How you use your student loans is up to you. I know of students who have grabbed their cheque and turned around andinvested it - then cashed out when they graduated - turning a profit. {One of my Poli-sci profs actually advised this). In 1995 i used my loan to buy outright a Mac PowerBook which i used 'til i graduated in '98, and then i continued to use it productively after that.

{I'm a geek, so i drove it into the ground. I still have it on the charger and the batteries are still good too. I turn it on once a month, smile, and run the batteries down. Hey, i'm a geek. ;-}

If for some reason you can't get the cache money together, every computer company and their sister will extend credit on easy terms. The price tag is no obstacle. Pay attention! The resale value is important. I type this on my 2 year old Aluminium 12" PowerBook. Its street price is still a Grand! It doesn't feel like an old machine yet (i got some extras, and maintenance matters too).

Of course, i'm still going to run it into the ground. ;-)

Apple is a hardware company, not a software company. Tragically, people 'use' software, and the hardware is irrelevant.

Examples:

1) I bought my four year old a mac Mini core solo for his birthday when they first came out. He loved it as he'd been using an old G3 and the games he favored ran pitifully slow. Unfortunately, a game he wanted to use, no longer ran with the intel achitecture... but since the disk was MacWin, and I had an old copy of XP laying about I installed bootcamp, and the windows version worked wonderfully... until it hit a brick wall with some goofy problem with the video card they put in it not being entirely compatible with XP (this has actually been a recuring problem).

2) I recently bought him a brand new game, featuring a pixar created rat. When I tried to get it to run in Mac, the installer said, "you aren't using a core duo... this machine isn't capable of playing the game..." and it REFUSED to install. I rebooted in Windows, and installed the game it seems to be working flawlessly (although the goofy vidcard problem has yet to rear it's ugly head).

The two point I site underscore why apple suck: THEY WANT YOU TO BUY NEW HARDWARE... Sure they give you fancy softare to run on it, and it works well at first, but if you want to keep the machine for a few years, because, well it's wastefull to encourage them to keep making more when there isn't a realistic need to do so... you're out of luck, as Apple, by it's nature wants you to consume more of its products reguardless of whether or not you need or want more.

For Christmas this year, I'm getting the boy a wintel/linux box. !@#4 apple.

5 year plan, buy $1000, assume it is worthless in the end (recycle or donate):

$1000

5 year plan--buy for $1000 every year, sell for $400

Year 1: $1000

Year 2: $1000 - $400

Year 3: $1000 - $400

Year 4: $1000 - $400

Year 5: $1000 - $400

= $3400

One could also factor in the opportunity cost of not investing the money you could have saved every year by not buying a new computer every year.

I don't think it matters what you buy--just don't buy a new one every year. It will cost you more is bad for the environment.

I won't go into tips on how to make a computer last-there are lots out there--you shouldn't see any major performance degradation over 5 years if you are smart.

Not very helpful, is it? Used MACs are way more expensive than used PCs, as the examples given in the article illustrate.

Unfortunately, your resale argument doesn't apply to me. I run a household network with a collection of PCs of various ages. I don't resell my computers; I move them down the food chain to lesser uses. Eventually the oldest, slowest ones fall off the end of the chain -- but by then, their resale value is zero, or close enough to zero so as not to matter.

At the top of the chain, some of the computers run Windows, because I have some applications that require it. All the rest, the servers that keep the network running, use Linux.

I have a stack of what is at this point probably more than a thousand dollars worth of computer games which I do still sort through, re-install and play on a regular basis. None of them will work on a Mac. I also have a Big Fish Games membership... which doesn't apply to Mac games. I already paid for Microsoft Office '03, and have no reason to upgrade again anytime soon; I'd have to buy Office all over again for a Mac or learn a new program when I rather like this one.

So for all practical purposes, a new Mac is going to cost me a *lot* more than a new PC, because none of my old stuff will work on it. Then let's add in the fact that most of us don't get new PCs every year, and a significant number of people that I know just use them until they die, which means I know people who still haven't upgraded to Windows XP. (And, of course, I've been the one to do repairs on their machines... which I don't think anybody could have done for a Mac.) A dead machine of either brand has no resale value.

I don't have a spyware problem. I haven't had a virus for about ten years at this point, and the last one was a result of my own stupidity in the days before my family realized we needed a (free) antivirus program. I've doubled the memory in my desktop since I got it, and while the processor is a little sluggish these days, I could upgrade that, too, if I had the cash. Considering the articles I've read on just how much pollution is caused by continually buying new computers instead of upgrading, that's important to me.

And now let's throw in that I've used OSX and I don't like it. It is definitely not as multitasking-friendly as Windows or Linux. It's gorgeous, but I don't need my operating system to be gorgeous. (The only reason I finally switched to XP style is because for some reason on Classic, a two-high taskbar tells me the time and the *day* but not the date, and that annoys the piss out of me. In XP it does both.) 'Form', in this case, does not trump 'function'.

So, yeah, why should I bother again?