Letters to the Editor
Bill Owen
Published Letters: 510 Editor's Choice: 6
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Once and for all, proof that God does not exist
[Read the article: Once and for all, proof that Macs are cheaper than PCs]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is Farhad power tripping here or does he really think that his short, almost nonsensical, and extremely limited analysis going to "prove" anything?
Others have pointed out that resale value is not the main determiner of cost. I used to own an iBook whose logic board failed just two weeks outside of warranty. After Apple refused to repair it, (reasonable enough I suppose) I did some research and discovered that there were many many people whose logic boards had failed in exactly the same manner. I also discovered that some of these people had had their logic boards replaced as many as 5 times! The reason? Apple was aware that the logic boards had a design flaw but rather than issuing a recall was simply keeping quiet and replacing the boards as they failed. But of course no luck for people like me who were outside of warranty.
To make a long long story short, I started working with another guy and we mounted a media campaign, started a class action and eventually I got a call from an Apple VP who told me that Apple would be issuing a worldwide 3 year warranty extension. They then "fixed" my iBook with yet another faulty logic board, which then failed again one year later. More on the story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibook
Never mind that $1500. machine was really really really slow (they told me I should buy more than 512 meg memory) and that the mouse, which is one of the main ways we communicate with the machine, only had one button (it's a bug - not a feature). Forget the fact that everything I did had to be converted to something else so I could talk to the rest of the world (yes, I could buy more translator software = < $$$$). Don't factor in the several hundred hours I spent working on the project to get Apple to "think different". No, just consider that if I had sold the iBook after one year (and moved all my files, added my extra software, plug-ins, extensions, copied my email et al) I could have gotten more money than if I had an ugh, Wintel machine. Of course, the fact that the generic Wintel machine I bought at the same time, is still working fine after 4 years, is meaningless in terms of Farhad's analysis. It's the resale value stupid.
Expensive software, limited interoperability out of the box, high cost of repair, very expensive peripherals, memory etc, all add up, literally to a much higher TCO for an Apple machine. But hey, it's "worth" more because it's really pretty and people will think you are cool. No, they won't.
So according to Farhad's analysis, the hundreds of hours of work to get it fixed, and the one year of waiting and waiting for a slooooooow machine to do some work so I could get paid added nothing to my TCO. No, it did, and it was ridiculously high.
Farhad is correct on one point though, I should have sold it and bought an easily upgradeable, works the way I want it to, PC, after one year.
And Farhad, a machine with a 250 gig HD is useful, while one with an 80 gig HD is almost useless for people like me who do multimedia (which is what Apple is supposed to be better at, but are not anymore) and 512 vs 2 freaking gigs of memory is a major difference, in that memory, rather than processor speed, is one of the biggest determiners of raw system speed - which some of us who use computers for work consider a big factor in determining TCO. So equating an anemic, underpowered Apple system to an adequate Wintel system is not even a fair comparison to begin with.
Need I add I just bought a very nice 4 gig MP3 player that was much cheaper than an iPod and still plays MP3's all without the virus-like iTunes sucking up resources on my system? What's my TCO on that?
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Farhad's Not Stupid
[Read the article: Once and for all, proof that Macs are cheaper than PCs]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Even though his mind is clouded by the pretty lights on his "complimentary" Apple Cinema display, he was very clever in starting a skirmish in the never-ending Apple vs PC debate. Someone can correct me, but I don't recall any of his articles generating so many comments.
I just got a big reminder of why I don't like Apple anymore (used to). I went to their site to research the new iTouch, which actually looks pretty cool. There was video of course, but it quickly turned into an iTunes commercial with a long boring diatribe on exactly how to buy music. So I thought I would fast forward through that. I could not. No fast forward. I had to watch. Steve says! Okay, so I will just turn down the sound. No volume control either. Then it froze. Isn't that impossible or something? Oh sorry, must have been my PC.
That experience brought back all those wasted hours on my iBook, you know the one with the faulty logic boards... doing it "different", which in applespeak means one way, their way, with a one button mouse. Steve says.