So it went live and it got read a few times. About a million times in two days to be exact, the Mac article has already gone down as one of the most popular articles in AT history. I got a lot of people telling me I was Mac-biased, a lot of people telling me I was PC-biased, but I got far more people telling me they liked the article, so I came away pleased.
The top three arguments I got against what I wrote were:
1) My price arguments were wrong.
2) You don't need more than two buttons on a mouse.
3) You didn't mention ________ (fill in the blank with Unix, security, iLife, etc...)
To which I respond:
1) No they're not.
2) Yes you do.
3) I know.
:)
Ok, now to be a little more serious. The price thing I still believe firmly on; while you can spec out a Dell system to easily hit $3000, take a look at our Buyer's Guides and see what type of a system you can get for just $1500. Granted you don't get warranty, an extremely quiet case, etc... but let's be honest, price matters, it matters a lot - that's why there are tons of sub-$1000 PCs out there. Lots of die-hard PC users already think Dell's prices are too high, they aren't going to embrace Apple's. But honestly this doesn't matter as much, as the article wasn't very cost-centric to begin with, I just reiterated an age-old argument which some agree with, some disagree with and others could care less about.
The mouse issue may just be a personal one and I'll leave it at that; most of the article was personal opinion so there's not much more to be said there.
Now the final point is an interesting one, because after all of the emails I got asking why I didn't touch on any number of aspects of OS X I found myself wanting to write a follow-up to the 11,000 word article. I honestly don't have the time to tackle that right now but it's something I may contemplate doing in the future, or maybe I'll just save it for a review of the next iteration of OS X due out next year.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed but it looks like NVIDIA may just come through with a 6800 Ultra DDL for my upcoming Mac GPU roundup. They're saying about a week, we'll see what happens there. I'm still planning a trip to visit ATI's Mac team, but I've yet to hammer out a date as to when, so I'll keep you posted on that as well.
Right now most that's on my plate is PC related, but I'll definitely post anything Mac related as soon as I get word.
I'm still using the G5 by the way, this was posted from it and that article was written on it.
The top three arguments I got against what I wrote were:
1) My price arguments were wrong.
2) You don't need more than two buttons on a mouse.
3) You didn't mention ________ (fill in the blank with Unix, security, iLife, etc...)
To which I respond:
1) No they're not.
2) Yes you do.
3) I know.
:)
Ok, now to be a little more serious. The price thing I still believe firmly on; while you can spec out a Dell system to easily hit $3000, take a look at our Buyer's Guides and see what type of a system you can get for just $1500. Granted you don't get warranty, an extremely quiet case, etc... but let's be honest, price matters, it matters a lot - that's why there are tons of sub-$1000 PCs out there. Lots of die-hard PC users already think Dell's prices are too high, they aren't going to embrace Apple's. But honestly this doesn't matter as much, as the article wasn't very cost-centric to begin with, I just reiterated an age-old argument which some agree with, some disagree with and others could care less about.
The mouse issue may just be a personal one and I'll leave it at that; most of the article was personal opinion so there's not much more to be said there.
Now the final point is an interesting one, because after all of the emails I got asking why I didn't touch on any number of aspects of OS X I found myself wanting to write a follow-up to the 11,000 word article. I honestly don't have the time to tackle that right now but it's something I may contemplate doing in the future, or maybe I'll just save it for a review of the next iteration of OS X due out next year.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed but it looks like NVIDIA may just come through with a 6800 Ultra DDL for my upcoming Mac GPU roundup. They're saying about a week, we'll see what happens there. I'm still planning a trip to visit ATI's Mac team, but I've yet to hammer out a date as to when, so I'll keep you posted on that as well.
Right now most that's on my plate is PC related, but I'll definitely post anything Mac related as soon as I get word.
I'm still using the G5 by the way, this was posted from it and that article was written on it.
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Jimmy Z - Sunday, October 17, 2004 - link
First: A very balanced and one of the best discussions on the topic I've seen in a decade. Kudos!Second: Re the comment by #5 (and NOT "Johnny Five," who was far more discerning) than this jerk):
Another true believer in the theory that less is more. Wrong about Bush too (not that W is perfect, mind you, but what does he have to do with PC's vs. Macs?). And invokes Jesus Christ on HIS side. How many mistakes can someone make in that few sentences?
I suppose the independent R&D to compete against a vast industry that supports 98% of the market means there has to be a price premium for Macs, and a second source must be to hire the trendiest industrial designers to create their prestige level technological "objets d'art" that make people hunger to own something that in its way is undeniably cooler than an XP PC with its ugly semi-utilitarian interface.
But if I'm going to pay a premium, I not only want cool and cool features, and given that I also have to give up breadth (if not depth) of application choice, I want at least equal performance -- and given the memory speed, video cards, and other areas in which the Mac continues to lag behind, where it DOESN'T HAVE TO, everytime I think I'm finally going to put Wintel behind me, I just can't ever quite see the value equation.
So for me Apple could get my business by either closing the price gap (cutting prices) OR the performance gap (achieving true component parity or better throughout the machine), but unlike Mr. #5, I'll not pay more for less, i.e., I won't pay a premium price for a machine with the panache and status of a BMW Z3 and the performance of a Civic.
Especially considering that for 18 year MS vets like me, the "reverse learning curve" will be fairly high and lengthy as well before we even achieve the benefits of OS-Xdom.
Another factor is that companies like Adobe will NOT let me upgrade from the PC to Mac versions of their products during an upgrade cycle, even FURTHER (and dramatically in the case of products like Photoshop and Office)increasing the already high premium for switching. Now HERE's a place where Apple could maybe twist some arms and help potential migrators like me (eternally interested, but too tight-fisted to pay ANOTHER $700 for the PShop program we've already licensed).
Maybe (and now I'm going to get it from the Mac freaks, of whom my pro photographer nephew is one, with his unc's blessings given his field) if I really needed a status symbol to assuage my ego, I'd do it. Otherwise, I'll clunk along and run my anti-virus, firewall, spyware and spam programs and send the occasional curse in Redmond's direction.
Anonymous - Saturday, October 16, 2004 - link
I'm an x86 Linux user (approaching 2 year switching anniversary). I have recently been exposed to OS X in the computer labs at college (very recent Dells with iMacs interspersed). This is my opinion, after adding in my other WinXP experiences:XP has some major task preemption regressions---heavy I/O in Explorer freezes the whole system, consistently. OS X---at least from these 800MHz G4 iMacs---blocks only the process taking up all the resources (Finder displaying a file's properties is shockingly costly).
As far as mice go, I can use a one-button mouse on a Mac or a two-button mouse on a PC. I personally prefer keyboard accelerators + three-button mouse + X-Windows paradigm of select to copy and middle-click to paste. So you're both losers there in my book. :P
tcsh > cmd. No contest.
I only wish I had my own Mac box to fool around with. Then I could give a full opinion.
* The content of this post assumes equally competent administration in both environments.
Big_Ed_Mustafa - Friday, October 15, 2004 - link
Doc and SD: I have to confess that the thought of a flourishing resale market for used Macs is a concept that hadn't occurred to me. Personal computers have been driven down to price levels so low that they're mostly considered disposable appliances here in the U.S.http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp?product...
The above is the link to the Compaq computer for sale at Walmart for $498.00 U.S. (275 GBP). There's no wait, you walk into Walmart and load a box into your shopping cart, just like you were buying a toaster or an electric toothbrush.
Dell, on the other hand, had a banner ad I saw just yesterday offering a P4 2.8Ghz PC with 256Mb DDR RAM, 40Gb hard drive, CD-RW drive, Windows XP, and a 17" monitor for $350 (194 GBP) after rebate.
When you can buy a brand-new P4 2.8Ghz system very nicely equipped from a major manufacturer for $350, nobody the states messes with used computer equipment
Doc - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
Interesting points SD - nice chatting with you.SD - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
#37:That's got to be at least a factor, I agree, but I'm not sure it's all of it. Some older Macs did have pretty bad screens.
#36/Doc:
Sorry for the point-by-point thing, but I figure it's the easiest way to do things.
>>>
I have bought & sold many Macs over seven years here in London & I just don't see this low end price nose dive you mention. It may happen elsewhere.
>>>
Low-end price dive? You mean the last-generation thing, right? I think I said that low-end parts actually have much better depreciation than midrange and high-end parts do; if I didn't, forgive me, I should have. The generation nosedive DOES exist, as you can see looking at the prices of PowerMac G4s before and after the G5's introduction. (Some of them do a better job of holding their values for the reason #37 touched on: they're often sold with really good monitors. Take a look at prices for just the box itself, then, or failing that with crappy monitors.) However, it's not as significant for the cheaper stuff, because there's really only so low that hardware can go. (It's smaller percentage-wise after a point, so it's way smaller cost-wise.)
>>>
You seem to be using the logic of 'XP won't run on a three year old PC therefore a Mac price must nosedive too'. If that isn't it then I don't see where you are coming from.
>>>
Err, no, I'm not. To restate, Mac depreciation is slow until the hardware is replaced by a MAJOR new generation (I'm not talking about revisions, although those will affect the accepted average sale price to some extent). It then jumps off a medium-sized cliff, then continues going down slowly. Look at PowerMac G4 prices..
And XP will run on a three-year-old PC so long as the PC was decent three years ago. Three years ago, an Athlon Thunderbird with 256MB of DDR would have been considered a solid midrange machine, and that machine would run XP pretty well (a memory upgrade would be nice for multitasking or gaming, but 256MB definitely isn't rock bottom). Irrelevant, I know, but I felt like bringing it up.
>>>
The oldest processor you can reasonably run OS X Panther on for Internet & Office apps is a 400MHz G3 - I have done it (I am typing now on a 600MHz G3). That makes the oldest Mac that can run the latest OS a Blue & White PowerMac G3 400MHz 'Yosemite' - released in January 1999 - just short of 6 years ago!
I've just installed Panther on a Pismo PowerBook G3 400 - released February 2000 - well over four years ago. Performance with a new 7200rpm Toshiba drive is perfectly useable for Office & Internet.
A friend just bought a Lombard PowerBook for £300 via eBay & loaded Panther - it was first released in May 1999.
>>>
Yep, never said anything about G3s not running OS X. I've heard that they're not very snappy with OS X, but that they're not as horrendously slow as, say, a PC with 128MB of RAM is running Windows XP (unstreamlined install).
On the oldest processor you can reasonably run XP on... XP doesn't really eat processors alive, it just takes up a ridiculous amount of memory. You can run XP reasonably well for office apps and web browsing on a Celeron-A, Pentium II, or early P3 so long as it has 256MB of RAM. IIRC, the Celeron-A era was late '98 to late '99, so XP will run just fine on a good six-year-old computer so long as it's given a $20~40US memory upgrade. (Assuming the machine didn't already have 256+MB of RAM, anyway, and I'm pretty sure that 256MB was a lot of RAM six years ago.) So that's not really a plus for PCs OR Macs there-- the earliest PC that'll run XP acceptably is a little older than the earliest Mac that'll run OS X acceptably, but older PCs will require (relatively inexpensive) memory upgrades.
>>>
As for the top end - "high-end PCs just have suicidal depreciation". Well, that isn't the case with PowerMacs here in London either. The Graphic Designers all buy them & you see a steady stream of them advertised when a new model comes out. They know that they can buy them for the business without sales tax (at 17.5%) and then sell them eight months later privately for pretty much what they paid for them to the public who see a 17.5% discount off the new prices as reasonable.
>>>
Indeed, it isn't-- that's why I said "PCs" (I'm not using "PC" to refer to computers in general, heh, don't worry). Like I said, depreciation for high-end Macs is quite low until you hit a generation gap.
>>>
If you want to check some Mac prices in London check:
http://www.loot.com
You'll find three G3 iMacs 500 & 600 MHz (3.5 to 4 years old) selling for £350 to £425.
>>>
Hmm, that seems a little high to me. Probably about right for me if you use a dollar sign instead of a pound sign. I'm guessing that's because people in the U.K. generally have to pay more for electronics than people in the U.S., but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a better reason.
>>>
Finally, depreciation is of particular concern to anyone buying an all-in-one computer. The cheapest way to upgrade it is usually to sell it and buy another newer one. With iMacs that is much cheaper than upgrading an equivalent PC - you get EVERYTHING new (including software) for about £100 to £250 (depending on model).
>>>
Not necessarily. If you sell your iMac after it's last-gen, you lose a significant amount of money. That said, all-in-one super-duper-proprietary PCs tend to be cheap pieces of excrement, so what little market value they have probably drops very quickly. Lesson learned: all-in-one PCs are to be avoided.
Illissius - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
On the price thing... this has been discussed to death, but I'll take another stab at it. You are entirely correct that the Mac you bought cost $3000, and that you can get a very nice PC for $1500. That doesn't mean the two are directly comparable. The Mac is a *dual* 2GHz G5, for one thing. G5s are fairly comparable to Opterons/A64s, right down to the 64-bitness, so I submit that the correct hardware to compare in price to your Mac would be a dually Opteron 246 (2GHz), some motherboard with comparable features, and the other parts (memory, video card, HDD, etc.) you can probably get entirely equivalent versions of for each.p.s. - wtf is up with 512MB memory in a dual 2GHz rig? o_O
Alex - Wednesday, October 13, 2004 - link
The only reason iMacs hold their value is because when you sell it you are selling a perfectly good monitor with it. I bet I could sell a 486 with a 20 inch lcd for over a thousand bucks. My parents run windows XP on an Athlon 500 that i got almost 8 years ago, it does everything most Mac/PC users do, surf the web, and run office 2003, does that mean it's the best computer ever made, hell no. I use dual G5 macs at school all the time with Maya, photoshop, director, and a bunch of other multimedia apps. They work just fine, but any mac user saying their computers never crash need to try running/rendering maya scenes, I've seen them crash plenty. The only reason I buy all the new hottness for my pc is because I like playing games, and I like playing with computers. I could care less what type of computer people use, but I think it's funny how most mac fans talk about how the dual G5 can do everything blah blah blah, writing all this from eMacs because thats all they can afford.Doc - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
#31 SDI have bought & sold many Macs over seven years here in London & I just don't see this low end price nose dive you mention. It may happen elsewhere.
You seem to be using the logic of 'XP won't run on a three year old PC therefore a Mac price must nosedive too'. If that isn't it then I don't see where you are coming from.
The oldest processor you can reasonably run OS X Panther on for Internet & Office apps is a 400MHz G3 - I have done it (I am typing now on a 600MHz G3). That makes the oldest Mac that can run the latest OS a Blue & White PowerMac G3 400MHz 'Yosemite' - released in January 1999 - just short of 6 years ago!
I've just installed Panther on a Pismo PowerBook G3 400 - released February 2000 - well over four years ago. Performance with a new 7200rpm Toshiba drive is perfectly useable for Office & Internet.
A friend just bought a Lombard PowerBook for £300 via eBay & loaded Panther - it was first released in May 1999.
As for the top end - "high-end PCs just have suicidal depreciation". Well, that isn't the case with PowerMacs here in London either. The Graphic Designers all buy them & you see a steady stream of them advertised when a new model comes out. They know that they can buy them for the business without sales tax (at 17.5%) and then sell them eight months later privately for pretty much what they paid for them to the public who see a 17.5% discount off the new prices as reasonable.
If you want to check some Mac prices in London check:
http://www.loot.com
You'll find three G3 iMacs 500 & 600 MHz (3.5 to 4 years old) selling for £350 to £425.
Finally, depreciation is of particular concern to anyone buying an all-in-one computer. The cheapest way to upgrade it is usually to sell it and buy another newer one. With iMacs that is much cheaper than upgrading an equivalent PC - you get EVERYTHING new (including software) for about £100 to £250 (depending on model).
Doc - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
#30 Big Ed MustafaI've just tried to configure a basic Compaq on their site:
Operating System - XP Pro SP2 vs. Mac OS X on eMac
Processor - Celeron D 325 (2.53 GHz) vs. 1.25GHz G4 PPC
Memory - 256MB PC2700 vs. 256MB DDR333
Hard Drive - 40 GB vs. 40GB
Optical Drive - CD-RW/DVD-ROM vs. CD-RW/DVD-ROM
Ports - USB + legacy vs. USB, Firewire
Network card - no mention vs. on board
Graphics Card - Integrated Graphics vs. ATi radeon 9200 32MB
Sound Card - Integrated 5.1 Capable vs. Integrated not 5.1 Capable
Monitors - 17" flat CRT monitor vs. 17" flat CRT monitor
Speakers - JBL Platinum Speakers vs. Internal Harmon Kardons
Software - Works Suite 2004+Word 2002 vs. Mail, iChat AV, Address Book, QuickTime, iLife (includes iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand), iCal, AppleWorks, Quicken 2004 for Mac, World Book 2004 Edition, Sound Studio, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, Deimos Rising, Zinio Reader
Form - Standard Tower - Small Form Factor
I think those two are roughly comparable - I rate the G4 over a Celeron & the Radeon 9200 over an on-board chipset sharing system RAM. I rate the Mac software over Works but the PC sound card over the Mac. I suspect the eMac CRT will be better & the design - well the PC just wasn't. The Compaq appears to have no firewire or network card.
PRICE: Compaq $761.98 and then play around trying to get a $100 mail-in rebate to take it to 661.98. Network & a decent firewire card will take that to around $720. If you need a Garageband equivalent you're going to pass the eMac price.
eMac - $799
I am not familiar with second hand PC prices but you say a three year old PC is worthless - I have heard similar from other PC users but I imagine it is still worth a couple of hundred bucks. A three year old Mac is most certainly not worthless. A three year old iMac here in London sells without difficulty for between £300 & £380 (depending on RAM & condition). Trying to take out the UK sales tax element for you (17.5% - it isn't payable 2nd hand but it inflates UK prices initially) and convert into $ those figures are very approximately $446 to $566.
That gives the PC an approximate three year cost of $520
The eMac is much cheaper at between $353 and $233.
So, I hope you see why I suggested that careless "Macs are expensive comments" are only of service to insecure PC users who are comforted by incompetent maths... and, before I get flamed, I don't suggest for a minute that description fits any of the discerning readers of Anandtech.
By the way this was written on a three year old Dalmatian iMac running the latest version of OS X 10.3.5 without a hitch.
Mac Gamer - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 - link
#30 - er, like I said, most of the "A" list PC games are out for Mac. They are just faster on cheaper PCs. I'm not bored, just frustrated at getting low FPS.