The Apple Mac Cost Misconception

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This is a ludicrous article. The least you could do is add a note saying you are on your knees in front of Steve Jobs while writing this.

I build a quad core 8gb monster for about 2800 bucks. No way I could do that with an apple.

Apple prices themselves higher to instill an image of high quality. Its the same as any other high end brand. Do you really think a Ferrari is worth what it costs? Of course not. You are paying Image Tax on it. Apple is very much the same.

The simple truth is, Apple sells based on image for the most part. Most designers (which i work as, incidentally) are too tech-stupid to swap over, and are used to working on macs from years past. They won't change. I know that working the way i do, Mac's don't dig it. I will be on a PC until I have a compelling reason (performance, price, gunpoint) not to be.
 
"But the Mac-hating here is little over-the-top. The mere act and perceived offense of writing about Apple on this site has sent some of you into a rage to the point where you're ready to burn the author at the stake."

I'm not in a rage. I don't "hate" Mac. And I take no offense over an article discussing Apple product on THG. So get off it, drop the shroud.

I'm tired of the Apple lies. People listen to that crap and they actually believe it. Then I waste time showing them the facts, and they make the decision for themselves. Here's a thought: the author forgot one hidden cost in all of this, the extended warranty. God help you if you try to work on your own Mac, right? I mean, just upgrading with third-party RAM voids the warranty. How draconian is that?
 
Couple of problems there, adinsx.
1. Your RAM link doesn't work, but I know the RAM you're referring to. There is a performance advantage to having multiple sticks instead of just 1, because two sticks has twice as many pin contacts and can evenly split their load, addressing half of the same memory each at the same speed. It's easier for two people to carry two large rocks than it is for one person who's twice as strong to carry two large rocks. It's more expensive, but more versatile. That's why every RAM option Apple offers is 2 sticks or a multiple of 2 thereof.
2. The Mac Pro has burners that write DVD's at x16, not x8.
3. Firewire is more widely used than you think, especially in the government and in many research and educational institutions.
4. The Lian Li is a fair comparison to the Mac Pro case in terms of airflow, and material. It does have performance benefits, but more so longevity benefits. Aluminum helps dissipate heat better, plus the linear crossflow through separated sections minimizes heat buildup, which shortens the lifespan of the components.
5. I think 1000W is about accurate. 2x 120W CPU's, 300W total supported for the PCI slots, that's 520W without 4xHDD's, 2xDVD burners, or possible 32GB of RAM. (This is max spec, but Apple only uses one power supply for the Mac Pro) 550W just isn't enough for expandability.
6. The CPU he should have usedis LGA 771, not 775. Apple does not use Yorkfield based processors, they use Harpertown with the 1600MHz FSB, which is LGA 771. He did screw up there. But he screwed up alot more than that with this article.
7. Linux on an all-purpose workstation? That'd be a maintenance nightmare. The point of a workstation is to work, and spending time tweaking and optimizing the system for compatibility every time there is an update is a waste of time when time is money. Get something that works with no fuss and you're golden. (
 
the "mac clone" for $2773.33 has to be the biggest load of crap I've seen on this site. Heres why:

Lian-Li PC-A71A Aluminum Full Tower $229.99
While Lian-Li makes very good cases, you don't need something this expensive. You can get EXCELLENT cases for just $60 if you know where to look. Even if you want to splurge a little, you can get an AMAZING Thermaltake case for
 
[citation][nom]waffle911[/nom]Couple of problems there, adinsx. 1. Your RAM link doesn't work, but I know the RAM you're referring to. There is a performance advantage to having multiple sticks instead of just 1, because two sticks has twice as many pin contacts and can evenly split their load, addressing half of the same memory each at the same speed. It's easier for two people to carry two large rocks than it is for one person who's twice as strong to carry two large rocks. It's more expensive, but more versatile. That's why every RAM option Apple offers is 2 sticks or a multiple of 2 thereof.2. The Mac Pro has burners that write DVD's at x16, not x8.3. Firewire is more widely used than you think, especially in the government and in many research and educational institutions.4. The Lian Li is a fair comparison to the Mac Pro case in terms of airflow, and material. It does have performance benefits, but more so longevity benefits. Aluminum helps dissipate heat better, plus the linear crossflow through separated sections minimizes heat buildup, which shortens the lifespan of the components.5. I think 1000W is about accurate. 2x 120W CPU's, 300W total supported for the PCI slots, that's 520W without 4xHDD's, 2xDVD burners, or possible 32GB of RAM. (This is max spec, but Apple only uses one power supply for the Mac Pro) 550W just isn't enough for expandability.6. The CPU he should have usedis LGA 771, not 775. Apple does not use Yorkfield based processors, they use Harpertown with the 1600MHz FSB, which is LGA 771. He did screw up there. But he screwed up alot more than that with this article.7. Linux on an all-purpose workstation? That'd be a maintenance nightmare. The point of a workstation is to work, and spending time tweaking and optimizing the system for compatibility every time there is an update is a waste of time when time is money. Get something that works with no fuss and you're golden. ([/citation]

1. Fair enough.
2. Ah, true.
3. But for a general purpose computer, firewire 800 support isn't really a necessity. Either way, I didn't subtract the cost of the firewire cards.
4. Well, I find it hard to believe that the Mac Pro has similar effective airflow to the Lian Li. But I don't exactly have any experimental data to back my view up, so meh.
5. The processor he posted was 95 watts. The point is, he does not have 4 HDDs, 32 GB of RAM, and 2 DVD burners. And probably never will. 1000w is simply excessive for this build.
7. Linux is easy as pie to maintain. FAR easier than any iteration of Windows. Ubuntu does an excellent job at simplifying things for the user, as do many modern Linux distros. The only people who tweak for optimization are Gentoo users, and the only people who have to "fuss" when there are updates are slackware users, really. Updating in most Linux distributions is a far simpler task than updating a variety of apps in windows.
 
[citation][nom]tuannguyen[/nom]You're welcome to go elsewhere.[/citation]

Wow, if I was a THG editor I would 'can' you right now for that statement. Are you TRYING to start a riot by putting up this useless article on a PC enthisiast based website ? You're on a sinking Mac ship, trying to take as many people with you, misery loves that company. You need to rethink your career.
 
Hey all, can't be bothered to register, but I've been reading toms for about 6-7 years now. I'm a recently graduated economist and have only one thing to mention: competition. IBM/PC-compatible parts have been openly competitive since the early 80's and the advent of the x86 processor. Apple STILL isn't allowing 3rd party manufacturers to produce similar products. In a sense, Apple has a monopoly over it's devices. While not technically a monopoly, the effects are the same, as there is only one producer for all of us buyers. On the flipside, PC/compatibles have many producers and therefore are required by the market to compete with lower prices. It's really quite simple; if it's a matter of cost, PCs/compatibles will always be cheaper (all components being equal, or close to) than Apple pcs by virtue of market forces ... so long as Apple doesn't open up their product line to 3rd party manufactuers.
 

agreed
 
[citation][nom]berler[/nom]wow wtf is this crap? tom's hardware limiting the length of posts?[/citation]
If you just browse through the 27 pages I think you'll see that it's bleedingly obvious that this is not the case. I wish it was though :kaola:
 
ROFLMAO mac's arnt built for more reliability/life span customisbetter - load of crap

if apple wants to play in the PC field, make the OS open and free to use on any PC, see if you have the balls to keep customers happy and issue free with all the new (and at times, troublesome - like nvidia's early vista drivers) hardware.

I prefer a box where i can freely switch and upgrade anything i want.
 
[citation][nom]decoppel[/nom]He won't, he's dodged anyone who puts a decent point on here because he has no rebuttles.[/citation]

What is with you ppl, the xeon 5 series is made for dual processor server and comes in lga 771 format as well so shut up about the cpus and 775 already !! Look it up on newegg under server and lga 771 ! he prob just rounded off the 3 from 2.83 ghz cause who cares about 30 mhz !
 
Tuan,

Obvious cherry-picking in your example to support your opinion, really serves the opposite purpose. People buy Mac for their OS, industrial design, and status symbol.

Trying to compare what's under the hood is not an arguable position. PC will always come out on top due to more competition and selection in terms of price.

There is no myth or misconception. Apple carries price premium. Most PCs cost less for the similar hardware offered by Apple. The premium is significant enough that many of us won't buy Macs. This is also true for some PC makers or a line of their products some of which you used in your article. I think you would have been better off using company like Sony for comparison which operate in the similar "premium" brand market.
 
Gosh that author really is ignorant. Well researched, but still ignorant. No wonder he didn't reply to any comment in the previous article.

"Macshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh themselves are not overpriced. In fact, they are fairly priced for what hardware it comes with."
 
so not true. Sure if you compare the prices of the parts used, you end up with a tiny price difference, but if you activate your brain, you do end up with a much larger.

If you'd for instance replace the server chipset with an x48 and the processing power with a q9xxx you'd have saved enough for twice the memory in a non ecc version.

ps. please note that ecc memory really is obsolete! it's so cheap to replace broken memory, and ecc checking in the ecc capable mch drains quite a bit of processing power. So while xeon equipped mac pro's might seem overpowered, they're actually wasting some of their nice power on error correction checks and similar nonsensical things. It's the same problem intel had with the skulltrail system for pc's .... nice idea, but simply not economical.

What the vtol guy meant to imply probaby was that, instead of the hardware apple uses, one could get a better performing mashine with ordinary products for less money.

and let's face it - nobody buys a hp workstation or mac pro unless they've got a very specific need for it - both contain xeons and ecc memory, and both are overpriced as the server components in general are.
 
First off, if you want to compare two different things, be it easily benchmarked or not, compare them in the most precise manner possible. Take two (hardware equal) laptops, one Mac, one Windows/Linux/etc, find a program that runs on both (antivirus/Photoshop/Firefox) and at the very least time the difference between the two (a video would be nice). Then you will get a solid benchmark of the inner workings of the OS itself to have a viable comparison. Like it or not most people would see this and the previous article as a comparison between macs and PCs. I do like a small amount of the author's input on the overall 'feel' of something, but not entire articles.

Secondly, I'm sure that a Mac has the integration of all of its features worked out quite well but those features seem limited, unlike the vast possibilities of PCs.

Also, I do not like that 'PC' gets lumped to windows boxes only, because isn't a mac a 'Personal Computer' as well? Or is it a LC (Lifestyle Computer)?

In conclusion, I did enjoy to read the article but must admit I took it with a grain of salt.

-Zunaro
 
[citation][nom]zunaro[/nom]Also, I do not like that 'PC' gets lumped to windows boxes only, because isn't a mac a 'Personal Computer' as well? Or is it a LC (Lifestyle Computer)?[/citation]
Isn't that what most people generally do? I posted a comment earlier that just said "Mac > PC" and it got lots of negative votes from the "PC" cult, even on page 17 (can't imagine page 1 :lol:).
 
"Isn't that what most people generally do? I posted a comment earlier that just said "Mac > PC" and it got lots of negative votes from the "PC" cult, even on page 17 (can't imagine page 1 :lol:)."

Yes it is, I merely stated that I don't like it, nor have I given any negative votes to anyone. It is fun to hear what other people have to say about a subject like this, even if it is just "Mac>PC" :)
 
This article fails miserably in the price comparision (something that THG used to excell at).

You need just ONE pc that is either cheaper offering the same hardware, or the same price offering better hardware, to confirm that Macs are overprized. Just one. The reason? if there is just one combination of hardware parts that give you more (performance) for less ($) it is enough to prove that Macs are overprized.

The thing is though, that there's not just one, but literally hundreds of hardware combinations that will blow appart your arguement that Macs are priced similarly to PCs. I'd even say that MOST of those combinations can easily hit the 50% cheaper-than-a-mac mark with equivalent hardware, and in some cases even better hardware.

You on the other hand, just proved that if you try very hard, you can buy a PC (or a laptop) as expensive as a Mac with similar hardware. Congrats.

Appart from the cases (which I admit, most Mac cases look great and some are even well designed inside to help with the cooling), there is nothing that justifies the extra price, so in the end you are just paying more for the apple logo.

Having said this, there are lots of different pc cases that will cool your PC just as good (or even better) for waaaaaaaay less money. The looks? that's personal preference...

Overall 1/10 for a pointless article
 
Well if you go through the first few pages and look at the ratings, it's pretty easy to see that most of the comments are from the "PC", or rather, "Windows" cult. The fanboys come out in force on here. The UK site seems to a little more civil, and doesn't have so much of a pack mentality.
 
I once tried to outprice a mac. What happened was this: The video card the motherboard, the cpu, the ram, the monitor, the keyboard and mouse, all totalled up to roughly 50% of the total cost of the mac. Then i had to add all the really sh-ty things that i would never use, like webcam, microphone, bluetooth, etc. and the total cost of the system was only about 5% cheaper.

this is because those really tiny novelty and or useless bits really dont have huge competition unlike cpu's monitors video cards and motherboards.

So while you can get excellent prices on the base components to make a beast pc, which will outperform a mac, you end up stuck down with the tiny components that have a 400% markup at the store.

If you know what you want, get a PC. If you want to show off, get a mac.
 
[citation][nom]exiled scotsman[/nom]The author is trying to climb an impossibly steep mountain here on Tom's. Everyone here is a hardware fanboy and can care less about what OS they are running as long as it plays the latest games at high FPS and and gives them their useless 3dmarks scores. or ego-boosting float@home points. I know, I'm one of them. I love my hardware. I love building game crushing systems and do it without spending too much $$. Com on, thats half the fun anyway![/citation]

I call bull. I play a couple of games, All of which can be played on a Mac using Wine (I play them on FreeBSD using Wine). All of them can also run well on 3-4 year old PC hardware in pretty much any windows but Vista. There are plenty of people here, like me, who's primary concern is stability.

Just because you are one of them doesn't mean everyone is like you.

[citation][nom]But I also own a mac that I use as a programming/media/productivity/server administration machine and I love the hell out of it. OS X is fast, modern, and pretty to look at.[/citation]

I'll disagree with the 'pretty'. But that's an oppinion, and everyone is entitled to their own.

Also, I do all of those tasks on Windows and FreeBSD without an issue. It's not hard to keep a windows machine stable and secure. You just need more self control than with other OSes

[citation][nom]I have the power of the *nix terminal at my finger tips which I use to SSH into a Arch linux server for quick and dirty command line love. Built-in VNC that is a snap to use. I hate to do a comparison like this, but OS X is like a super polished linux distro running on a BSD-Mach kernel sans the extensive customizability.[/citation]

As much as I dislike OS X, I wouldn't compare it to Linux, nowhere near the headache.

[citation][nom]I understand why the author wrote this article. The instant, personal flaming of anything mac is a little ridiculous. He felt he needed to defend his new platform discovery. The poor guy even acknowledge the short comings of the platform and where it needed to improve before it could be consider a hardware enthusiast platform. Yet, some commenters still reiterated the same all crap.[/citation]

He also put advanatages where there were none, or at least removed disadvanatages that were there. That's why he's being flamed to hell and back.

[citation][nom]I know macs are an extremely poor choice for a gaming machine.[/citation]

Try VMWare Fusion and Wine. That statement isn't really true any more.


Yeah, I've used Macs. I really dislike them, but have used them. I guess I don't see them solving any problems not solved by another system, except consistency (which is important). Aside from the consistency in fair quality, every other problem can be solved elsewhere for cheaper (many examples here in these comments). And for the consistency, you can always go Toshiba on the notebooks.
 
Aside from factual inaccuracies (GPU memory et al), this article is basing its argument on a false comparison which is logically incorrect.

--------

Looking firstly at the laptop comparison:

Proposition 1: Apple product is same price/lower price than XPS/Omen
Proposition 2: XPS/Omen are representative of PCs as a whole.
Conclusion (and I quote): "Macs aren?t "way more" expensive than PCs."

Proposition 2 is clearly erroneous.

Alternatively you can restate it as
Proposition 1: Apple isn't more expensive than XPS/Omen.
Proposition 2: XPS/Omen are aren't more expensive than PCs as a whole.
Conclusion: Apple isn't more expensive than PCs as a whole.

Again, position 2 is clearly erroneous.

--------

Turning to the desktop comparison the logical fallacies are not as egregious but still present:

Proposition 1: The Mac Pro is the same price as the custom build.
Proposition 2 (and I quote): The custom build "is essentially a baseline Mac Pro replicated using the cheapest minimum required components to build".
Conclusion: Macs are not more expensive than PCs.

Proposition 2 is a falsehood, IMHO (unless someone can demonstrate that a $320 PSU counts as "the cheapest minimum required").

Actually apart from that the desktop argument is logically consistent. However in following pages the author builds on this comparison and there is an implicit fallacy:

Proposition 1: Mac Pro is is the same price as the custom build.
Proposition 2: I choose to discount alternative models where a mac hardware is more expensive than a similarly specced custom build.
Conclusion: Mac hardware is not more expensive than PCs.

--------

As a general note to the editor, this article (following so soon after the SSD debacle) has severely damaged my confidence in this site. To sum up:

Proposition 1: I read articles on Toms Hardware because I want information ("tell me something I didn't know") and insight ("explain something I couldn't have figured out myself").
Proposition 2: Recent articles on Toms Hardware (this one and the SSD debacle earlier) display neither of these. In fact they misinform and display clear logical errors.
Conclusion: Why should I read Toms Hardware.

Kind regards

Jon Tseng
 
Here you have it.

All these comments confirm why so many myths continue to abound about Macs.

The anti-Apple-Taliban are so ridiculously dismissive that they have blinded themselves.

 
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