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• Wednesday, November 7, 2007 06:26 PM

  An amazing culture of denial

  The many comments I've read by (assumed) Windows users have some good points about the false malware argument, and about current reselling being such a small niche market (in fact, Macs are a lot like BMWs there - the parts are worth even more than the whole). But the denial about the economics are patently wrong.

  First, except for bargain basement crap, Apple is priced almost identically to Windows PCs. And have been for about 5 years. No, you can't get a Mac for 500 bucks, but those El Cheapo's are not really a "computer" by today's standards, they're just Internet terminals. And that's all my 80-year old mother needs, so I bought her one, not a used Mac (warranty/support was important). But if you want anything that does more than surf and email, you're looking at $900, including a decent monitor. And those PCs are roughly comparable to a Mac mini, which costs about $900 with a decent monitor. And it matches, feature for feature, spec for spec, right up the line - except as you get more demanding you may have to pay extra for an OS (Vista's many iterations) that meets your demands.

  But here's the real economy that the Windows PC crowd misses: A WinPC needs to be replaced about every 2 or 3 years. Not because there's any Spyware proiblems, but because the demands of newer software and peripherals outstrip the machine. Each version gets more bloated, more resource intensive, and less collaborative with older software and hardware. In order to keep your apps from bogging down you have to replace the system. Apples last 5 or 6 years before they can no longer support applications. Photoshop 9 works just as well as Photoshop 6. Same for Filemaker 8.5 and 6. iLife,mail, even OS X. 10.5 (Leopard) works just as well on my 4+ year old PowerBook as did the 10.2 it came with.

  So even if I don't calculate resale into the cost of my computer, if I replace it this Christmas it will have cost me about $400 a year. But the comparable Dell notebook I decided not to buy and likely replaced two years ago would have cost $700 a year. Even if I kept it, I'd have had to replace it early this year to run Vista, and it would have cost $500 a year.

  Maybe this explains why, going all the way back to the very first comment, Humanities majors are so relatively poor. Spending the extra $100 on the Mac would have saved you from spending another $1000 before your 4th year. You'd still have - and be very happy with - your Apple Mac. There's a real crash course in Economics that everyone (even Sociology majors!) can understand

  —imajoebob Read imajoebob's other letters
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