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• The Apple Mac Cost Misconception

  Note: This isn’t a guide to evangelize and convert people from Windows to Mac OS X. It’s a guide to give people options. If you’re happy with what you’ve got, great! But if you’re interested in alternatives read on. After my first article on Macs and OS X, there were several readers who just down right bashed Macs for pricing and OS X without solid reasoning or legitimate hand’s on experience of Macs. So this is a follow-up. Let’s get straight to the point. Tom’s Hardware isn’t about being a "PC fanboy." It’s about finding the best hardware, revealing up and coming tech and debunking predetermined notions. That begs the question, especially here: what’s so special about a Mac anyway? Here’s the short answer: nothing really, just some very elegant aluminum chassis designs. The key, is the operating system. Even still, let’s settle this issue about price. In a recent comment, someone came up with an analogy that a Mac isn’t really a BMW, but rather a Hyundai dressed up in a nice exterior. One problem: Hyundai’s don’t have nice European car exteriors. And to generalize it this way shows the lack of willing to understand the core of the Mac: it’s operating system. Because that’s really what it’s about. But for the sake of these first few pages, let’s leave Mac OS X out of the picture for now. Let’s just see where Apple comes in on hardware. In terms of hardware, there’s nothing really special about a Mac aside from elegant designs, be it a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro, that makes it incredibly more worthwhile than the PC equivalent. And there’s no doubt that you can get an equally equipped PC, or build one yourself, for less money. In fact, I mentioned this in my previous article, although some people seemed to have completely missed the page where I complained about Apple’s outrageous prices altogether. However, building a PC to do the same isn’t the point, because you can always buy a cheaper car to get you from A to B. Instead, let’s see what you can get for $2000, from Apple and from others. For $2000, do you really get much less? Let’s take a quick look at some of Apple’s competition and their pricing structure compared to Apple’s: We went to Dell’s website and picked out what Dell indicated was a serious gaming laptop. We also took the XPS model that was priced the same as the baseline MacBook Pro. Let’s take a look at the results. Apple vs. Dell Price Comparison $1999 MacBook Pro$1999 Dell XPS M1730 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo 2 GB of RAM2 GB of Shared RAM NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256 MBNVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT with Shared MB 200 GB HDD200 GB HDD 15.4-inch LED LCD17-inch LCD 1440x9001920x1200 Dual-Layer DVD BurnerDual-Layer DVD Burner 802.11n Wi-Fi802.11g Wi-Fi Bluetooth Built in WebcamBuilt in Webcam Backlit KB with Ambient Sensor        Optical Audio Output/InputSPDIF through Dongle Dual-Link DVI OutputDual-Link DVI Output Remote MagSafe PowerStandard female/male Jack 5.4 lbs10.6 lbs 1 inch thick2 inch thick For the most part, the two systems are comparable, indicating that at least for a laptop, Apple’s pricing fits in line with comparable hardware. Certain things like shared memory for graphics leave some performance desires for the XPS, but the XPS has a strong leg up on the MacBook Pro with the larger screen size. Apple’s MacBook Pro has several small advantages over the XPS, mainly with the MagSafe connector and it’s nearly take-for-granted use. I have seen several incidences where people have tripped over or through someone else’s MacBook Pro power cord and the MagSafe design literally saved the laptops from flying. The biggest differences are the screen size, weight, thickness, and shared memory. For absolute performance, the screen size won’t matter here, but the slow shared graphics memory on the XPS will. For a laptop that Dell indicates is a gaming machine, shared memory is a disappointment, as graphics is an important area for 3D gaming. For another comparison, let’s look at the MacBook Air to VoodooPC’s Envy 133: Apple vs. VoodooPC Price Comparison $1799 MacBook Air$2099 Envy 133 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo 2 GB of Shared RAM2 GB of Shared RAM Intel GMA X3100 Shared RAMIntel GMA X3100 Shared RAM 80 GB ATA HDD80 GB HDD 13.3-inch LED LCD13.3-inch LCD 1280x8001280x800 External eSATA Super Multi Drive 802.11n Wi-Fi802.11n Wi-Fi BluetoothBluetooth Built in WebcamBuilt in Webcam Backlit KB with Ambient SensorBacklit KB with Ambient Sensor DVI OutputHDMI MagSafe PowerStandard female/male Jack 3.0 lbs3.37 lbs (with SSD) 0.16 to 0.75 inch thick0.70 inch thick iLife ’08 SuiteNo software package At this point, the Envy is $300 more expensive than the MacBook Air. Although the Envy 133 does include an external optical drive, tacking on Apple’s quite expensive $99 MacBook Air SuperDrive to the purchase of the MacBook Air still leaves a $200 gap. Bottom line: Macs aren’t "way more" expensive than PCs. So where do things get really hairy with Apple? Upgrades. Apple really stabs you in the face when you’re upgrading your Mac. All goes well when you want to buy a base system, but as soon as you want to add options, be prepared to be murdered. I’ll talk about this later. Let’s take a look at desktops.

• Just as there are the budget-minded Windows buyers who cannot appreciate the extensibility of the platform, there are the fashion-conscious Mac buyers who pick up the latest MacBook or iMac simply because it looks stylish. However, that is not to say that Macs lack any substance. I’ve been computing since 1984, and it’s only recently that Mac OS has become the superstar operating system that it is in 2008. In the Mac OS9 era, there was no true preemptive multitasking support. That means that while you could open multiple applications at any given time, the operating system could not automatically allocate computing resources to each application. Holding the mouse button down, for example, stopped the entire system until you finished your selection. You can be Hiro and even stop time. The transition to Mac OS X was a substantial one. OS X was essentially the next version of NEXTStep, with OS9 emulation and the support of PowerPC. With this new operating system design, attention to proper programming practices was held. Rather than tie the operating system to a single big endian platform, Apple engineers, from day one focused on code that was clean enough to run on x86 processors. Presumably, it wasn’t difficult to port to the ARM processor. Although IBM’s Power architecture offered superb performance in its corporate line up, the PowerG5 CPUs failed to offer the same overall performance ratio that was available from AMD’s and Intel’s CPUs beyond floating point computation. More importantly, the G5 was unworkable as a mobile chip and this meant that the Mac notebook had no ability to compete against the rising talent from Intel’s Haifa design team. Everything’s Changed We can start with the OS X. Like Nvidia during its rapid six-month product cycles, Apple has been exceptionally aggressive in pushing Mac OS further. Non-Mac users may not realize how different OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is in comparison to the original 10.0 (Cheetah). From the original proof-of-concept 10.0, Apple moved quickly, adding a GPU-based window manager/compositor, a journaled file system, and automated backup support, all the while improving overall system performance with each step forward. The hardware has also improved dramatically. The visual effects introduced in OS X, which once made OS X one of the slowest operating systems on the market, are now accelerated by faster and faster GPUs. With the transition to Intel complete, today’s Macs offer the same hardware as a PC. In some cases, Apple is even ahead of the PC world—GeForce 9400M shipped first on Apple. This transition has also allowed better PC compatibility with virtualization.

• Two months ago, I never thought I would become a Mac fan. I had toyed with the idea, but if my Vista PC wasn’t compromised, I’m sure I’d still be a PC guy. But my time with the MacBook changed things. When it comes to my core computing applications: Internet, office productivity, and digital imaging and content creation, the MacBook works beautifully. It’s incredibly stable, extremely responsive, and a pure joy to use. Small touches like Cover Flow for the normal Finder and integrated Canon RAW support bring the extra level of polish that’s lacking from Windows Vista. With the unibody MacBooks adding a final tactile complement to software, it’s hard for me to imagine ever going back to Windows after making the switch on my primary PC. The MacBook itself is a stunning piece of hardware. Starting with the aluminum exterior and wonderfully intuitive multitouch trackpad to digging internally to the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset and careful motherboard design, the MacBook is one of the best notebooks I have used at any price.  Sure, as a techie I’d love to have a higher-quality screen from the MacBook Air, and the backlit keyboard of the 2.4 GHz model, and yes, the addition of FireWire or at the very least an eSATA port would have been welcome. But, the notebook does everything else so well, so efficiently that I still get a smile every time I use my MacBook. I’m not the first PC guy to be impressed by the latest Macs. Our colleagues at Anandtech were pleasantly surprised to see the superior battery life of Mac OS X over Vista and our colleagues at Wired aren’t the only ones to comment on the speed of Mac OS X over even Windows XP. We’re just the first to look into the possibility of performance penalties in running hacked Mac operating systems. Windows Vista is still my platform of choice for home theater PCs and gaming. Windows Media Center still offers a better living room interface than Apple Front Row, and its support for ATSC HDTV makes it must-have in a digital living room. More importantly, I can build Windows Media Center PC of my choice, combining a silent CPU and power supply with a ton of hard drives and multiple ATSC tuners. The Mac doesn’t have anything like Media Center. Plex, the Mac OS X fork of XBMC and Boxee both show a lot of promise, but without the ATSC integration that Windows Media Center offers, it’ll be a while before I even think about leaving Windows Vista behind. The Mac also can’t compete with the PC when it comes to games. While StarCraft 2 will likely be the Mac Game of the Year in 2009, the PC version of Mirror’s Edge already has me itching to rebuild a gaming PC. But I’m waiting to rebuild. In January, Apple is expected to launch a new set of desktops. If these systems offer Core i7 quad-core CPUs, a modern GPU, and arrive at a reasonable price, I’ll be the first to get one to dual boot Vista for games and OS X for everything else. If Apple comes through with a netbook, I’m not sure if I’ll pick one up or not. The MacBook already does what I need in a notebook and the iPhone does everything else I need for extreme portability. An Apple netbook would need eight-hour battery life and full Office 2008 document support for me to make the switch.  Who knows, maybe iWork ’09 will run on ARM?