All the Intarwebz-connected computers at Casa Munchkin Wrangler are now running Firefox 3. It’s pretty slick, and seems to be noticeably faster than Firefox 2. It also doesn’t crash on the handful of flash- and script-heavy websites I have in my Daily Viewing rotation that made FF2 crap out with regularity.
While we’re on the subject of geek stuff, let’s talk about why I won’t be buying another Mac in the near future, despite my status as a loyal Mac user since I bought the original iMac on the morning of its release day in 1998.
The latest batch of MacBooks are based on Intel’s “Santa Rosa” architecture. It’s a standardized chipset and hardware combination for new budget- and midrange laptops these days, Apple and Wintel alike. If I want the MacBook, I need to shell out $1,099 for the basic configuration, which gets me a dual-core Intel CPU, 1GB RAM, a 120GB hard drive, a 13-inch glossy LCD, and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive.
Over at Best Buy (home of the annoyingly pushy service plan sales), they have shelves full of brand-name budget laptops based on the very same Santa Rosa platform. I take a look at the specs of the Dell Inspiron 1525, for example, and it lists the following: a dual-core Intel CPU, 2GB RAM, a 120GB hard drive, a 15.4″ glossy LCD, and a dual-layer DVD burner.
Price tag on the Dell: $549.
For less than half the price of the MacBook, I can get essentially the same motherboard architecture, the same hard drive size, but twice the RAM, a superior display, and a DVD toaster versus a combo drive. Both machines have built-in WiFi. Things the Mac has that the Dell lacks: Bluetooth and a webcam. Things the Dell has that the Mac lacks: a multi-format media card reader, S-Video and HDMI ports. (S-Video out is available on the MacBook with an optional adapter, sold separately.)
The MacBook does run OS X, of course, but when you look at the fact that the mainboards in both machines come from the same Intel circuit board assembly line, and that the Dell is more generously equipped when it comes to RAM, optical drives, and video-out options, is the ability to run OS X really worth more than double the price tag?
I love Apple’s designs, I really do, but when I can get better specs for less than half the price by going for the Dell, it’s pretty much a no-brainer. I mean, I’d be willing to pay a minor premium for the ability to run Jaguar and have a glowing Apple logo on the lid, but $549 vs. $1099? That’s a non-trivial price difference. I’ll even put up with Vista if it saves me half a grand.
(Cue the Apple fanboiz in four…three…two…one…)
29 Comments
June 18, 2008 at 11:40 am
(Yeah, I guess I’m a fanboy)
At least add to your analysis the fact that according to Dell.com, that Inspiron is not the same CPU as the MacBook, which is a Core 2 Duo at 2.1 GHz with 800 MHz FSB and 3 MB cache. Only the very highest-end 1525 has a Core 2 Duo, and it is not as fast, has less cache, and slower FSB and is more expensive than your quote for the low/mid-end 1525.
I also wouldn’t judge monitor quality just by spec. Those two machines have the same resolution, so the Dell will have larger pixels yet you get no more screen real estate to work on and a larger laptop to haul around. My HP work laptop (17″ screen) has a “nice screen” by spec (it is large). But to power it and still get decent battery life they made big sacrifices in brightness. Namely, if you move your head at *all* off center the screen dims dramatically. In fact, if you have your head dead center the center of the screen looks good and all the edges/corners are quite faded. You actually have to move your head around to see any part of the screen at full brightness. They have tailored to LCD diffuser to emit the light as straight-forward as possible. My in-laws have a MacBook and I’d take its better-quality 13″ screen over my HP’s 17-incher anyday.
I use XP and Vista at work and OS X at home. To me, I’d say OS X and all the accompanying software is worth several hundred dollars over having to work on and maintain Windows machines. To each his own.
In general, the price gap between Apple and others widens as you get to the low end. At the high end the Apples are very competitive. We are actually buying Mac Pros (8-core, 8-GB ram, etc) at work now to use as workstations running Win XP because the price is so competitive and we’ve found the reliability to be so much better than the custom-made number crunchers we used in the past.
(BTW, stumbled across your site recently and really enjoy it. Our viewpoints aren’t identical, but I feel I learn a lot from reading your writing)
June 18, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Enter Fanboy #2
Cheaper, yah, yah, yah.
I’ve never been a Mac guy just because it’s a “Mac”. Hell, back a dozen years ago, I even picked up a Supermac clone and used it happily for years. The difference for me is three things.
A: Virus protection. (what service are you going to subscribe to Marco? How much a month?)
B:Unix. OSX runs of a Unix core and that means I can go to the command line when I need to. I know some Unix, so this is a plus for only a small fraction of users, but still… I love it.
C: It runs reliably. I don’t have time to be tweaking and looking for drivers and the such. I just want to use my computer.
Are PC’s good machines? Of corse. Are Macs? Yes. For people who want to get a computer and don’t know much about them, I direct them to macs. For people who know quite a lot about computers, I direct them to macs too.
If your needs don’t take you to the high end and you’re looking to do some writing, hell, get the PC. It’ll save you a mint. If you are looking to do something more strenuous or want to get a computer that can last you for the next 7 years, I’d think about staying with the folks in Cupertino.
(all the above, typed on a MacBook Pro. Surprise, surprise)
Turkish Prawn
June 18, 2008 at 1:03 pm
If it makes you happy and it’s what you need, great.
The OS does make a diff. Is $500 bucks worth of difference worth it?
I can sell my management on the fact that, yes, it is. If it were my own money … I’d try a Linux on a PC for a week or two, see if I can make it suit my needs.
For me, the selling point of a ‘Mac’ is that it’s really running unix and does what I need it to do without a lot of fooling around.
June 18, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Oddly enough, “does what I need it to without a lot of fooling around” is why I’m a PC person. I haven’t been able to use any Apple computer for longer than about fifteen minutes before wanting to throw it out the window, then set it on fire. One of my dearest friends, on the other hand, was a PC user for years and then fell wildly in love with her first Mac.
Some people just seem to be wired up in the wetware for one or t’other.
On the other hand, if you’re bi-platform, then five hundred bucks is nothing to sneeze at. Keeping a Windows system virus-and-hacker-free isn’t really that hard. I’m no power user, and I haven’t had either for years… nor do I pay a damn thing in “monthly fees”. Then again, I’m married to a sysadmin, which probably makes a wee bit of difference. AVG Free is a bit naggy on the updates- but, note, “free”, and it’s done its job. Zonealarm- the firewall, also free, doesn’t suck, decent supplement to the routers we’ve got running.
June 18, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Screw Apple. Get a used laptop, format the drive and install Ubuntu.
I like your site. Found it through a link on View from the Porch.
June 18, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Exactly why I bought a Thinkpad X61 and run Ubuntu on it. Equivalent quality in hardware with all the Unix underpinnings. Paid half the price of an equivalent MacBook (though there really isn’t an equivalent since Apple killed the 12″).
Plus I get a lappy with more than one button. Seriously? It’s aught eight and Apple still clings to the one is better insanity? Only apple-ites can convince themselves the twister like key combinations required to get “right click” are easier than, well, right-click. Must be emacs users…
(Cue the emacs fanboiz in four…three…two…one…)
June 18, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Yea, I never had any serious issues with my old Dell/Win.XP work horse over 6-7 years. I am not so in love with Vista on my new machine, but it has some nice features. I would recommend getting XP on your new rig if at all possible.
Virus wise etc., I haven’t had problems one way or the other. Not opening email attachments you don’t trust and avoiding shady sites seems to go a long way, and the free software mentioned above seems to do the trick as well.
I definitely wouldn’t be willing to spend nearly double the price for the same machine, and often if you look around coupon sites online you can find discounts on Dell laptops through their site. They also run specials, incuding inexpensive monitors and docking stations.
June 18, 2008 at 2:23 pm
When I broke my old XP laptop’s screen, I bought a MacBook Pro. I did put XP onto it for dual-boot, because sometimes I need it. My feeling is, buy what you want and are comfortable with. I’m not as comfortable yet with OS X as I am with WinXP, but I’m comfortable enough, and I don’t have to worry about drivers, DLL hell, and the like, which were killing me when I was 100% WinXP at home.
June 18, 2008 at 2:38 pm
My view on mac fanboyz/grrlz: don’t be surprised when they start telling you about how scientology changed their lives.
June 18, 2008 at 3:05 pm
People telling me why I need a Mac because I do graphics remind me of people telling me I need religion to be moral remind me of people who tell me I can’t have a gun because they’re not safe with one.
(recurse!)
June 18, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Whoa! You’re geeking out on me today…
June 18, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Oddly enough, “does what I need it to without a lot of fooling around” is why I’m a PC person.
Most of what I do on my laptop is reach out and admin other systems – windows, varieties of Unix and so forth. It’s less a fanboy thing and more .. a quality tool. You can be perfectly happy with a Wal-Mart socket set – but if you’re doing something heavy duty in the garage it pays to buy the good stuff.
Must be emacs users…
It’s amazing, really. I can put terminal into fullscreen, run emacs and it’s like I never left the 90s.
Plus the kids don’t ask to use my laptop.
June 18, 2008 at 4:08 pm
You can be perfectly happy with a Wal-Mart socket set – but if you’re doing something heavy duty in the garage it pays to buy the good stuff.
If you say so; I stand by my “it’s often just a matter of what you find easy to work with”. Los Alamos National Labs doesn’t have a lot of Macs- it’s almost all Unix and Linux among the hardcore guys, and PCs for the scientists that just need a computer. I’m not about to tell the guys in the Advanced Computing Labs that they’re not doing heavy duty stuff, or that they just don’t know what kind of tool they’re neglecting…
June 18, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I simply don’t understand all the x-strain-e-us ‘lectrons on the issue.
I buy Mac’s because I like them – an ah doan feel no need to justify my wants and likes, and am certainly not going to waste time trying to rationalize them.
I used to buy dells but it started sounding like a rainstik and had funny colored lines running across the screen and spit out the whole CD unit on the floor just like a porn star; an before that I had: winbooks, an afore thet, some crappy off-brand notebook made in a NYC sweatshop, and before that some other crappy cheap Compaq wanna-be, an before that a blessed Apple //c… damn sure miss the last one, and its easy to use ProDOS and tightly coded applications.
June 18, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I’d hardly call my quad-core 64-bit PC “wal-mart” grade. The fact that for the price of an eight-core Mac Pro, I can get three of the blights and they play Team Fortress 2… well, you know… *shrugs*
Same as my monitor, really. I use a Dell 30″. Same TFT as the Apple 30″ Cinema Display. Slightly brighter backlight. More shit on it (5-way card-reader for example). One half to 2/3rds the price for it’s uber-res goodness, and frankly the black bezel on it disappears, whereas a silver bezel is noticable and irritating.
It ain’t Wal-Mart just because it’s cheaper – in fact, in a lot of ways the Dell panel is superior – brighter, more features. *shrugs*
Mac stuff is a lifestyle choice. If – like me – your job description demands maximum machine power, stability and reliability for minimum dosh, then it’s custom PCs running XP Pro all the way. Bang-for-buck is simply unbeatable, and I spend so little time screwing around in the OS that I honestly don’t care.
Besides. I want my quad-core Amiga. Plague o’both your houses, dammit.
June 18, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I’ve been saying this for years. Mac’s lack of quality budget hardware is what is keeping them from being a bigger player in the industry. Hell, their lack of ability to work with “rolling your own” doesn’t help, either.
I don’t buy brand name computers. I build custom systems, because I can (usually) do it cheaper, I know exactly what goes into my system, and I don’t have a bunch of extra crap I don’t need. For desktops, I can invariably set up a near-mirror image (near, because its usually better) of a Mac for 2/3 or half the price. And when I’m done, I have choices as to what flavor of OS I want to run on it. I can have XP, NT, 2000, 98, 95, Linux (all flavors), and probably several more I don’t remember.
And I can do anything with them that you can do on a Mac; most of my video editing is done via a Windows XP machine running Sony Vegas, because it is a far superior program than Final Cut Pro, for nearly half the price. I also run 3D graphics programs (mainly Carrera, though I also have the choice of Maya or 3DSMax if I want to pay more for them), Photoshop, and a dozen other programs on the same machine. ALL of which work as well on the PC as they do on the Mac (in some cases, better, because it has a better video card, and hence render faster).
Mac has a place, but it’s definitely a niche machine, and has a reputation it doesn’t quite earn. Looking nice only gets you so far.
June 18, 2008 at 9:00 pm
“I’ve been saying this for years. Mac’s lack of quality budget hardware is what is keeping them from being a bigger player in the industry. Hell, their lack of ability to work with “rolling your own” doesn’t help, either.”
no, it’s the “there can be only one” market mentality of the entire braindead segment of the american consumer market.
Buy your dell. If you don’t fancy Linux, see if someone has installed the latest MacOS on a similar machine.
emacs requires middle-click to paste under X-windows too…. of course why are you running X when you can just use emacs as your UI? *sheesh*
M-x spook
-E
June 18, 2008 at 10:02 pm
1) Mac users tend to overhype the whole MalWare scare. I’ve been running Wintel desktops since the dawn of time, and the last time I picked up a virus of any note, it affected the boot sectors of the 3.5″ floppies on my 486SX/25…
Half of not getting a virus is the same as not getting mugged: Stay out of questionable neighborhoods and dark alleys and avoid criminal exchanges and don’t talk to strangers and you’ll probably be fine. Download doberman porn from a Romanian hacker site while clicking on email attachments from h4XX0r111@pwndU.com, and you deserve everything you get, dumbass.
2) I have to say this about the Mac: I hooked up this G4/500 tower for a month long experiment some three months ago. Has it been headache-free? No. But neither have I had the desire to say “f%$k it!” and drag my 2.4GHz P4 back down from the attic, either, despite it being superior in every quantifiable way. The drooling praise for the Mac interface isn’t completely baseless…
June 18, 2008 at 10:07 pm
PS: When are you going to get another 9000S?
June 19, 2008 at 2:46 am
I had a thing a few months back. I bought a pair of braces, ’cause my belt was wearing out and I fancied a change. Realised I’d been wearing ‘em every day for almost a month, when it came to me – I’d picked up Mal-wear.
B’dum tishh.
June 19, 2008 at 2:47 am
(Sorry, I think I mean “Suspenders” outside the Uck)
June 19, 2008 at 8:25 am
Mark HB: but so very definitely not within the former boundries of said former Empire!
Meh. I started early and one of my BBS boxes consisted of a Heathkit terminal and a Hayes modem. Plus the little book that listed all the modem commands. No memory. No operating system. It replaced a Kaypro II, until the Kaypro came back. (I have never used a word processer — PerfectWriter? — better than the one that came with that machine and ran on two floppies and 64K of memory!) Until nobody would sell raw-prompt internet access, I ran an ancient 486 box with a monochrome display to do e-mail and web-browse. (The web is hella fast and handy without pix, though formatting issues were staring to get tricky).
To this day, most of what I use a PC for is as a magic box with pictures and a keyboard that connects to a place where a lot of my friends like to hang out. Op sys? Browser software? As long as it does the job, I don’t much care. I’m usually running machinery that is years behind the time — and at a quarter of the price, when it’s not picked out of dumpsters.
June 19, 2008 at 10:28 am
Only on thursdays.
June 19, 2008 at 10:39 am
Wow! I’m a Wintel guy, but… I’ve been a Mac user longer’n you, (going on 20 years, now).
Not to harsh your mellow, but before you accept the sticker price on that Inspiron, make sure you price out all the stuff that’s NOT included. I took that same item (direct from Dell) and ran the shipped price up to $1300.
Of course, at that figure, it blows most G27 (or whatever number Apple’s on this week) DESKTOPs out of the water, but…
M
June 19, 2008 at 10:48 am
You’ve hit on why I didn’t buy Mac.
While the Mac heads are correct that the MacBook has a faster CPU than the ultrabudget Dells, that is because Apple insists on selling people more than they need on the low end- that way they can brag about their machines running the latest OSX version, even if the computer is 3 years old. Well, DUH- when it was new, you made the person spend far more than they otherwise might have.
Last Christmas I bought a Dell Inspiron 1720. Price of a 17″ MacBook Pro? $2500 and climbing fast if you want some software with it. Price of the Dell, complete with 3 year at home warranty, MS Office Home/Student, and otherwise the equal of the MacBook Pro in every way? Under $1300. Shipped. After tax. Mind you, this is a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB Ram, 160GB hard drive, and more- even has a 1920×1200 display that Apple doesn’t match. With Apple, the same warranty is extra (if it exists, dunno if they do at-home), MS Office is extra, and so on. And then you aren’t even factoring in a need for another copy of Windows to run a few programs that aren’t on OSX.
You can configure some machines to be more expensive than Macs, but it isn’t hard to beat the tar out of their more expensive stuff. As much as Mac-philes like to claim “but the Mac is cheaper if you do this,” the fact is that you’d be hard pressed to not find a PC that isn’t at least 20% cheaper for a given amount of hardware, if not more.
June 19, 2008 at 10:54 am
Wow. I’m sorry I commented. If my comments were taken as flame bait or ‘fan boi’ feelings of superiority .. well that’s your interpretation, not what I wrote.
I don’t see a Mac as a lifestyle choice, just a tool I use. When a better unix (as defined by my needs) laptop comes around, I’ll happily switch.
YMMV.
June 19, 2008 at 11:10 am
Brian,
no offense taken, seriously. There are more important things to work oneself into a lather about than what it says on the lid of one’s laptop.
It’s not so much the tool as what you do with it, anyway. Word looks much the same to me on OS X and Vista, and the end product is identical.
If I didn’t have to roll my pennies for non-essential tech toys, I’d have a house full of Macs. Yes, the bottom-drawer MacBook is more powerful than the bottom-drawer Dell…but there’s no Mac at all available at the budget I can afford, so that kind of bumps Apple out of the race for me at the moment. If I could get *any* Apple portable brand new for $500, I’d buy it.
June 19, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I’ll start with the disclaimer: I’ve been using Macs, Windows, and unix (mostly linux) for ages upon ages. I use all three at home every day. I have no religious feelings about any of them being The One True OS For All Things (although I admit I still hate any-unix-that-isn’t-OSX as a desktop OS).
I’ve had PC notebooks and seen plenty of them; the last notebook I bought was a 600mhz iBook, and the next one will be a MacBook. Yes, I can probably get a little more power for the money. (And a bigger screen, but I like small laptops, so bigger is the opposite of a selling point.)
But I think the design and quality are, in fact, worth $500. But if they aren’t to Marko, then they aren’t (and if the budget isn’t $999, you’re just not getting a MacBook, unless you’re really lucky and it’s a refurb).
(Contra Phil, though, I’ve never been able to consistently beat Mac prices, and not by serious margins, on same-spec hardware. But “same spec” requires serious attention; as Marko already demonstrated, it’s easy to not notice that two similar CPUs are not the same CPU. Or to leave out of the spec “doesn’t weigh 8 pounds”, for instance.)
Mark Alger: Uh. You do realise that Apple switched to Intel CPUs, the same as Dell uses, a few years ago now, right – and all the Macs shipping now are dual-core (or greater) and 64 bit?
June 20, 2008 at 4:27 pm
You know I did purchase my latest laptop from WalMart.
Dual Core Turion 64 bit proc, 2 gig memory, 160 gig hdd, DVD burner, built in webcam and wifi. My only complaint is that the touchpad seems “touchy”. If you haven’t checked out the brand “Acer” then it might be a good thing. I paid 599 before tax.
Vista? Not as buggy as people are whining about. So far it has been just as stable as XP Pro. Sadly not as stable as Win2K Pro, but there are only a few of us left who even use that OS. Of course on any Microsoft OS I turn off all the eye candy and use the classic interface. It keeps things relatively even across different generations that way.
I like Macs, but can’t afford them.