The Apple Mac Cost Misconception

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until now I was just lurking on tom's site... but this article just kicks me to write something. as an old mac evangelist (started out with the original mac II) I always loved to preach to people about the mac advantages and sold a ton of them to (still) happy users. well, that was up until stevo decided to jump ship and to roll up the pirate flag above cupertino and go full mainstream/lifestyle. looks like the ipod success really did it for jobso and all the undecided fan-bois. nowadays everybody has his head so far up steve job's ass that I really wonder how they breathe. the fan-bois flocked so fast to apple that I guess some must have experienced a whiplash while turning their heads the other way. I would rather be back in the old days when the PC guys just smiled at us for being a curious little group of enthusiasts. at least I had a good reason for defending apple; then. but today!? not really. quality, service, innovation, all of it went down the drain and still there is more cheering than ever before. try to be a bit critical on a mac site and you will be bashed for it in a way that you were only used to by those famous troll-sites. don't get me wrong, I still only use OS X privately but I am also happy with my windows machines at work; but I would not bash any windows user for using vista or having a bang out of his SLI super graphic system. but those new fans should be aware that mac today is just using the same hardware from intel as any other manufacturer in the field. sure it is nicely designed and the OS X just works (mostly) flawlessly with the hardware, but the hardware itself is the SAME as any other, but with a, according to my book, unjustified price premium (and sorry, but ilife does not justify the price either - in fact to mention this is kinda silly as you can get freeware that does more than ilife). anyways, just wanted to mention from somebody who worked long enough with apple in the consumer market that the price is ALWAYS higher than that of a similar PC!
 
Tom's should check out the specs for the Mac Pro competitor this nut picked out. I know you are trying to say you just bought equal components but i'd have to disagree. Are you seriously telling me that the mac pro has a $320, 1000w PSU in there? BS! they probably use $15 PSUs like most of the other PC brands out there, you could have put a hx620w in there to run that and saved $200. Also, as many have mentioned, use the OEM version of windows... last i checked Mac didn't supply you with the privilege of an install dvd to transfer it to other machines (could be wrong but i doubt it). Good to see you bought the most expensive motherboard you could find too; because this clearly reflects the same hardware a in the mac pro... well, maybe if it were a couple years old and didn't have a SB. The keyboard is also a joke. You guys should paste that into the newegg search and check out that $40 gem. Tuan's great taste in keyboards clearly reflects that of the mac pro... he can even be the first to review it! As for the ram... FB ram? seriously? Can somebody explain why on earth that is actually necessary? And one more thing, the mac pro is hardly a full tower! Is it even really made out of aluminum or just silver plastic? $230 is pretty steep for a case... a better comparison would be the silver antec p180 mid tower... for $134.

Anyways... i guess you just have too many choices with pc... it can get confusing. What really would be cool is getting a mac pro and evaluating all the components to see exactly what they are and how good they are. Then run some benchmarks against a truly similar PC and see how they do... if only you could run any of the benchmarks on the mac.

do away with this thread! it's crap and I can't stop reading it, laughing, and shooting coffee out my nose!
 
Mac Pro + 8GB RAM + 4x1TB drives = $5,949.00 in the US store. (www.apple.com)
Same machine in an European apple store = €5.169,00 (www.apple.be)
Current exhange rate for € to $ = 1.548
That brings the European version to a whopping $8001.612

That's where I got my figures. So it seems the problem is even worse outside the US because Apple thinks that $1 = €1.
Macs are overpriced in the US imho but in the EU Apple seems to think it can ask for your left arm.

Your Newegg config wont even work. You are trying to put an LGA775 CPU in an LGA771 socket. (X3360 = LGA775 and MBD-X7DWE-O = LGA771) Wich tells me you don't have much experience putting together machines from scratch.

Now let's configure this box you claim can't be done for less than €3000:
Tyan Tempest I5400PW (S5397) = €348
2x Intel Xeon E5420 = 2x €280
2x 4GB Kingston PC6400 FB-DIMM = 2x €157
Asus ENGTX280 = €362
4x Samsung F1 1TB = 4x €117
NEC AD-7200 SATA Silver = €20
Thermaltake Toughpower 1KW = €252
Lian Li V2010A Silver = €241
Logitech Desktop EX110 Cordless = €29
MS Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 x64 = €148
Assembly and 3 year warranty = €85
Shipping to NL/BE = €10

Total cost: €2837 (Or $4392)

And I didn't even bother to go pricehunting, these figures came from one webshop. (http://sallandautomatisering.nl/)
Your move, fanboy. 😛
 
When I price out a Mac Pro there's no way I can get the price within my budget. In a vain attempt to save money I must select the cheapest configuration with the intention of then buying more reasonably priced hardware on Newegg. So the cheapest Mac Pro is about $2379 ($400 over my budget). Then add another $150 for a better video card, $100 for RAM, and $200 for Vista and the price jumps to nearly $2800. Compare that to a Prelude system from Maingear.com which is where I purchased my current pc. At Maingear I can get what I want AND NEED for LESS than $2000. True, the specs aren't the same but it is within my budget AND it's insanely better than system I currently own. Isn't that what most people really want? A new and faster system that stays within their budget. Considering that any kick-ass system will soon be obsolete I can be very content to simply get something affordable that is better than what I have. I like the idea of owning a Mac but the extra money I save by going PC means a lot to my 7-month-old son... and my wife. :)
 
To those who quoted me and said he had not the time to respond to "500+ comments" On the first page when he was responding to comments he literally pick and chose specific ones, usually people with poor grammar or spelling.
 
All I want to say is that the biggest misconception here is in the article.

As pointed out by everyone who commented, there is just too much left out.
 
[citation][nom]decoppel[/nom]On the first page when he was responding to comments he literally pick and chose specific ones, usually people with poor grammar or spelling.[/citation]Uhh thanks? Note that English is not my native language.

The point I tried to make was that a Mac was way more overpriced. Not a little but surreal overpriced. If you cut the 1KW PSU and Lian Li case from the config I just posted you could take of another $300 or so. I just went with those parts because that's what the author used in his article.
 
[citation][nom]VTOLfreak[/nom]Uhh thanks? Note that English is not my native language.The point I tried to make was that a Mac was way more overpriced. Not a little but surreal overpriced. If you cut the 1KW PSU and Lian Li case from the config I just posted you could take of another $300 or so. I just went with those parts because that's what the author used in his article.[/citation]

I wasn't calling you out with my post or insulting you, merely stating what Tuan was doing.
 
[citation][nom]decoppel[/nom]I wasn't calling you out with my post or insulting you, merely stating what Tuan was doing.[/citation]Relax I was joking. But you are right however, it is pretty bad that an author on THG has to resort to these tactics to defend his article.
 
What's with all these Mac articles lately? Bottom line: I have used a Mac with a core2duo at work for 2 years. I am a graphic designer. I have a core2duo PC at home w/ Vista that I built myself for half the price. The two machines are comparable aside from the OS.

The Mac crashes constantly even with updates. If I browse the web for more than ten minutes (Safari OR Firefox..doesn't matter) it crashes for no apparent reason. If I try to open Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time, it crashes. I sometimes watch that damn spinning pinwheel for 5 minutes before I force quit the app. Sometimes I try to quit an app normally and it hangs, FORCING me to force quit the app. Years before I used a high-end mac at college and it was just as bad.

The OS is shoddy. This is my opinion, based on first hand experience, not pro-PC propaganda. Macs are barely good for running your ipod.
 
I don't know if anyone pointed this out but I'm not reading 28 pages of comments.

The Macbook Pro comparison for one is a SERVER platform. Server components are overpriced and the markups are much greater than more common desktop parts. For one you quoted 2 Xeon YORKFIELD processors which are LGA775 for a LGA771 motherboard. There is no dual CPU yorkfield motherboard. Switching to 2 harpertown processors would add $320 to the PC quote. However, to be fair you overspecced the powersupply by quite a bit as a 1000 powersupply is overkill for this machine. A simple Thermaltake RX W0144RU 600W PS would more than handle this build and cost $195 less. Also the Supermicro board includes raid which is an $800 option. You also include sound cards and firewire addons for a server board? Why pay for things you don't need?

Final point is I come to Tom's hardware to read about PC technologies and reviews not get more Mac propoganda shoved down my throat. There are thousands of sites pushing the Mac agenda out there if I cared to read them. Please stick to the topics that the vast majority of Tom's Hardware community appreciates and leave your Mac at home.
 
This is one of the most devious comparisons I've ever read. Very droll.

What If I would say to you I've built the equivalent of a 1500 UUSD IMac with PC parts for around 700 USD AND run OS-X 10.5.4. It has a 2.2 Ghz core duo, 2GB ram, a 500 MB HD and a DVD-R (and obviously a KB, mouse and monitor, netwrk, etc).

Would this not yield a better comparison ?

Peter R.
 
[citation][nom]hixbot[/nom]Wow, you took a PC desktop with identical hardware and proved that it would cost the same as the baseline Mac Pro.What's the point? You can build a PC with hardware that isn't identical but PERFORMS better for CHEAPER. Picking the same overpriced PC components doesnt prove anything.[/citation]

My thoughts exactly. Plus, how many users are going to utilize the full hardware potential that comes with a $2000+ Apple device especially when it is not a laptop?

Normally, when you hear someone is going to put $1000 into building a computer, they are building it for two reasons:

1. Gaming (which you really can't do on MAC)
2. Tinkering with coding and databases.

Yeah, you could spend $2000+ on a MAC system to do heavy coding but why when you can get the same performance from a $1000 IBM compatible PC?

The consumer market for PC parts (non-apple) is geared for meeting their needs and gives them the ability to take what they have and build on it where as Apple limits everyone except their high-end Mac Pro which has a starting price of $2799 and has the hardware equivalent of a server.

What normal consumer needs a server to begin with?

If you want a true comparison, don't match hardware to hardware, match performance to performance at stock.

Also, the next time you match prices for machines built by retailers, go with a company that doesn't charge an arm and a leg for a PC. Voodoo PC's prices are some of the highest of have ever seen in the retailer market.
 
There's no way to convince people of this.
People will always compare Macs to computers they picked, based on their preferences, say one without bluetooth or a thicker one. That's because Apple makes so few models. Of course it's unfair to compare a Mac against a less-well equiped computer that works "well enough". But from the perspective of a user that only needs such a computer it's perfectly reasonable, because that one Mac is the closest match available.

So really, when a Mac has exactly the package you want, the price premium is surprisingly small. But for everyone else, Macs appear very expensive, because one size just doesn't fit all. So the real complaint should be that there are is such a small selection, not that the prices are outrageous. (For instance people are forced to compare to the Mac Pro, because there simply is no xMac.)

Of course, RAM prices are outrageous. But so are Windows prices, if you're buying them from Microsoft. There are plenty of places you can buy Macs that include cheaper RAM.

Also, Apple doesn't discount old products near their end-of-life. But you can get old ones cheaper at a lot of places when new ones come out. Nobody ever uses these prices on the Apple side of a comparision, though.

One really has to wonder, though, why so many people (a lot of which don't even buy them) rant about Mac prices. If any other company released an allegedly overpriced product, people just wouldn't care...
(I can half-way understand Mac people's desire to "defend" the prices. After all they're often accused of paying extra for "wanting to be cool". Seriously. Can we, as a society, move on?)

By the way, I bought another MBP recently. I did because I got a decent student rebate, because MagSafe saved my ass more than once, because I hate glossy displays and because I'm addicted to two finger scrolling. I'm not ashamed to admit I could have payed a lot less. But since I spend so much time with computers, I don't regret the investment. And I certainly don't blame anyone for having different priorities.
 
I just found a nice deal on a PC from a reputable online retailer for $299.99. Here are the specs:

XFX MG-63MI-7109 Socket 775 Barebones Kit - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz OEM, Crucial 2048MB PC5400 DDR2, ATX Mid Tower Case, 600watt Power Supply

Yes, it doesn't come with a hard drive but I can get a 500GB hard drive for 69.99

The Apple equivalent is the Mac MINI with only a 120GB hard drive for $899.00.

Now, you tell me which of these two devices the every-day consumer should buy to do normal every day things like check email, use a word processing program, cruise the internet, talk to people via instant messaging programs, and maybe look at some photos.

If you do try to tell me which one and why, please remember to attempt to justify why someone should fork out an additional $530 for a device that does the same thing as the more economical equivalent if you choose to justify the apple device.
 
Up to this point, I've been picking on the article with flaws it's had.

A couple ponits users have missed

(1) Gaming on a Mac - Parallels and Wine can get most games running just fine (I know about wine, Parallels is second hand info, but some versions have good DriectX support).

(2) Mice. You can use a standard USB mouse on a Mac. I know a person who ditched the apple mouse for a Logictech MX518. All 8 buttons + scrollwheel of the wonderful little critter. And Macs have had shipped (or at least had the option to ship) with two button mice since '03 or '04. These mice also have a scroll whell on them that lets you scroll vertically and horizontally.

There's plenty to be critical about with a Mac. You don't need to use misinformation to do so.
 
[citation][nom]sjss[/nom]Up to this point, I've been picking on the article with flaws it's had.A couple ponits users have missed(1) Gaming on a Mac - Parallels and Wine can get most games running just fine (I know about wine, Parallels is second hand info, but some versions have good DriectX support)[/citation]

Most people wanting to game don't want to deal with such hassles. They want to play right out of the box. A Mac system should be no different, but of course the library of native Mac games is very small to PC options. Having to use an emulator or additional software to play a PC game just complicates what should be a simple straight forward activity.
 
[citation][nom]Ghostronix[/nom]What's with all these Mac articles lately? Bottom line: I have used a Mac with a core2duo at work for 2 years. I am a graphic designer. I have a core2duo PC at home w/ Vista that I built myself for half the price. The two machines are comparable aside from the OS. The Mac crashes constantly even with updates. If I browse the web for more than ten minutes (Safari OR Firefox..doesn't matter) it crashes for no apparent reason. If I try to open Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time, it crashes. I sometimes watch that damn spinning pinwheel for 5 minutes before I force quit the app. Sometimes I try to quit an app normally and it hangs, FORCING me to force quit the app. Years before I used a high-end mac at college and it was just as bad. The OS is shoddy. This is my opinion, based on first hand experience, not pro-PC propaganda. Macs are barely good for running your ipod.[/citation]

Sounds like you have a harsh work environment :)

Macs are unportable iPods

 
Everyone comparing Macbook Pros to HP's and Dell's are forgetting the fact that:

1. HP and Dell are the shoddiest, cheapest, poorest manufacturers on the planet.
2. The Mac is much thinner, which raises the cost.
3. Vista is crap and XP is obsolete.
 
[citation][nom]Nikki18[/nom]Everyone comparing Macbook Pros to HP's and Dell's are forgetting the fact that:1. HP and Dell are the shoddiest, cheapest, poorest manufacturers on the planet.2. The Mac is much thinner, which raises the cost.3. Vista is crap and XP is obsolete.[/citation]

Depends on your definition of cheapest, because IMO OVER pricing everything to increase profits is cheap to me.
 
[citation][nom]sjss[/nom]Gaming on a Mac - Parallels and Wine can get most games running just fine (I know about wine, Parallels is second hand info, but some versions have good DriectX support)..[/citation]

Dont be a retard, wine still cant play anything worth mentioning. Crysis ? forget... Bioshock? forget... GRID, Carbon, Flight Sim 2k8, etc... etc...

I was playing GTA1 the other day (its now a free download from rockstar) and even that 10yr old game with dx6 graphics caused my box to lockup using wine.

Dont flaunt wine in here. Its a POS and is not a solution to gaming on non-windows boxes.
 
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