Slashdot Mirror
Doing the Math On the New MacBook
Technologizer writes "Apple's new MacBook is a significantly different machine than its predecessor — a slicker laptop at a higher price point. But does it carry a large price premium over similar Windows PCs? I did a painstaking spec-by-spec comparison versus three roughly comparably-configured Windows machines, and came to the conclusion that the value it offers for price paid is not out of whack with the Windows world." The article uses the phrase "Mac tax," which one commenter points out is a recent Microsoft marketing canard.
I don't know who paid it, but someone did:
The challenge of the thumbscoop was to create a crisply machined scoop that was still comfortable to use. The designers at Apple worked on hundreds of versions of the thumbscoop -- even examining them under an electron microscope -- to get it right.
If anyone can read that last part without laughing...
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
There's one major difference this analysis doesn't cover. If you're patient, you can get a dell for up to 40% off, and although it's not quite as drastic with Lenovo, the same is true. This macbook will ALWAYS be expensive.
Macs are design items. Some people don't mind paying a higher price for something which appeals to them.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you subjectively feel that the value of the product matches the price paid then an objective comparison is not significant.
.: Max Romantschuk
is the OS. You dont get mac os x on another machine!
Seriously, no FireWire? I know they tried to screw the IEEE 1394 working group with the bait-and-switch license pricing tactic, and the beating they took in the industry was well deserved. But 1394 is superior from an operational standpoint, even if the controllers are a bit of unwieldy packaging-wise and expensive to boot. To have removed it completely from the low-end laptop doesn't bode well for it's future in the rest of the consumer hardware line, although lots of people still have MiniDV cams that use it. USB2/3 will in no way be able to fill that gap, even with the coming surge in hard-disk video cameras.
You fail, Apple. No FW400 (at a freakin' minimum, come on), no sale. I'll get the Dell or the Lenovo and Hackintosh the bejeezus out of it.
Did that commenter also point out that "Mac tax" is (the first time) both written in quotation marks to imply that it's not their phrase and link to an article that was called "Are Macs More Expensive? Definitely - Just Ask Microsoft!"? The whole point of the article is that the phrase has been coined and they're investigating whether Macs are more expensive for the specs than comparable PCs.
Not that I'm saying Macs are cheap - I'd rather custom build/upgrade and slap Linux on it - but it's not as if it's an unbalanced comparison article.
Fingerprint Scanner
The Dell and Sony have one. ADVANTAGE: DELL AND SONY
It makes me laugh every time: Hmmmm a finger print reader......where would I be able to find fingerprints of someone who has used this laptop that I have just stolen? Sure hope they don't always use gloves when they type.....
I mean, where can you think of a more cool-but-useless feature? And it is sooo cool.......
Qxe4
1) MacBook (Beginning of 2006):
"AAAAH, EXPENSIVE"
"See, i did the math, it's comparable!"
2) MacBook (End of 2006):
"AAAAH, EXPENSIVE"
"See, i did the math, it's comparable!"
3) MacBook (Mid 2007):
"AAAAH, EXPENSIVE"
"See, i did the math, it's comparable!"
4) MacBook (End of 2007):
"AAAAH, EXPENSIVE"
"See, i did the math, it's comparable!"
5) MacBook (Beginning of 2008):
"AAAAH, EXPENSIVE"
"See, i did the math, it's comparable!"
And now - totally surprising:
5) MacBook (End of 2008):
"AAAAH, EXPENSIVE"
"See, i did the math, it's comparable!"
Who would have thought!
There are many, many examples of how the 'reviewer' has simply picked the wrong comparisons. Sony and Lenovo are notoriously expensive. Generic Dells are notoriously crappy. And of course, where the Apple is deficient (e.g. hard disk space or RAM) the reviewer doesn't add the necessary upgrades at Apple's prices to make the price comparison fair, it simply ignores them.
I can't link to it because of Dell's site, but for about $100 more Dell currently has an XPS 1330 which whips the Macbook in virtually every respect: much better graphics, much more RAM and HDD, significantly faster CPU, bigger battery, better connectivity, and so on. Mysteriously, the reviewer has instead selected a relatively poor quality Dell as a comparison point.
Some other selections from TFA:
How? This is not explained. Does "different class" mean "much cheaper?
I understand that the objective is to compare "like-for-like" and see whether Apple is adding a premium, but if an AMD chip (or a different Intel chip) offers comparable or better performance but is not available on a Mac, then how is that not part of the 'cost' of buying Apple? Limiting it to Core 2 Duo seems unneccessary. And why is it legitimate to reconfigure the competition, but not the Mac? Could it be that Apple savagely gouge you for any upgrades?
Why not pay whatever Apple charges for the same capacity? One of the biggest Apple gouges is when you add RAM or storage to their preconfigured systems. Ignoring this is not justified.
And yet, there would be hundreds of x86 laptops on the market that provide 4 or more.
Or you could pick a different Dell, like an XPS series model, and get HDMI, s-video and DVI as standard. In addition, the review does not appear to add in the cost of Apples various dongles and attachments.
HDMI equates to "optical out" and is arguably more useful for modern hi-fi equipment. I am relatively ignorant about audio in options.
Again, this is simply a result of picking the wrong competition - again check out (for instance) Dell XPS laptops, which are extremely well built and solid.
Read Pynchon.
Long story short, the least expensive Windows laptop he found comparable to the $1400 MacBook was an $820 Dell, making the Mac Tax a whole 70% on top of the price-conscious buyer's choice in the Windows world.
However, he did succeed in finding two similarly overpriced models to the Mac from Sony and Lenovo, demonstrating that bad choices are also available in the PC world, if you look hard enough.
To reply to my own post, knocking the 13" Macbook up to the same specs as the Lenovo in terms of RAM, HDD, and video out increases the price to $1,457.00, or $150-200 more than the Lenovo depending on whether we go by the "sale price" or the list price.
So in summary: yes, there is a "Mac tax" (which incidentally is a phrase which was in use long before MS adopted it).
Read Pynchon.
Im a big Mac guy, but even I felt bad for my friend who wanted to switch, he wanted to rebuy his computer again (long story), his $1500 NZD PC (some media centre thing with tv tuner card etc) was roughly equal in specs to the $3000 NZD iMac he ended up getting, once the warranty on the Mac was brought up to 3 years as well as rebuying Office for Mac. It was painful, and he misses the TV Tuner, ones I've seen that plug in cost HUNDREDS! Ouch.
Maybe in America, but I think in many parts of the world, Macs are very sadly more expensive than PCs. I compare my Macs to computers a friend has built for himself, and theres a big difference in price. I would still take the Mac for design and OSX, but they are not cheap here in New Zealand :)
---
You will also get some brands of Windows laptop much cheaper by shopping around. In fact, Dell is one of the only companies who don't fall into this category.
Not to mention that the review picks Lenovo and Sony, two of the most expensive brands. Where is Asus, for instance?
Read Pynchon.
From Apple's Macbook mini-site:
So there you have it. If Apple is funding the development of technology to send their designers into the future, where they must then spend years infiltrating futuristic IEEE meetings before returning to the present to design laptops, then of course their machines will be a little more expensive.
But just think of the money you'll save when you can browse the Omninet using remote mind-control in 3245AD while those Dell suckers are stuck with forking out for Dell's by-then outdated brain-implant technology.
Read Pynchon.
In TFA it is stated on page 3 that the MacBook costs 1299$ while the Lenovo is 1264.84$, the Sony is $1194.99 and the Dell is $819. Yet, in order to make the MacBook appear to be not so expensive in comparison, it states that they are all of comparable value and therefore, as you should ignore price differences in the scale of 100$, they all cost the same. I mean, WTF?
But that isn't all. There are a few more laptop manufacturers that, oddly enough, happen to be the world's leading laptop manufacturers (Acer, HP, Asus, etc) and also, oddly enough, offer similar laptops in the same price range of the Dell laptop. In fact, Sony and Lenovo are known as the inexplicably expensive laptop brands.
So, having said that, how exactly can anyone claim that the Apple laptops aren't expensive when you realize that their laptops are more expensive than the already expensive windows laptops? You can't.
P.S.: The current Apple laptops are also PCs. It doesn't make sense to claim that a Windows laptop is a PC while the Apple laptop is something else.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
One reason I dislike current laptops are their (generally) crappy LCD resolutions. Over the past 7-8 years I've only used laptops with 14.1in SXGA+ LCDs, including the T60p I'm typing this from. I actually prefer the 14.1in SXGA+ LCDs, but I know it's a losing battle. A very limited number of T61p were released with them, and I'm pretty sure they'll be the last in history.
I'm not unreasonable, and I understand that movies look better if they fill the widescreen. Although with all the variations in widescreen ratios, I'm yet to see a movie without any black borders. You can also display two documents side by side, even though 90% of people I've seen only show a single maximized instance of MS Word with a single document open. Widescreens do take less room in cramped spaces, allow for more keyboard space and even numpads, etc. However I use my laptop for typing, and screen height is far more important than width. I'm a minority though, so I'll adapt.
Now assuming I'd be looking for a replacement laptop tomorrow (hopefully my T60p will last a while), moving to Apple would mean going "down" to a 15.4in WSXGA (loss of 150pixel height) on the Macbook Pros or 13.3in WXGA (loss of 250pixel height and 200pixel width) on the Macbooks. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.
On the other hand I just checked out Lenovo's site. Their T500 laptop is offered with a 15.4in WSXGA or WSGA+ resolution. The WSXGA+ is only a $75 upgrade, and it offers the same height and much more width than my SXGA+. The rest of the specs are very close to the Macbook Pro, but at first glance it's about $200 cheaper.
Beyond their arguably sleek design, the absolutely only reason any rational person would even consider a Macbook or Macbook Pro is OS X. I used it briefly, and I really liked it. Unfortunately given my laptop use, the OS alone is not incentive enough to put up with the limited and (slightly) more expensive hardware.
"The differences between OS X and Windows are far more significant than any spec I discuss in this article.
Oh, but it's very simple. Unix (4 legs) good, not Unix (2 legs) bad.
Is it more expensive than a high-end Windows machine? Not really.
Who buys those high-end Windows machines? Nobody with any sense.
Does Apple offer $500 laptops? Nope.
Ergo, Apple is expensive.
No sig today...
The thing which I find annoying with all these analysis is that they never, ever compare battery life, which to me is the singulary most important spec of a highly portable laptop (10-13 inches or so, above that is portable (14-17), below that is netbooks (7-9)).
The cheapest MacBook/iBook has, from at least 2005 (as long as I've checked out the market) been in the top cathegory for battery life in it's priceclass, and, they don't even lie that much with how long time they can actually be used responsibly.
Also, they are pretty much noiceless and doesn' generate extreme hot spots like many laptops do, making them more comfortable to use in your lap.
OSX is what userland Linux should be. It's secure enough. And there is a culture of user-centricity amongst the application developers. That's the special Mac aura - to me.
The keyboards are really good, too. I love that spacing between the keys - the margin of error is built-in, so that you can type faster and still avoid hitting the neighbouring key. Stuff like being able to write appx 10% faster is also the "marginal" utility of a Mac.
Stop the brainwash
Seriously, how many categories did he need? I guess he wanted ads.
The problem is, that for the target market it is horribly overpriced. This guy had to go out of his way to ignore all the similarly TARGETED machines that you can find in your Sunday circular for $500 to $800. Some of them even have discreet graphics at that price.
Better yet, everyone knows Dell is always on sale. You can find deals on any laptop maker other than Apple.
The real Mac tax is found when comparing targeted audience. In other words, the people who would love to have a laptop for light work. This the audience Apple misses completely by pricing themselves out of consideration.
I could probably find half a dozen laptops that would serve just as well, if not with more features, but they wouldn't look cool.
(fwiw I own an iMac, 2nd gen iPod, and 2nd gen Touch, and am awaiting the next gen iMac to come out)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Has anyone checked the price of Apple machines seen over several years? Try to sell a cheap PC notebook after a few years and do the same with a MacBook. You will see that there may be a "Mac tax" but it also applies to used machines.
And I've seen many people being cheap with their notebooks and really regretting it very soon. Paying a bit more hurts only once but using a crappy notebook hurts every day.
I did my own comparisons, and really, I see the Mac tax.
I have a HP Pavilion DV6000, comes with pretty much everything. I bought it a few months ago for £400 (GBP). A Mac Mini costs £399 (GBP).
This laptop has dedicated RAM for graphic card (GeForce 8400M GS - runs all my games just fine, with excellent quality) usage, 2GB RAM, sdcard reader, firewire, A/G/B wireless, DVD burner, HDMI, three USB ports, VGA, modem, ethernet, video out, webcam, microphone...
I use this machine as my mobile gaming machine (it works great) and work stuff (software development, office work), home stuff (movie editing etc). The only disadvantage with it, is that it each core has 1.66GHz, while on the Mac Mini has 1.83GHz. That said, I couldn't use the Mac Mini for decent gaming, or for the majority of the stuff I use this laptop for without significant performance costs, lack of hardware options etc.
That's just the Mini, the cheapest laptop from Apple is the MacBook is £719.00 (GBP), which has Intel GMA graphics, no dedicated graphic card RAM, only 1GB RAM.
Sorry, I'm not convinced Apple systems are on par with PCs for their cost.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Tell me, what is the marginal utility of that special Mac aura?
What is the marginal utility of your snob aura?
Actually there *are* unique features to the Mac WoW client, to quote TUAW: "Most gaming companies tend to shy away from the Mac, but Blizzard has always been the exception. And with World of Warcraft, there are actually huge benefits to playing the game on a Mac. A while ago they added builtin iTunes controls (right into the official client), and as of the upcoming patch (now available for players to play around with on a public test), they've actually created an ingame movie recorder-- only for the WoW Mac client. It's a pretty well done feature, too. WoW Insider's Paul Sherrard took the recorder for a test drive, and created what you see above (after a little bit of iMovie fiddling). The options are pretty impressive for an ingame vid capture as well-- you can control whether the UI or cursor is seen or not, and you even get a choice of codecs (including H.264, Pixlet, or Motion JPEG). Very nice. Whoever's working on the Mac team at Blizzard really knows what they're doing, and is definitely giving Mac users the hookup on cool exclusive features." Re: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/13/world-of-warcraft-mac-client-adds-builtin-movie-capture/
After using half Windows and half Mac for 6 months last year, I switched totally to the Mac about 6 months ago. Here's what I've concluded:
1) OSX is not very fast. I think it's bloated. I've got a ridiculous amount of processing power on this Mac Pro, but it just doesn't move that fast.
2) XP is not very fast. I know it's bloated.
So what's the difference?
OSX is still as slow on my MacBook as it was the day I bought it. I've already formatted my XP Boot Camp gaming partition once this year to get my speed back.
The big problem with Windows is that it gets slower as you go. I haven't noticed that at all with the Mac, even as I wantonly install and uninstall programs. I used to be terrified of what new programs would do to my XP machine. I just haven't had that problem with OSX. Plus, I have access to lots of cool things developed for UNIX that don't seem to slow anything down, stay out of my way, and Just Work.
are arbitrary and often proprietary notions regarding the engineering of a product. more often they are just poor excuses for design, built to lock consumers into your product at the expense of everyones time, energy, and sanity.
they can also be marketing gimmicks that infiltrated engineering via a useless first-line manager with no more product engineering insight than "it needs to be wireless."
this kind of "engineering" isnt new. microsoft has been engineering things to standards that dont exist for around a decade. the only difference is windows ME didnt come with some shitcock in a turtleneck banging the invincible OS drum and treating me like i was a six year old with nothing better to do with my time than swoon over magnetic power cords..
Good people go to bed earlier.
I agree.
The marginal utility of the Mac is the amount of thought that goes into the entire system. Everything from MagSafe and freefall harddrive locking to built-in webcams (which you'll notice PCs quickly copied) to POSIXy goodness and Open Group certification. Different volume settings for different audio pipelines. Self-contained applications, system-wide and per-user settings, etc.
Add to that its greatness as a development environment and I'm pretty much sold.
If only OS X (specifically HFS+) would support filesystem holes. Grrrr...
From Apple's Macbook mini-site:
All engineered to standards that don't even exist yet.
Even as a Mac user/developer this makes me cringe. Ewww...
There's at least two things they are referring to.
1) Snow Leopard will support OpenCL. You might say well so what, eventually my Dell will to, after all that's what Open means. True, but look at the architecture in the macs. They elimiated the Northbridge and the Bus chips. The CPU now connects directly to the GPU.
If you have ever tried to program an NVIDIA GPU for computational work you know that the slow step is shuttling the data back to the CPU. So having OpenCL with an insanley fast bus means that standard is going to actually be useful.
2) the Open HD video connector.
on the new macs, running H264 high def has dropped processor utilization from 100% to 20%, presumbaly because of the NVIDIA chip. So now streaming HD is going to be a reality and will actually exist for the mac world. And TVs that support the Open HD are becoming available.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Sorry, but I just love the irony of writing about avoiding hitting neighbouring keys on the keyboard, then hitting one in the next sentence. :)
As usual the article and the commentaries ask and answer completely the wrong question.
The interesting question is NOT whether, if you take a Mac spec as your starting point, you can duplicate it for less elsewhere from another vendor. The answer is usually, no, not very much, and sometimes it costs more. Which tells us just about nothing about suitability of product or value for money.
The interesting question is whether, if you are looking for a computer, you can find a better value choice better suited to your needs from the Mac range or from other vendors ranges.
You almost always can. The reason is, the paucity of price points and specification points in the Mac range. This results in Macs being an overpriced or underfeatured choice for most people most of the time.
This leads to a simple conclusion. For most people, most of the time, the Mac product is going to be overpriced. For most people, the other vendor product is going to offer better value. Which is quite compatible with the proposition that for any given point in the Mac range, its hard or impossible to duplicate it for much less. This was however never the issue.
The Mac range is not the starting point for comparisons, any more than the Louis Vuitton range is. How one wishes people would stop pretending that it is.
Indeed you notice the performance hit under Windows after some time. In regards to OS X, what I really do like is it's responsiveness. Even if it sometimes isn't exactly the fastest thing on earth, with the latest version of it I always feel it very responsive and quick to acknoledge my actions.
I recently switched my gf to Mac, she is a designer. The reason for the switch was that every time Windows slowed down for her (an average user) she couldn't install it back on her own. She was really afraid of using Macs, but fortunately, she found it easy to learn the basic concepts, and is now using it full time. I am really glad I won't need to be installing Windows again in 6 months :D
In any case, I do realize that OS X isn't perfect. It may not be the most secure sistem either. But I believe that there's no discussion that it requires less maintenance for the average user today. Today is all that matters today. If things change, I'll see other options.
diegoT
I was always convinced of the Mac tax on their laptops.
Then I owned one. I didn't want it at first. I didn't lust after it.
Now I am convinced that there is no Mac tax. I happen to know that I'm immune to the idea that I'm a fanboi suffering from post-purchase justification. I just know that once you own one, if you had the Mac tax issue, you lose it. Quickly. Completely. Forever.
Then your next laptop will be a Mac. And you'll recommend them. And you'll probably try to explain something in a post that might not be easily explained.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.