac guy but this is a new one on me.
(I know we have a control panel called "Energy Saver", but I thought PCs were mostly Energy Star compliant?)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I hope I'm not the only one but I don't really want to play games on any computer that much. Though I've bought game software I haven't really been interested in gaming since Tetris back in the early '90s or so. I may be unusual in this but for fun I'd rather go out into nature, say hiking, go scuba diving, rollerblading, or go watch a play in the theatre.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Business men aren't known for being big risk takers, especially when it comes to say switching the entire marketplace.
Some business men are big risk takers, that's why some of them became very wealthy. Like some corporate raiders. But by porting games for Macs and Linux it's not really a switch instead it's expanding your market and any business person worth a hill of beans wants to expand their market.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Also - design. I know a lot of nerds like Apple stuff for that reason, but really - it's awful. All that plasticy white or pale blue. I know iPods are only supposed to last a year, but PCs have to look like they'll survive a few years in an office environment.
It's only ancedote but from my personal experience Macs last longer than PCs. The first computer I bought I bought a used Mac in 1992. It finally bit the dust when the floppy drive died in 2000. Prior to this the only problem I had with it was I couldn't install new software on it after a few years. Since 1997 I've bought 4 pcs for myself. The first one was a Gateway laptop. It's motherboard had to be replaced a few months after I got it. Then a couple of weeks before I had had it a year the hd died. The third was another laptop from Gateway. The lcd cracked around three months after I got it and when I called tech support they said they didn't cover that and this despite the extended warranty I paid for when I ordered it. The HP PC I'm using now is my fourth PC and like the first laptop, in the first year I had it the motherboard and hd had to be replaced. And that was just some of the hardware troubles I've had. Now, the second PC I got, I ordered from Microway is the only PC I haven't had hardware problem with. However the cpu is a DEC Alpha and I wasn't able to install much software on it so I haven't used it much.
After not having any problems with Macs in years of use and with having them with almost every PC within a year has convinced me to make my next computer a Mac.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Did you have to Activate XP? Though by far not the only reason, one reason I, a pc owner/user for more than 8 years, will get a MBP as my next computer is because of Activation amd WGA. All MS needs to know is I paid for it, I shouldn't have to "activate" with anyone what I paid for, nor do I need it to phone home at all when I don't want it to.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Every Mac you can buy now is nothing but a very well-built standard PC with a custom OS preinstalled.
OK, smarty pants. Go out and try to sell Mac clones, or anything that can boot MacOS and isn't made by Apple. See how far you get before Apple sues you out of existance. Or has that changed recently?
And don't get me started on Quicktime and iTunes (the only commercial trojan that's worse is Real Player). Then there's iPod and "Fairplay". I just can't support a company that behaves like that. They're worse than MS as far as I'm concerned. IBM may have inadvertantly given us the greatest gift--the clonable platform, and Apple is trying as hard as they can to take that away. To reiterate, I just can't support that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
And here I just purchased my first Mac (MacBook, black) and now you tell me it'll be obselete 2 weeks after I just bought it?
Too bad the warranty doesn't cover that!
I don't think there is anyplace where a warranty will cover obselesence for a computer. However I was talking about this with someone working in a camera store and explained I was concerned about buying a new dsrl, digital slr, when he explained that if a new dslr with better specs came in and the camera you bought got broken they would exchange it for the new one if it was the same price. And he said so just drop it so it breaks. I didn't do that but of course before I ever did I'd make sure the warranty did cover that.
FalconShould there be a Law?
After 18 months, the resell value of Mac is usually still very high, way over half the original price and the computer is still working fine even after twice as long for a non-technical user. Any way you slice it, this brings the value of Apple computers to more than twice the value of comparable Dell.
Apple is competing on price. You just need to remember: We aren't rich enough to be able to afford cheap things.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
OS X ships with Xcode. Your strawman argument is officially on fire.
*sighs* If you give a man a fish, he's dependant on you for more fish. If you give a man an os, he is dependant on you for security updates, driver updates, etc etc etc.
Part of the goal of this program is to help end developing nation dependance on developed nation.
Try to at least understand the argument before accusing people of being a straw man.
And where is your data that a $100 laptop without source code would be "useless?" This is just Slashdot geek mindset run amock, thinking that ANYONE in a country poor enough to have to resort to a $100 laptop would:
I have no data, as I pointed out in the post you're replying to, no such data exists (please learn better comprehension)
1.) Give a shit that the source code isn't included.
Most won't. *shrugs*
2.) Want to waste hours trying to hack Linux into working properly
You think these things will come with a copy of Fedora on CD or something? Are you honestly that stupid? They will come preconfigured & working OOTB.
when they could get OS X and not only have the Darwin source code and free compiler suite that kicks the butt out of anything on Linux,
As you can't build darwin and replace the running OS X kernel, I consider that pretty useless.
but would also have access to a larger application base that includes Office and Photoshop as well as the OSS alternatives.
Riiiiiight. You think all those proprietary binaries are going to run on these things? They've only got a 500MB flash drive (photoshop and office wouldn't fit on them). In addition, the cost of those applications exceeds the cost of the laptop, and most likely the publisher of those titles would have to agree to release modified binaries.
(and I can't believe you used the discontinued Microsoft line as an example of the Mac's software superiority).
You're just an Apple-hater with a handful of tired, decimated arguments.
No, I like Apple, they make great products. What I don't like is irrational apple fanboys, who doesn't even really know what they're talking about.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
OK, so I saw people comparing prices earlier, so I figured I'd go do my own price comparison. My goal would be to replace my aging home PC with something a bit faster. Here are my results.
Apple iMac 1.83Ghz Core Duo vs Dell XPS 410
with the following requirements:
Here are what I ended up with:
Differences
Personally, it sounds like the Dell has better hardware. It should also be noted that changing anything on the Apple costs significantly more than changing it on the Dell. For instance, upgrading to 2GB RAM costs $140 more for the Dell, but $200 more for the Apple. Upgrading the processor to 2Ghz (actually 2.13Ghz) costs $50 for the Dell and (along with a 20"ws monitor upgrade) $325 for the Apple.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It has a space for a second optical drive. For what it's worth, I'd like a 100MPG car, which does 200 MPH, and costs $10,000. But I don't expect one to turn up anytime soon. You get what you pay for.
We have Vista Beta in our office. The OS is a memory and processor hog. Now I know "but it's beta" and all that MS appologist crap, but the same box it is on screams with Linux and is quite capable with XP. All the computer pros in our office who have messed with this Vista Beta are already looking at their existing systems and deciding what all they will have to upgrade to make it Vista compatible.
Bottom line is, a > $500 desktop from Dell isn't going to run Vista for crap where as today you can buy and old Apple iMac on eBay for the same money and you can run Tiger.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Are about gaming machines a lot of the time. Macs don't really hit that spot so well, sadly.
Whenever I see threads like this on Slashdot, I can't help but think how sorely mislead the average Slashdot user is. The forum is overwhelmingly pro-Apple and pro-Linux, and they let their emotions cloud their vision.
Often, you see trollish headlines that state "will Apple kill Microsoft?", "Will Apple kill Dell?", "is this the iPod killer?", etc. People here seem to be a little on the artsy/emotional side rather than on the purely logical side. They can't seem to grasp the gravity of a situation; instead they get lost in the details and forget the scale of things. For a forum that loves Star Trek, they sure don't think like Spock.
First of all, people underestimate the massive advantage of being the much larger company. Dell has a huge marketshare advantage over Apple. They have $55 billion a year in revenue vs. $14 billion a year. If worst came to worst, Dell could simply buy Apple. Microsoft could also easily buy Apple, but the US Gov wouldn't allow that. Still, if it were a fight to the death, they could afford to take losses to sap away Apple's marketshare.
I think people should stop to think for a moment before they post these unrealistic headlines, because if it came down to it, the larger company would simply gobble up the smaller company. It's business 101.
I'm not trying to troll here, I'm trying to inject a dose of reality into another one of these irrational threads.
Awww, is Anonymous Coward afraid of criticism? Go suck pure capsaicin.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Most computers sold by Dell do not live past 18 month mark with average non-technical user. At which time they have $0 resell value. Actually negative value, since you need to pay for recycling. After these 18 months and usually much sooner the only way out is a costly repair or what most people opt for, buying a new Dell.
The average lifespan of a Dell is a lot longer than 18 months. Even if the you didn't want the machine, you would have no problems giving away P4 class hardware.
After 18 months, the resell value of Mac is usually still very high, way over half the original price and the computer is still working fine even after twice as long for a non-technical user. Any way you slice it, this brings the value of Apple computers to more than twice the value of comparable Dell.
That's assuming that the current crop of Macs hold up their resale value. The fact that they have pretty much the same hardware as a PC, combined with the reputation that the new Macs have for problems makes me doubt that they will have as strong 2nd hand market as previous Macs. And don't forget that anyone who bought a PPC Mac right before the switch has watched as the resale of their machine value plummets.
Apple is competing on price. You just need to remember: We aren't rich enough to be able to afford cheap things.
You don't get it. That's called competing on quality. As in "We have a product that costs a bit more, but the extra quality is worth the extra cost in the long run." Walmart competes on price, not Apple.
Apple chooses not to compete in the "build your own computer" market. They don't have a microscope big enough to find said market.
That's real funny, considering that their marketshare is right around 2% when it comes to desktop PCs. The DIY crowd, combined with the small whitebox manufacturers hold about 8% the last I heard.
I've owned a Mac since 1986. I've used many (not all, not by a long shot) other platforms which have existed, including C64, Amiga, Atari, TRS-80, Apple II, MS-DOS, and Win3.1 -> WinXP. I still choose to own a Mac, and for that Mac to be my main computer, because I still find to be true (though, arguably, to a "technical" lesser extent) what I have always found to be true: Apple does it friendlier and (at least for my needs) better than anyone else.
The whole spate of viruses, script kiddies, spyware, and so forth are still a relatively recent phenominon. I can fully remember back when there were viruses for ancient versions of what is now Classic MacOS. I used to have (and had to regularly update) my anti-virus software. I caught (and fortunately killed before they usually did any harm) a number of viruses back then (though by no means anywhere even close to the number that are out there for Windows today). I used to envy the Amiga for it's technical prowess at the time in areas of multiple-app resource management, stereo sound, drop-in-compatibility with video production systems, and a number of other little things. Those were the things I felt the Amiga "did right". But they still weren't sufficient to move me from the Mac platform to it. And frankly the "advantages" of games and availability of "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" in terms of software for Windows are not sufficient to pry the Mac from my hands now.
Bottom line: I'm not in denial (which, I'd like to point out to geography buffs here is in Egypt, btw), and neither is every other Mac user out there. Maybe not all of us, but most of us use what works best for us. And that ain't Windows, folks.
Absolutely--and why are 90% of high-end computers purchased? To play games!
What OS has the biggest game developer support?
If Apple wants to sell more of those high-end computers, maybe they should take a look at the demographics of people buying them. Is it a coincidence that at my undergraduate university the only computer lab with more than 2 Apple computers was the Art building's lab, with about 30 of them? You can't tell me that there was that big of a concurrent demand to use Apple's image-editing software which can't possibly be that much better than Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. The only time the room was ever full was when a class was in, and as one of those who took 'digital art' as a gen-ed I can tell you with authority that virtually any image editor would have been sufficient.
So why does the art faculty demand Apple computers?
Apple is selling to the demographic that wants style and has money, which is a lot smaller than the demographic which wants computer games and has money.
~Ben
In regard to the actual headline, cheap people will continue to suffer but those who will shell out an extra $200 for a Mac mini will get such a better experience and so fewer hassles I just don't see how the market can't grow. Of course there are a certain number of people out there who put no value on their time and stopped learning the day they left school, but those people deserve Vista and it's very likely poor user experience on their $399 Dell.
Apple is NOT in the business of selling or supporting Windows, and they shouldn't be. Why do Microsoft's work for them? Now, it's not that any business (including Apple) shouldn't try to make themselves attractive to existing and potential customers, but there's a fine line between making yourself available to every customer that walks in the door, and trying to get and hoard every customer that walks in the door.
Now, maybe this will be flame-bait and maybe I'll get modded for saying this, but once you do what you can to educate people, if a non-geek-specialist still wants to run Windows, then he or she isn't the kind of customer Apple wants or needs anyhow. Let them revel in their own ignorance. I'd rather be a part of a user base that chooses to be that user base than one which simply becomes the user base by default. What I don't get is why people think that just because people out there (like me) don't choose to follow the same path as every other schmuck, we're somehow elitist. Yes, I know there are irritants over here in the Mac camp, but we're hardly unique in this. The Linux and the Windows camps have them too, just like there are snobs and freaks amongst the ranks of Star Trek fans (though I'd hardly describe someone as being some kind of kook just because they liked Star Trek).
And let's face facts: There aren't any viruses out there right now for Mac OS X. Hacking and cracking a UNIX-based Mac box is harder than a Windows box. You don't have to sit there on a Mac and become a rocket scientist, taped-pair-of-thick-eyeglasses, three-pack-of-cigarettes-a-day, Mountain Dew-chugging geek just to keep your box secure and generally optimally configured. Now, maybe this offends some people out there, but then, if you want to talk about the small dog, inferiority complex, I think I know where that group of people lives.
Sony was somewhat infamous internally for having the "three thousand isolated incidents" mentality. Yes, they did admit from time to time there was a flaw, but they tried whenever possible to keep mum on their design issues and shortcomings. For instance, Sony's initial forray into AMD-based laptops resulted in computers which ran hotter and had much shorter battery run-times, well below what was stated. And only after getting beaten over the head by a ton of customers did they go to the length of saying, well, if the customer is still in warranty, we'll throw 'em a bone by sending them -- as a courtesy, mind you -- another battery. The fact that the whole issue centered around the fact that Sony engineers never bothered to impliment any kind of CPU step-down drivers or other technology was avoided at all costs.
But then, that's just me, another used-piece-of-toilet-paper, talking, I guess...
First, Macs have been, and -- short of Apple suddenly going belly-up -- probably always will be the preferred choice of creative professionals. The fact that most of the creative pro-calliber software out there has a Windows version isn't really changing this very much, and largely due to the fact that creative professionals are not interested in -- and typically don't have the time to be -- computer geeks. They have work to do, and frankly, Windows brings baggage that they have no interest in contending with.
Second, I get a laugh out of reading that Apple is missing the market by not catering to the lucrative game market. Number one, short of them becoming a Windows licensee, this is never going to be possible since the games are not so much Intel-based as they are Win32 based, and that limitation is far more significant than any other factor. Number two, I don't know any hard-core gamers -- not a single one -- who permit anyone's brand-name computer on their desk. Every single true gamer I know and have ever known either builds their own or hires someone to build it for them (because they want top-shelf components with no compromises). So all arguments that Apple alone is missing out on this market are fundamentally flawed -- by this logic, all of the name brand PC makers are missing out on this market.
I can't find where I can mod up your post, BetMonty, but I sure do agree with it. Especially your comments about Sony. They're totally a "Tail Wagging The Dog" company. It's what's put them where they stand now-a-days, and what will kill them if they don't change it.
at the point that its MacOS X operating system reduces Windows to just another .app that runs in a window on the desktop like any other application.
Sure, it'll cost you a MS license included in MacOS X, BFD. When one subsumes the other and it runs transparently, the point is won, game, set, match.
Dell at that point is left to defend its price/performance/service. Not much of a business plan against Apple hardware.
-r
You know that is nice. Now how about you configure similar Dual Dual Core Woodcrest machines. I will bet Dell has nothing to compare.
Give it less than a month, and I will bet Apple has a midtower Conroe based machine call the Mac. It is obvious considering the large hole Apple has intentionally left in its product line. This is Apple's release season, and we have not seen the end of it, just the beginning!
2% of 8% is 0.16%. That is a very, very small market segment.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Just a little more PATIENCE!
I'm positive that Apple has made room for another desktop in its lineup. Why? Look at all of the pro machines. They are all dual processor. Previously Apple had a crippled PM to bridge the distance between the iMac and the high end. Apple has opened a gap here for a minitower, pizza box, who knows what shape computer. This will be the real desktop growth machine. Kinda Prosumer.
You have the:
Mac Mini - Basic computer. Could be used as a lowend desktop or small server in a small business.
iMac - Minimalist desktop, classic Apple all-in-one design. Can play some games, but not a real heavy hitter.
MacBook - Portable Mac mini. Basic laptop, no good at graphic intensive games, but pretty decent machine.
MacBook Pro - Portable desktop machine. As good as a laptop gets.
Mac Pro - Uncomprimising speed demon.
Notice what is the common element in all those names? Mac.
I predict that Apple will introduce the first ever Apple Mac as soon as it gets enough Conroe (Core 2 Duo Extreme) processors from Intel to provide a reasonable level of availablilty.
This'll use a SINGLE dual core processor unlike the dual processor in the Pro. Upgradeable graphics card and maybe one free PCI slot, 2 drive bays instead of 4, 1 optical instead of 2 and 4 RAM slots instead of 4. Top end will be a single 3 GHz (BTO) machine. This should be slower than the base dual 2 GHz Mac Pro at highly threaded apps. This'll be the "gamer"/prosumer machine that people have been asking years for. It doesn't really threaten the workstation class of the Pros, but offers more expandability/monitor size and customizaiton than the iMac.
It'll be aggressively priced to make a dent in the market place. It'll be cheaper than an EQUIVALENT Dell. Bet on that! Look how much effort Apple is putting into its machines to prove that point at the WWDC.
These'll be "available" in Sept., but only really be widely available by the Oct.-Dec. Christmas shopping season (HoHoHo). This'll do for Apple's desktop market share what the MacBook did for the laptop.
"Vista full version = $200"
It is very probable that the low-end Dells will ship with the Home Basic edition of Vista, which won't cost anything near $200 (MS may do some stupid things, but they aren't suicidal enough to charge the same price for a crippled "idiots only" version of Vista as they now do for XP Professional!).
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
For every sob story, there's the other sort. I have used a G3 iBook since it first came out as my daily workhorse. It has only ever had one problem, which was the chafing and eventual breaking of the cable that supplied the screen backlight with power - a common problem on that model apparently. I replaced the cable myself and other than that it has been 100% reliable. Now consider the abuse it has received. Daily use of between 4-8 hours a day for over five years. Travelled between the UK and Australia several times, as well as many other trips. Taken apart several times - first to upgrade the hard disk from 10GB to 40GB. Second to overclock the processor from 500MHz to 600MHz - even soldering the mboard didn't break it. Third time to replace the cable I mentioned. The take-apart and put back together I got down to less than 1/2 hour. It's all about confidence - and not being too precious about losing a screw. Oh, I also replaced the keyboard a while back - not because it wasn't working but because I used it so heavily that some of the letters wore off. Now I just bought a new MacBook to replace it, the G3 will be semi-retired to acting as a music and wireless printer server. It's given me nothing but total service, and hasn't even worn that badly - though it definitely has a slightly used look about it. A great machine, I hope the Macbook will prove as good.
Most people think Windows XP Home Edition costs less than $100. In fact, that's the price of the upgrade only. The full version costs $200. Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition cost more than most people think.
In order to legaly put Windows on your Mac, you're going to need the full version of one of these products. If Microsoft has significan't better pricing with Vista than with XP, this will be cheaper, but the full version of their curren't OS, when sold shrink-wrapped to the public, is significantly more expensive than most people think.
TW
I'm gonna buy a Porsche, take the engine out and leave it by the side of the road. I just like the cup holders!
Lastly, they suggest that Steve Jobs held back on showing more Leopard features so people would not get too excited and stop buying in 2006. 'If you get too excited about what is supposed to be an incredibly amazing product you simply won't buy a new Apple this year.'
I purchased a Mac Pro. I thought about waiting for Leopard. But then I realized that I still won't be getting rid of my G4 Cube or my Blue & White G3 w/550 MHz G4 upgrade, and I'll be buying a multi-seat license for them just like I did for Tiger. (Buying one 5-seat license is cheaper than buying two single-seat licenses.) By getting a Tiger pre-installed system, I'll be getting an Intel build of Tiger that I didn't have already, and I'll be wasting one less seat when I buy Leopard later. Thus buying now makes more sense to me than waiting, even if all the new features of Leopard were disclosed.
But then maybe I'm special as I have two old machines to upgrade in addition to the new one. If I had only one old machine capable of running Leopard, I could save the expense of the multi-seat package until the next upgrade after Leopard.
The only ways I could lose out is if Leopard is released for Intel only or otherwise not released in a universal package.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Do you really? Apple's $2,000 computers have been just as unreliable as Dell's $1,000 ones. The best excuse I've heard is that every Apple product is somehow "first generation," and that I should always wait to buy the next version.
For more information, click here.
However, these days, I don't trust Lenovo yet, and finding Windows much harder to support than OSX (I won't go into that here, but it's not because of any shortage of Windows knowledge on my part), I tend to lean towards Macintoshes whenever Windows isn't necessary. The price really isn't considerably higher, the support is good, and OSX is easier to deal with as an OS (for everything from trouble-shooting to imaging).
I hope you are right. There is a big gap here and it is only from this gap where I will purchase a Mac. I am a potential switcher.
Apple can't count on forcing people (like me) into only the high end (Mac Pro) or the low end(Mac Mini), as others have suggested. That might work on the faithful, but it only creates another barrier for entry for potential switchers. A year from now even low end Dells will have dual core conroes.
If they are getting serious about market share they need something with more potential than a Mini that is affordable and competetively priced with PC offerings.
It doesn't have to be cheaper than Dell for me. It just needs to be close.
... not just to Tipperary (as the Irish say).
In the meantime, don't hold your breath.
Apache has a far larger market share than IIS yet it has almost no serious security threats. So using your logic above how can that be?
True, Apache runs half or more of the web servers but it is more secure therefore there aren't as many attacks on it but there are some. That's one of the good things about FOOS, with so many people working on them when a flaw or vulnerability is found someone comes up with a fix relatively quickly. For the most part this makes Apache even more secure. That is a big reason I believe OSs, servers, and such should be open source. The market is big enough for both closed and open source software and places where one is more appropriate than the other. As FOOS grows there will be less need for closed software though. I also agree with you on MS. They didn't pay much attention to security and are suffering because of it so now they're working on it some.
FalconShould there be a Law?
"Most people think Windows XP Home Edition costs less than $100. In fact, that's the price of the upgrade only. The full version costs $200. Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition"
Wow, you're right. And MS were surprised that they didn't sell as many boxed editions as they thought? At that price, the only surprising thing is that they sold any! BTW, a quick cruise around various web sites reveals that it's even more expensive in many other countries, so MS shouldn't act so shocked when people pirate it, especially when the hardware it runs on can be had so cheaply nowadays.
"Similarly, the full Proffesional Edition cost more than most people think."
Yes, but it's a relative bargain at only $100 more than the cruddy Home Edition. I can't imagine why anybody would bother paying $199 for that when they can have Pro for an extra $100.
"In order to legaly put Windows on your Mac, you're going to need the full version of one of these products."
Indeed. The upgrade no doubt checks for the presence of a qualifying MS product, and these can't be installed on a Mac even if you happen to have a CD of (for example) Win98 lying around. Furthermore, the Mac's insistence on a version of XP with SP2 means that most of the older sealed boxed sets or OEM versions being sold on Amazon and EBay for well under $100 can't be used either.
"If Microsoft has significan't better pricing with Vista than with XP, this will be cheaper"
I doubt that this will be the case, as the full version of Windows-98 was pretty much the same price as XP Home, so it's likely that they'll continue this with Vista, although the Home Basic edition may be a little cheaper due to the fact that it has even less features than XP Home. Or rather, one can hope that this might be the case!
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
It's like having all your funiture from a company that sells it all in what can become one, giant set
So apple is like IKEA??
And because Apple was the only one that sold PPC chips to the public, unlike Intel chips which were cloned (hence the terms IBM-compatible and Clone PC) and are made and sold by several different companies, Apple could choose what price they sold their chips at because they had no one to compete with. With Apple moving to Intel chips, it may become easier to "clone" Apples, in a sense (though I will admit that I'm not sure offhand how the licensing works with that now that they've switched).
And if you're going to act all high-and-mighty, might you consider signing in instead of posting as an AC?
I've never seen anyone claim anything other than what you just said. That's the whole point: Macs are priced similarly to PCs, but there are no really cheap Macs because Apple doesn't compete in that segment.
Macs are priced similarly to PCs
1) Macs are PCs.
2) Macs are more expensive than the equivilant from a different PC manufacturor.
(I suggest doing a comparison with an Asus rather than dell - after all, they're made in the same factory)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Look, what the hell is your point? This is utterly pointless. Yes, dear, I realize that Macs are "Personal Computers". I also realize that 99% of all people use the word "PC" to denominate what we used to call "IBM compatible PCs". Everyone understands what is meant when you say "Macs and PCs". Get over it.
Yes, for every Mac, you can probably find a PC that is cheaper with similar specs. The same applies to every PC. I said "Macs are priced similarly to PCs", not "You can't find a PC priced cheaper than a Mac". The point here is that you don't pay a huge premium for Macs anymore, compared to PCs. Macs aren't by definition more expensive than PCs. The canonical example is the Dell comparison simply because Dell offers cheap prices at acceptable (at least to some people) quality levels.