Article:  |
WWDC: Apple Reveals Its Path | |
| Subject: | Apple vs MS and Wintel box makers | |
| Date: | 2003-07-05 19:08:38 | |
| From: | anonymous2 | |
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Response to: Apple vs MS and Wintel box makers
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Subtract the difference in cost between a Mac with OS X and a Dell running Windows and you'll understand how much some people value, and more particularly, are willing to pay for "style". The emphasis is on 'some' because many more people are simply more interested in the basic functionality ("good enough") of a commodity PC at a minimal cost. The difference between "designer jeans" and Walmart blue jeans if you will. (Macintosh machines also seem to go out-of-style rather quickly with each new design "innovation" - being a consumer at the leading edge of Apple hardware/sofware products is a costly proposition ...)
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Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.
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Apple vs MS and Wintel box makers
2003-07-06 11:31:08 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
You obviously don't get it.
Apple not only has better style, but also more functionalities, and is actually cheaper than Dell - at least in the long run.
All Mac models (including the $799 eMac and the $999 iBook) are of high quality and come with virtually everything that most people ever want, a cheap Dell most likely requires lots of costly updates over time. Up till now, the only thing that the Wintel platform is good at is the raw CPU speed, but that advantage has just been destroyed by the G5. Now the dual 2 GHz G5 Power Mac costs only $3000, and the dual 3 GHz Xeon Dell is $4000, there is really no reason for anyone to prefer Dell to Apple other than out of prejudice or ignorance.
And don't forget that Macs do last much longer than Wintel PCs. I bought my 400 MHz iMac about 4 years ago for £1000, and my boss paid £1500 for a 600 MHz P3 Dell. While my iMac has USB, FireWire and wireless, none of which were available to his Dell at the time. Over the years, the only thing I added to the iMac was 512 MB RAM, and it feels as good as a new machine and gets faster with each new version of Mac OS X, while he had spent lots of money on a new CPU, new hard drive, new GPU, and a few other things, but the machine was still a crappy old Dell and eventually ended up in his garage last year when he bough a new computer.
With the combination of Mac OS X and the G5, there is really nothing that can prevent Apple from gaining more market share, particularly within the geek community. Apparently, 50% of laptops in JavaOne 2003 were Apple PowerBooks, and mostly the old Titanium models. Can you imagine how many people would buy G5 PowerBooks?
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Apple vs MS and Wintel box makers
2003-07-09 05:53:12 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
Ouch! I happen to own both a G4 12" PowerBook and Dell Precision P4 tower. Both weren't cheap and both are great machines. Pitted against each other, they've required the same updates.
I think Apple's to Apple's (no pun intended) Macs are a little more costly; however, as the models scale up the price level flattens. The G5's are very competatively priced with Dell's line of Xeon workstation (e.g., precisions).
To me Apple's appeal is the versitility I get out of the box. An out of the box Mac has Java, Pearl and Apache ready to go. A little DL time, and I've got a free set of dev tools (versus 600 smacsk for .net studio). To be fair, I think MS supports Visual Studio more vigiriously than Apple supports its own suite - that is just my perspective.
I vote for better products, not necessarily cheapest. My first Mac was in operation for over 10 years, nearly 24/7. Not bad for my original investment. ;)