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Puncturing the "PCs Are Cheaper Than Macs" Myth
jcatcw writes "The recently converted Scot Finnie went notebook shopping. At the high end of the notebook spectrum, in order to get comparable power and features, a Dell machine comes in $650 over the Apple, and it was clunkier and weighed more. Sony couldn't beat the Apple either. Midrange and low-end machines, though, turn out to be pretty comparable, with more choices in the PC arena but some good values if you happen to want what Apple has decided you need. So, if you're talking name-brand hardware, it's just no longer the case that PCs are cheaper than Macs."
I can get beige custom boxes for cheaper than both Dell and Mac, especially when not shopping for CeleronD based boxes [which are probably sold at a loss to get the foot in the door].
Maybe not laptops, but who cares. Been my experience though that Dell laptops of decent spec [but not high end] are cheaper than Macs.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
www.system76.com sells laptops that are cheap and powerful and come preloaded with ubuntu. No wasting money on a mac/windows license. Of course, this article neglected that.
I gotta chime in with my USD0.02: After years of providing free PC customer support, my father (and his siblings) bought their father a Mac Mini. He does spreadsheets, email, a little word processing (mostly letters to editors and elected officials!), and genealogy.
For $200-$300 more than a feature-comparable PC, my father has saved himself, in the last year-and-a-half alone, dozens of hours of support (and he bills his time out as a consultant at somewhere north of $150/hr; you do the math). That's dozens more hours he can dedicate to actual paid work.
Now, Buppa's not stupid, but he is 92; tons of malware kept getting past his AV & firewall, and it was all he could do, with help, to keep the machine running (the dreaded Windows format-reinstall-repatch cycle). Now, no more crapola, and for an extra $100 or whatever the iSight was, he can painlessly videochat with his great-grandchildren.
Thank goodness I'm not the go-to support guy for my in-laws (my poor brother-in-law is), but if I ever am, a Mac Mini will be the best investment I ever make.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
but the Dell is bigger and louder, probably consumes more electricity, and doesn't run OS X. And 60 GB is plenty for the system drive. By a 500 GB drive from Lacie for $240 and put all your music/video on that instead (and the form factor is a perfect match with the mini's case, and combined will still be smaller than the Dell). So now it's $349 for a machine that is larger and louder than it needs to be, or $839 for a small/quiet machine with 3.5 times the disk space that can run more software.
Your right, the Dell is a bad deal... It can't even run OS X for Pete's sakes!