At What Cost Frugality?

Microsoft has been running advertisements that lead one to believe that Macintosh computers are overpriced, with the subtext that you're paying extra for "cool", not for any tangible benefit. This is not intended to be another salvo in the Mac vs. PC "war". If you feel that a PC does what you want it to, the way you want it to, then more power, my friend, more power. I'm not trying to convince you otherwise. No, this is merely a response to the dual claims that Macs are overpriced and offer no advantage over PCs but a brand name - both of which are largely a matter of opinion, but often supported by fallacious "facts".

For instance, I've heard many, many people describe the Mac Pro as a "[insert high dollar number here] machine that I could [buy/build] for [insert some ridiculously low number no larger than half of the first number here]". A little bit of research on the web shows this claim to be absolutely fallacious. The fact is that the entry level Mac Pro (at the time of this writing) is around $3300. That's an eight core Xeon with 6 GB of RAM. If you go to a random computer site - take, say, Dell.com - and spec out a comparable machine - say, the Precision Workstation - you find that with half the processors and a much lower quality case, you pay $3000. Now, Dell runs on a very slim profit margin. I've found in the past that I can only beat Dell's price by about 10-20% when I build my own PC from components, and that usually vanishes if I buy a legitimate copy of Windows. That means if you spec out the Precision workstation, you should come in somewhere between $2400 and $2700 for the Dell specs. I'm imagining you'll have to pay more to get dual quad cores instead of a single.

When people compare Apple laptops to "PC" laptops (Macs are actually PCs, too; they mean "Computers Designed to Run Windows" - which they are, even if you put Linux on them) they invariably compare them to the bottom of the line Dells and HPs that you can get for a song and a few bucks. This is an absolutely ridiculous comparison. The Apple machines are better built in ever aspect. Pick up any unibody Macbook and tell me it feels similar to picking up one of those cheap plastic "PCs". It doesn't. In fact, even when you compare it to machines that have the same kind of target demographic (the Vaios, Adamos, etc) it comes out rather well on price comparisons. Apple just doesn't compete in the cheap-as-you-can-make-it market.

None of these things take into account the "intangibles" of the Apple ecology. As a former PC user who spent YEARS building my own boxen, and was once one of those "Apple is overpriced" complainers, I can tell you that I was wrong. In a twist on a popular phrase, "PCs are cheaper than Macs only if your time is worthless." Since I've switched to Macs I spend much, much more time using my computer, and a lot less time getting it to work. I no longer have to deal with bus contention or incompatible upgrades or ... well, you get the idea. I buy stuff from Apple, and with very rare exceptions, it just works.

And OSX is a joy to use, by comparison. No, of course it wasn't when I first switched. I switched initially because Apple did what all of us Linux "zealots" had been trying to do for years - made Unix "Desktop Ready". I loved working in Linux, but the applications I wanted to use - audio recording and production, video editing, photo editing - just didn't "live up" to their Windows counterparts. Apple just did it, in one fell swoop, and that changed everything for me. I can pop up a terminal and I'm in bash! OSX ships with many useful scripting languages (not batch files) built in - you can write perl, bash, or phython on your Mac from the time you power it on. You can ssh to another *nix server without installing additional software. You can grep files, tr them, pipe them to sed or awk - the whole package. I no longer have to put Cygwin on my laptop just so I can have a functional command line.

And it runs Photoshop. And Lightroom. And Final Cut Express. And Ableton. And Tracktion. And Microsoft Office (ick). And ... the list goes on. Plus, it ships with iLife - iPhoto, Garage Band, iMovie - these are apps that just don't exist for Linux or Windows.

Maybe none of this is attractive to you, or you don't feel that it justifies the premium computer price. Great, I dig it. But be sure that your "facts" reflect reality; the price difference isn't between "PCs and Macs", it's between "Premium computers" and "cheap computers". And the Mac OS offers many very real benefits to many people.