On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 09:45:45PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Agreed apart from the bit about Mac's being super expensive, that's only true if you ignore things like build quality and sensible design and just compare clock speeds.
No, have to disagree on this totally, build quality is something you can't argue about really as it gets subjective to the actual machine you do the comparison with. There are crap built x86 machines, but then there are some fine examples of x86 engineering. Sensible design, I would/could somewhat agree on in the Macs favour, although there are flaws (more on that below) and the clock speed comparison isn't really what I am basing my examples on. Just look how much Apple charge you to have more Ram, faster/bigger harddisks, or upgraded gfx cards when you compare like for like Apple seems to be charging at least a 50% premium over what you can buy for an x86 pc. They usually want 35 quid! just to add bluetooth support.
I struggle to find laptops as well designed as say the iBook or Powerbook's for less money when I start to consider other things that are important to me (portability, battery life, build quality).
IBM thinkpads are good, and I given that around 50% of Mac laptop owners I know have had to send the thing off for repair within the first year (and quite a few of them more than once) I think Mac laptops suck, although they do appear to be getting better again so ask me again in another year.
When the Dual G5 was first made available it was very hard to build a X86 based machine with the same real world performance for much less money and that's completely ignoring the fact that they are one of the best designed and built Workstations I have ever had the pleasure of pulling to bits.
That will be the one that Apple got in trouble for because they lied about the performance ;) and how do you categorise "real world performance"? Many of the tasks I want to do on my computer are not possible on a Mac, that would mean it has a real world performance rating of 0, on other tasks then it may be slightly faster but then I could buy 2 (or more) x86 machines for the same price. Also look at how expensive a Mac that will play Doom III nicely costs compared to an x86 gaming rig.
You can beat the Mini Mac on a straight price/performance comparasion, but factor in subjective things like near silent running and the tiny form factor and you'll struggle to find anything to compare. Just off the top of my head a MiniITX board, case, memory, Hard drive, Slimline CDRW and PSU comes to about £250 retail (and that's for less performance and does not include an operating system or any manufacturer support)
There have been many other small form factor PCs in the past, tbh I'm not too worried about how big my computer is as it sits under my desk. Also you have to factor in the one of the design flaws of the Mac mini with its dodgy dvi/vga adaptor which isn't compatible for the vesa spec which to me suggests a big Apple design flaw (so it isn't *always* sensible design).
There are some benefits to having a Mac, but then downsides too. Trying to take the Mac cult approach of "everything is good" doesn't really work. I'm not really defending x86 though, as I think the architecture is a bit crap but then again there aren't many options but I think I will stay put for now. I also thought of one more point that wasn't raised and that is the relative upgradability of a PC compared to a Mac.
The machine I am typing on was originally a 1.4Ghz Athlon with a Ge-Force 2 card which cost 600 quid, the motherboard died and it cost 50 quid to replace with a newer better motherboard and around the same time I upgraded the gfx card to a geforce 4 for 100 quid. At christmas I upgraded the cpu and gfx card which cost me 200 quid for a 2.mumble Ghz Athlon and a GeForce 6600GT card and the upgrade required me to buy some new ram (total 1GB). Every time I have upgraded the machine I have sold many of the bits on ebay.
When I add up what it has cost me over 4 years (1050 quid) and what I got back by selling bits (150 quid, and if I had sold the geforce 2 card I would have got another 50 quid) It has cost me 850 quid to have a machine that is more than fast enough (and at the beginning was fairly high end) for nearly 4 years with no upgrade projected for another 2 years I would say that works out as a bit of a bargain compared to an equivalent Mac (in fact, looking at the Apple store online, an equivalent (but admittedly slightly faster) G5 Mac would cost me about 1361 quid. God knows what the price would have been if I had stayed with Mac kit from the beginning.
Adam