The price difference between Macs and PCs widens | Hacker News Reader

The price difference between Macs and PCs widens

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49 pointsspydez104 comments

Yes, they're much more expensive. But I think that saying it's the hardware is to miss the point. People don't really think as much about the mac hardare as much as the mac software.

And let's be honest here, smart and educated software engineers go out of their way to buy macs when they definitely have the skills to install and run linux. They could definitely buy a cheaper Windows PC. Unless you want to be utterly derisive and dismissive, you can't simply say, "It's a fashion item."

People are buying macs because they want Mac OS X. Maybe instead of arguing about how "overpriced the hardware is" or "how people love candy coating" people in charge of competing products/projects should look into the reasons why hen you go to a tech conference you see a sea of glowing Apple logos. People there are not stupid, and if you just dismiss their choice as such you're going to miss out on key information.

I agree. There is a great lesson to understand here about pricing and profiting from a premium product offering that customers enjoy.

Definitely. Another thing to note is that apple haven't really done any black magic marketing (though they have done that too) to get their margins up. They simply differentiated effectively. Noone else has in that market so it seems like voodoo. But in most markets (batteries, soap, jeans, cars) you have differentiated brands that command different premiums.

A mac is not comparable to a windows pc (in the minds of many consumers at least). So the get to raise their margins. Dell including XYZ = Toshiba including XYZ. The specs are the value, pretty much exactly. So, like petrol stations, they don't have margins.

Another thing to note is that most price comparisons compare based on seller costs. Because in a competitive market that is what market prices reflect. The value to a consumer is necessarily higher (or they wouldn't buy) and it can be much higher.

If the cost of production is $1000and & the value to the consumer is $10000, the machine will be priced somewhere between those two. The more competitive (less differentiated) the market is, the closer to $1000.

I'm a developer, I've run various OS's over the years, Windows first, Mac OS X after that, and after my iBook's hard drive failed, I now run Linux on a refurbed ThinkPad. Windows was the only environment that I had to get out of. The amount of friction Windows created in my everyday development was enough that I felt it necessary to switch to maintain productivity.

The difference, though, to me, between working on OS X or Linux, though, is negligible. I suspect that most conference goers with glowing Apple laptop lids can be just as productive in Linux as they can in OS X. (I'm not a Mac developer, I imagine that crowd would disagree)

I use a text editor and a browser to get my work done, Macs don't offer me any software advantages in that department.

> The difference, though, to me, between working on OS X or Linux, though, is negligible. I suspect that most conference goers with glowing Apple laptop lids can be just as productive in Linux as they can in OS X. (I'm not a Mac developer, I imagine that crowd would disagree)

Since most of the tools are the same, the only real difference is in the GUI and underlying software toolkits. If you aren't targeting a HLL like Python or Ruby, Apple's NeXT-descendent API really shines. There is just nothing like it in the Linux world, although Qt has tried to copy it. So you can definitely start noticing that.

I used to be a Linux user too, and I still develop software for Linux. To me, I vastly prefer the OS X user environment because a lot of niggling detail work involving clipboards, image viewing, indexed-content search etc are all done, and done such that they generally work, and lots of not-necessary-but-pleasant-things like mixed-channel sound work without even considering them.

Yes, I could get most of these things working in Linux. I know the software, I know how to install it and configure it... but I just can't bring myself to do all that to get what, at best, will be an equivalent experience.

Most of the tools aren't the same - as has been discussed here, the Mac repositories are far smaller than their Debian and Ubuntu equivs, which means you're less likely to find what you want. In my experience they're less tested too.

Personally I prefer the Linux middle-click paste (especially compared to the key Macs use instead of Windows for Ctrl, which messes with my muscle memory by being over to the left), and viewing images, content indexing, and mixed channel sound have worked out of the box for years.

Misinformation: "There is just nothing like it in the Linux world"

http://www.gnustep.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNUstep

Why was this voted down? He said "Apple's NeXT-descendent API really shines. There is just nothing like it in the Linux world" when GNUstep is very much like it.

I didn't vote it down, but I imagine it was voted down for laughable incorrectness. GNUStep, while a noble effort, is largely a copy of the pre-OSX-era NeXTSTEP API (although I guess technically it's trying to rebuild Openstep, but it seems the history of these projects is so confusing that NeXTSTEP is used interchangeably because it's so iconic), which is literally a decade behind.

GNUStep is not seem to be, nor does it seem to want to be, an effort like Mono to create an open Mac OS X platform (at least last time I looked at it, which was late. It also can't use some of the finest decisions that Apple and NeXT made (e.g., ".bundle", ".app" and ".framework" paradigms) because the underlying linux platform is hostile to them.

Comparing modern OS X to gnustep as anything more than a historical curiosity shows a degree of ignorance and dismissiveness that borders on flagrant. Even assuming the best in people, most mac developers I know would have a frown forced out of them at such a comparison.

I meant very much like it in terms of compared to other frameworks, not in the mono->.Net kind of way, more like the java and c++ being very much alike because they support object oriented programming with built-in features.

You're totally right, though and I would like to recant my previous posts. Oh well, it is too late. My apologies.

I'd really like to let my manager at work read your comment. He recently went to a local "Web 2.0" conference and was surprised by all the Apple laptops everyone else had (both attendees and presenters).

Yet, he still continues to bury his head in the sand when the people he manages complain that they want a Mac for work (web development and design). He says there's no room in the budget, but we seem to get a steady stream of new Dell shitboxes every year or two.

If you work on your computer all day every day, as many HN readers do, and it lasts a couple of years, then paying a bit extra for something that makes that work more efficient or more pleasurable is well worth it. After years of PC use, I changed to a Mac a couple of years ago, and it's worth every penny.

People are buying macs because they want Mac OS X

There are about 15 people so far who have said the same thing. Maybe it's true, but it seems to be getting a little desperate. I'd wager that many Mac purchasers did not have a long experience with OSX before buying one, nor could they describe in any serious way the differences between various OSes ("It just works". Memo: Windows "Just works" also). They have, however, been exposed to the bountious fruits of Apple's marketing department, and could tell you quite clearly the differences between "I'm a mac" and "I'm a pc".

99.99 percent of the time, using a computer, you are not using the OS but the applications. Firefox, an IDE, a music player, an IM client, etc. These don't vary too much.

> There are about 15 people so far who have said the same thing. Maybe it's true, but it seems to be getting a little desperate. I'd wager that many Mac purchasers did not have a long experience with OSX before buying one, nor could they describe in any serious way the differences between various OSes ("It just works". Memo: Windows "Just works" also). They have, however, been exposed to the bountious fruits of Apple's marketing department, and could tell you quite clearly the differences between "I'm a mac" and "I'm a pc".

Because the hacker crowd at JavaOne: known for making uninformed and unresearched computer purchases based off marketing. Could you at least try not to be derisive? Why don't you just say, "Go play with your shiny toy, kiddo?"

> 99.99 percent of the time, using a computer, you are not using the OS but the applications. Firefox, an IDE, a music player, an IM client, etc. These don't vary too much.

Yeah, and even then I like the choices on OS X better. I prefer Adium to Trillium, Safari to Firefox (the Safari web inspector is like firebugz, but fast), iTunes is pretty much the standard player.

And then of course, most of my day is spent in a text editor (of which I have a wide variety of excellent choices, from Linux standbys like emacs and vi to modern contenders like TextMate) and a terminal.

Why is it that these things are so hard to believe. Is it that hard to imagine?

While windows "just works", OS X is the desktop nix that "just works" and works with all the peripherals I own and there is a high-quality ISV market.

99.99 percent of the time, using a computer, you are not using the OS but the applications. Firefox, an IDE, a music player, an IM client, etc. These don't vary too much.

This is actually false. The Mac development culture is far more UI/User-experiece-centric than those of either Windows or Linux, and so the OS X applications tend to be more polished and simply more fun to use. Please try it for a while before trolling.

'And let's be honest here, smart and educated software engineers go out of their way to buy macs when they definitely have the skills to install and run linux. They could definitely buy a cheaper Windows PC. "

Some do, some don't. I prefer to save some decent money and get a Dell laptop with the screen size and rez I want (completely unavailable in Mac laptops) and the clitmouse I want (completely unavailable in Mac laptops), install Kubuntu, and hack away.

I gather, form the many people I know with Macs, that it's the perceived "it just works" factor coupled with a Unix dev environment. Linux desktops are still falling a bit short on that, though it just works good enough for me (and really I think the issues I run into with Kubuntu are equivalent to what Macs users tell me about with their laptops. Plenty of annoyances and WTF to go around.)

Unless you want to be utterly derisive and dismissive, you can't simply say, "It's a fashion item."'

For me it's the other way around. I like the MacBook hardware a lot but I'm not so happy with Mac OS.

Mac OS memory management is awful compared to Linux or Windows and makes the entire system feel sluggish. Safari keeps crashing. Spaces is broken. Not being able to maximise windows is annoying. Transparent menus are hard to read (what am I supposed to see behind them anyway?).

There are a lot of positives as well, but all being said, I'm not going to pay that premium next time.

You can disable the translucent menubar. Just uncheck the box in Desktop & Screensaver's prefpane. Spaces can be disabled as well (in the Expose & Spaces prefpane) so you can use Virtue instead for virtual deesktops.

Also, Safari's been stable for me (except on delicious2.0 for some reason, but I dont use delicious often). But thats just one piece of data, not really enough to make any sort of conclusion.

I have disabled the translucent menubar. But you cannot disable the translucent menus. I have disabled Spaces because it breaks Cmd+Tab switching but I would like to use it if it actually worked.

I like the MacBook hardware a lot but I'm not so happy with Mac OS

You can easily install Linux on Apple hardware. There are detailed instructions somewhere on the web. I'm writing these words from a Mac Mini with Ubuntu. I used to use Mac OS X as my primary system for a long time before and my experience was good. On OS X you can have most of the things you have on Linux, but some things require much more effort to set up and some don't work. The fonts look much nicer on OS X.

I'm considering to do that. It's just that last time I looked the atheros wifi chipset wasn't supported by Linux out of the box and I was simply too lazy to mess with drivers again.

You can run OSX on hardware besides Apples.

http://wiki.osx86project.org/

osx86 is hacky at best. It's worth buying a real mac box if you're getting a laptop (to have working power management).

And if you use a desktop, well, I'd recommend getting a mac anyway, just so you can update without having to reinstall or sacrifice a USB port to that efi hack.

Yeah, you can, and it works fine, and then you need a fix, and then it's not cracked and won't install, and now your computer's broken.

i think that for people who only use simple programs, all the OS's look the same (except linux, which can't seem to get rid of its shoddy gestalt.) i think for these people, the external design of the computer as an appliance makes a big difference, partly because it's something they can actually valuate

i don't see a problem with buying/selling the candy coating. if i bought a mac it would be for the case/monitor design. it is very pretty and elegant

After finally conceding the demise of the Commodore Amiga around 1996, I started using a mixture of Windows NT and GNU/Linux. I loved the Unix way of doing things, especially for software development.

But I am not only a programmer; I also spend a lot of time doing music arrangements and production. I hear that things have improved, but last I tried, music-related applications for GNU/Linux were fairly woeful.

I ended up getting a Mac in 2002, largely as an experiment, and have bought three more since then. I would likely prefer GNU/Linux systems for software development, but MacOS is plenty adequate for my needs there, and I can run my music/sound applications.

I do think Macs look pretty spiffy, but when it gets right down to it, they just proved to be the best option for what I need my computer to do. They might not be the best option for everyone, and that's okay too.

I find that most numbers treated as specs became less relevant, say 2-3 years ago. Today, I want a computer that will be a pleasure to use and agree with what I think constitutes a well-designed laptop.

Today, where even the cheapest boxes have enough horsepower to do everything I do and more, how good I feel while using the machine became more important to me.

Those cheap PC laptops are generally more gaudy designed, feature cheaper materials and make me feel like I'm being treated like a child. Just like you don't pick the person you date as a simple list of pros and cons, you don't pick a laptop via purely a tally of features.

If you want a computer that makes you "feel good" and think PC's are 'treating you like a child' (which is somehow possible with enclosure design), then you should probably stick with your shiny overpriced MAC and leave the bargains (and cheap horsepower) to us PC/Linux guys.

I agree, even if you hate windows, a Linux box is much more cheaper than anything mac has to offer for the same price range.

Admit it guys, mac has done a decent job in polishing the user interface,and overrall experience, but it has done even a better job in marketing.

A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contrubuting to Apple's higher margins. While the PC world is just much more cut-throat.

A good chunk of your money is buying a brand name, and contributing to Apple's higher margins.

Ah, but the question is: Which chunk? How much of the money buys the brand, and how much buys the OS?

The answer is that we aren't allowed to know. So the question doesn't really come into play.

It's clear that if you could save money by buying a box without Apple's brand, or their industrial design, but with the Mac OS a lot of people would be interested. Probably including me. But that's not Apple's game plan, for good reasons that were explored back in the Mac clone era, a time when (probably not by coincidence) the company nearly went out of business.

As it is, you're stuck with the whole package. So the question is: How much is the Mac OS worth to you? Given that even if I accept all of this guy's arguments the price difference is of order $600 to $800 -- less than 10 hours of my time -- the Mac OS doesn't have to save me much time or pain at all over the lifetime of the machine to justify the higher cost.

The real lesson here is that both PC and Mac hardware are cheap. Compared to many people's time, hardware is cheap. Compared to a developer's time it is really, really cheap. The Mac-PC pricing flame war is obsolete; it's a relic from the Elder Days when Macs cost $3000 to $5000 and didn't even run Unix.

I disagree a lot on the relevancy of prices. When you're a startup or a family looking to buy a handful of machines, the extra $800 adds up quickly to cut in half (roughly) the number of machines you can afford.

Do I get a Mac for me or do I get a PC for both my wife and myself? Do I put off upgrading some employees to more modern hardware or buy fewer of them Macs?

I really do want to use more Macs around here, but the economics don't make sense at the current price points. I welcome a drop in price which could get Mac a great deal of marketshare.

Which makes me wonder if we're going to see something crazy:

What if Apple's new announcement this year will be a lower-priced Mac notebook with built-in 3G-- price-subsidized by carriers to make it feel more competitive?

How many of you would buy the Macbook 3G?

It more depends on the carriers than the laptop. Many laptops have a "built in 3g" card option to order, but it's not significantly popular outside of business due to carrier retardation.

I wouldn't be surprised if apple is considering that route.

Especially now after they've successfully bamboozled carriers with the iphone.

But I actually think that the cheap ultra-portables (eg Eee) wuld have the edge here. If we take the mobile phone industry as a guide, the carriers will probably pay up to about $150 - $250 to get you on a $30 - $50 p/m plan. That doesn't make too much dent in an Air.

If you bundle it with home broadband plan (maybe they'd subsidise $300) they could give out mini laptops for free or at $100 or so. Apple is actually in a spot. Experience & connections with carriers that no one else has, but no product to which a few 100s makes much of a difference.

Before I bought a Mac, a year and a bit ago, I used Linux on a variety of laptops. Most brands (Sony,IBM,Toshiba,Dell etc). I spent a sizable chunk of time fighting with hardware, drivers, whatever sweeping changes the linux devs decided to implement that broke everything...

Since owning a mac, I have the power of linux, but it just works. It's known fixed hardware. Of course it's going to work properly.

I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something. Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system. Those days aren't fun days. I remember spending ages trying to get wifi adapters to work properly under linux. For some, this may be enjoyable, productive work. Definitely if you're into hardware, or trying to learn linux, but I can't imagine the advantage of having linux on the desktop over OSX.

Obviously I have Ubuntu within parallels on my MacBook just incase I want to have an exact server environment or something...

I'll point out that it is now possible to buy laptops, from several vendors, pre-installed with Linux. Lenovo makes several ThinkPad models with Linux, Dell has three or four models, as well. And they cost less than their Windows-running twins, generally. So, you have the power of Linux, and it just works.

The biggest source of trouble for me with Linux has always been wireless drivers, because manufacturers are so tight with their specs...Intel has a fully open WiFi chipset, and it's the one included in all of these "for Linux" systems, and it works really well.

I remember spending a day fixing the crap the linux devs piled on me when they decided to replace /dev with the udev system or something.

Yeah, I remember that day, too, but only because I was interested in it. My distribution upgraded without a hitch, and I wouldn't have even noticed the difference if I weren't specifically doing development work on a kernel driver that had a device interface.

Then there was some update to libc which broke everything on my system.

Never happened. Unless you're using some oddball build-your-own Linux, libc is not going to be upgraded in an incompatible way. No distro worth a damn would do that, and I'm absolutely certain that Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu have never broken everything on your system by providing an incompatible libc version. You did that to yourself, either by using a crazytown distro without proper dependency management (though I can't think of one that has ever broken libc in the way you describe) or by replacing libc manually and against the better judgment of your package management tools.

I'm not saying Linux is foolproof (obviously, it isn't), but if you choose a well-supported distribution, and follow its recommended upgrade processes, you will simply never see the problems you're describing. I've managed Macs, and I can say with confidence that they are no friendlier after an upgrade than a Linux system. You know they've changed their user management system in pretty dramatically incompatible ways several times since OS X was released? Even recently, one user related weirdness led to a friends laptop becoming completely unusable (it was in a sort of death loop seemingly trying to start the login process)...the only advice we could find on the web was to restore from backups--I poked around in single user mode, but couldn't make much sense of it, so I didn't touch anything. She handed it off to the Google techstop folks, who worked on it all day, and finally wiped it and reinstalled the OS. Perhaps all parties involved are just idiots...but it seems to me that things can go wrong with Macs, as well, and you've just not had time to run into it.

Never happened. Unless you're using some oddball build-your-own Linux

It did happen, to me also.

To be fair, I think we were both using Gentoo at the time, which probably qualifies as "oddball" I guess, but Gentoo does (or did - I haven't kept up) claim to have a good package manager with proper dependency management.

I used Gentoo but switched away when some expat change caused tons of apps to break at once and some dependency cycle prevented me from fixing the problem. I switched to GoboLinux, which is sorta like Gentoo but better.

I think we were both using Gentoo at the time, which probably qualifies as "oddball" I guess

More than oddball...Gentoo is just plain retarded. But you have my sympathies and condolences for the hours you lost to Gentoo.

And never let it be said that Gentoo has good package management. Clever, perhaps. But not good. Good package management requires good packaging policies, good maintainers, and good technology. The software involved is only a small part of the picture, and while one could possibly convince me that portage is a reasonably good piece of software, the other two pieces of the equation simply aren't there for Gentoo. And, because the policies of Gentoo are actively hostile to stability and predictability, even if the project does gain enough good maintainers, it will never be a suitable operating system for servers, or any system that you don't want to reinstall every couple of months (unless, of course, their policies change...at which point, the reasons people are so excited about Gentoo will have evaporated and all that will remain is Yet Another Linux Distribution).

"More than oddball...Gentoo is just plain retarded."

I think that's a little harsh. I still use it on a server or 2, it's got some very nice organisation not seen in ubuntu or others. Also having it compile everything should give performance gains.

I still like the whole use flags, rc system etc.

I still use it on a server or 2, it's got some very nice organisation not seen in ubuntu or others.

Sure, it's nifty to play with. But, it's the basic philosophy of Gentoo that is broken (for anything other than a tinkerers OS). Nothing can be predicted in a Gentoo system, and no Gentoo system is the same as any other. Lots of fun, and infinitely customizable. But, in a server, you need to know where you stand--and being able to experiment has far less value.

I'll happily concede that portage has done wonders with a rather complex problem...allowing custom on-the-spot builds of everything, and being able to upgrade and install most of the time without resulting in a flaming pile of wreckage. As long as the philosophy is "anything you want, even stuff that has practically zero testing, and all built from scratch while you wait", Gentoo will remain unpredictable and unreliable, and occasionally insane.

Every package and option that Gentoo provides is a new variable...something new that can go wrong. You cannot test that many variables, no matter how smart you are. And, of course, I don't think the Gentoo developers are particularly smarter than the folks behind Debian or RHEL or Ubuntu, though they may be as smart...but to be as successful with their chosen philosophy they have to be significantly smarter and significantly more numerous, because they have to solve far harder problems and on a scale never before seen. A very basic grasp of combinatorial mathematics tells me that Gentoo will have several orders of magnitude more possible failure paths than RHEL or Debian.

Anyway, if you opt to stick with an entirely stock install of Gentoo (by some definition of "stock") you will get a system that has as few variables as RHEL or CentOS or Debian or Ubuntu, which is a win. But, you lose the things that make Gentoo unique (and exciting for some folks)...and you get a system that is tested by a tiny fraction as many people as have tested RHEL, CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu. Not only is the userbase dramatically smaller, it's also fractured into thousands of unique distros, because so few people are running a "default" Gentoo.

What always amazes me is that the Gentoo developers don't realize what a mess they've signed up for with the choices they've made. They do have some awesome documentation, though. That may be a side effect of a system that is so vaguely defined...anyone that wants to accomplish anything with it has to read a lot and know a lot, so a lot of docs get written. I dunno.

"But, in a server, you need to know where you stand--and being able to experiment has far less value."

That's an amazing sweeping generalization. I'd say if you're trying for some highly optimized custom setup, gentoo is precisely the right distro to choose on a server.

I do agree though with some of your points. Ubuntu is certainly a lot less hassle than gentoo to maintain/setup, and deploying things on Ubuntu is easier since it's a pretty much known state...

I've been using linux exclusively for about 10 years and I can sympathize with your experiences.

However, in the last three years I've installed linux on two laptops for work - a Dell Inspiron at my previous job and a Lenovo T60 at my current job. In both cases, installation was flawless, hardware was autodetected correctly, and everything "Just Worked". That includes OpenGL, audio, and wireless. For reference, I'm using Ubuntu.

In the last couple of years, linux installations have become much, much better in this respect. I'm sure that people running bleeding edge hardware or using certain components still struggle to make it work with linux. However, the need to compile drivers and fix issues caused by updates is no longer a guarantee when runnig linux.

Frankly I buy macs b/c they're vendor-supported unix boxes.

Outside of my personal gripes with Mach-O, it's a pretty good unix.

who the hell needs the "vendor"?

i can get better unbiased advice out of online forums. even after going to freebsd i continued to use ubuntuforums, because the advice tended to be great. the arch wiki also rules.

i would rather use a forum or irc then call some dipshit on the "vendor" support line. all i want from a hardware vendor is a sane warranty. otherwise they can keep their worthless phone monkeys

The reason is that Apple guarantee that OS X, will work with their hardware. If it doesn't, they better fix it quick, or risk the wrath of everyone.

With Linux, you might have some unsupported hardware, and that's that. Your choice is either to write drivers yourself, wait until someone else does, or buy different hardware.

The article takes it on faith that the current margins Apple has can't last. Maybe I missed the part of the article where they back that up, but overall it seems like Apple's done a bang-up job selling (the perception of) lack of computing misery for a premium. If people want to pay extra to have the experience debugged for them out of the box, good for them, and great for Apple.

That quoted blurb from Wilcox about the Apple announcement of dropping product margins ignored the other parts of that announcement, when they also said they were planning on releasing a new product. Maybe the Macbook is staying upmarket and the new product is going to be a low cost / high volume machine that would eat into the cheaper machine segment.

It would actually be quite novel (for the PC business) if Apple was intending to invest in their brands and move them up and out instead of down and out. The Mac Pro (formerly known as a Power Macintosh), as a nearly $3k, 8 core Xeon desktop, has been positioned as an ultra-premium product that is suitable for only the highest level users, the MacBook Pro (formerly known as a PowerBook) is holding the cost line and too expensive for anybody but professional users or monied geeks. The MacBook is currently the laptop a non-geek would buy, but Apple has not addressed the lowest mobile market segment, which probably should be considered the sum of the cut-rate laptop market and the eeepc-type market.

This is a pretty common strategy in the automobile industry. The current Honda Civic is larger than the first generation Honda Accord. The Honda Fit slots into place where the Civic used to be. Honda has spent decades moving brands upward, keeping them relevant to their customer base and fixing segment gap with new vehicles that are the right size and marketed toward the appropriate people.

It's nice to see a tech company market their products more like major investments (Honda Pro) than like disposable consumer goods (Gillete Mach 8 Vostro 2100xblqi).

tl;dr: Apple cares about their brand -- don't expect to see a $500 MacBook, Apple probably will create a new product to combat the threat in the article.

<disclaimer>I am not a Mac fanboy.</disclaimer>

The argument in the article is flawed for two reasons:

1. Windows Vista needs more hardware to accomplish the same thing as Mac OS X. For example, I can get a along fine with 2 gigs of memory on a MacBook while it would be excruciating to run Vista with anything less than 4 gigs.

2. Generally what you are paying for when you buy a Mac is the experience. The fact that a growing number of consumers are still willing to buy Macs given the price difference reinforces this. Macs have always been a great demonstration of the synergy between hardware and software.

The article would have more merit if the author discussed the cost, in time and money, of performing a task (ex. create a document) on a PC or Mac.

I don't agree with the first statement. My mom's laptop has 1 GB of RAM is performs just fine, even when I had to use it. Granted, she doesn't do much but play a few very low demanding games (Zuma), browse the internet, and chat on Skype.

I can get a along fine with 2 gigs of memory on a MacBook while it would be excruciating to run Vista with anything less than 4 gigs.

There's no way that Vista needs 4GB of memory. 2GB is plenty. 1GB is more than enough, especially if you disable some of the effects.

I wonder how the screens compare.

I know when I bought my MacBook Pro, it had a higher pixel density than most PC laptops with similar screens, and that got lost in a lot of comparisons. Slimness and weight are sometimes also overlooked. PC notebooks equally slim or light as the Mac equivalent are often more expensive than the Mac model.

Does that $699 PC have equal or better pixel density to the equivalent Mac model? Is it as skinny?

(I honestly don't know. It's been about 3 years since I last looked.)

I bought a Dell M1330. It is:

* Lighter than the Macbook (but there's not much in it)

* Same screen resolution (1280x800)

* Slot-loading disc drive, but with a DVD Writer

* Nvidia 8400M compared to Intel X1300 graphics

* Had 1gb more memory

* Had 40gb bigger hard disk drive

It does, however, lack 802.11n, and the Macbook is marginally prettier. The kicker is that the M1330 was £130+ cheaper than the Macbook equivalent even after factoring in the educational discount.

There really is no way of spinning it - Apple's hardware is, and always has been, comparatively expensive, and in exchange you get Mac OS X. Apple has never competed on price. If one day I can afford to spend £700+ on a laptop I'd certainly consider buying a Mac but until that point I'm happy with my mid-spec PCs.

Battery life?

From what I read, ~2.5hrs vs. ~3-3.5hrs - not altogether unexpected considering the significantly more power hungry graphics card on the Dell.

That's still not bad.

But it doesn't run MacOS X which means you can't run all the Mac apps.

If you read, I did actually say that.

FWIW, I intend to install some flavour of Linux (likely Ubuntu) when I get around to it. All the applications I use tend to be multiplatform these days so I'm OS neutral - there's honestly no application on any platform that I'm reliant on and I like it this way.

I'm reliant on being able to test in as many browsers as possible, and unfortunately, this is where I run into the not quite dead monopoly, because I still have to test stuff in IE. And yes, I can run it on my mac, but I still have to buy a copy of, sadly, Vista. I dislike intensely having to pay that monopoly rent.

If it helps, Microsoft provide free Virtual PC images of IE6, IE7 and IE8 for compatibility testing. Only downside is they time expire after a few months when they provide a new version and you'll need to convert the virtual machine to another format to run it on Mac or Linux.

Download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21E... and info on converting them can be found at http://blog.mozmonkey.com/2008/vpc-ie6-ie7-ie8-on-mac-os-x/ (it suggests you can use Zipeg to decompress the files meaning a Windows PC isn't required at all).

Actually that looks really useful. Thanks!

And a few hours later, I can verify that it works quite nicely too. Again, thanks very much.

like what, firefox?

Note that this follows a standard fallacy: comparing circuitry alone. You're not buying a motherboard, RAM, and disk, you're buying a whole machine.

For example, the Inspiron 518 that they mentioned was a cheap plastic tower, and they compare it to the integrated iMac. The integration is going to add cost, no matter who builds it.

Apples to apples folks, apples to apples.

When I do comparisons, here's what I usually find:

1. When you find the same build quality (e.g. a macbook pro versus upper-end thinkpads or dells (I don't remember their naems)), the prices get pretty close

2. At an update, the macs are slightly cheaper. But the PC vendors quickly adapt. Then the macs are more expensive (usually ~$100).

3. To do fair comparisons, you have to also match in the software/accessories included. Lots of stuff free on either platform has to either be given credit or be matched.

4. You usually don't want everything included. But, for the sake of intellectual honesty, you have to make the comparisons fair.

5. Complaining that Apple offers poor selection or customization options are perfectly fair.

According to the article's links (& I think this might be fairly accurate), we are on the 'mac is high' end of that swing. Ant this time it's higher more then a $100 difference.

A Ferrari can be four times as expensive as a Corvette. News at 11.

It's an apples to oranges comparison. Average selling price is a terrible comparison tool - it only works for very similar products that cater to the same public. While I am not a Mac user (I am, but my main computer is a PC running Linux and the Mac is used mostly at home), I have the deepest respect for the product and I understand fully it's not the same as a more mundane Dell PC.

I'm more than happy to see info like this come out and put apple in its place as an expensive computer.

I was shocked at the low prices and great hardware I've been seeing on PCs compared to Macs. If this forces apple to be less stingy with hardware specs on macs then its a good thing. Its great that apple is going so well but i care far, far, far less about their bottom line than mine and other consumers.

Mac is the first computer maker that has succeeded in making computers a fashion item. They get to charge extra for being the in name-brand.

Obviously you were never a schoolboy in England in the 1980s. Sinclair, Acorn, Commodore, these brands were more hotly contested by the nerds than football teams or pop bands ever were by the cool kids...

I believe he meant that Mac is the first company to make computers and devices fashionable to everyone who isn't a nerd. There's a big difference. It's now "cool" and "hip" for any set of mainstream consumers to own a Mac/iPod/iPhone, while it's never really been "cool" to own any sort of Windows machine, except in tiny little crowds of geeks and nerds.

Obviously you were never hip. :-)

(Just being silly.)

Let me be a contrarian here. I have both a Mac and a Windows PC right here on my desk. I use the Windows XP machine far more often (and not because of any apps I cannot get on a Mac).

Before you flame me as a Windows nut, keep in mind that my first computer was a Mac, and I started on Windows after 2 years of Mac.

I am fairly certain I am not alone, but most Windows users are the silent types.

I bought my mac because I wanted OSX, I write software. I'm shocked at how many of my friends that bought a PC with Vista say it's utterly horrible. I'm happy I chose to switch given that common sentiment.

It's always the same. Apple introduces new Mac, it's priced competitively. Apple waits a year until it releases a new version and doesn't cut price while other manufacturers release new versions, so the Mac becomes comparatively more expensive as time goes by. Then, Apple releases a new Mac, and the cycle starts anew. Repeat annually. There's really no need to write these "Apple is cheaper" "Apple is more expensive" articles twice each year.

Face it – arguing over computers is futile.

Certain characteristics simply hold more value to some individuals over others, which is why some people choose to share their lives with blondes and others with brunettes or redheads. Similarly, some people choose to have Macs; while others choose Windows or Linux.

Suggestions that WomanA is "better" than WomanB are incredibly subjective e.g. a 5/10 to you might be a 10/10 to someone else. Although such suggestions can promote passionate discourse (as in this thread), inevitably the arguments that ensue end in deadlock - where you realise that no matter how much you argue, you and your critics will never see eye to eye.

Quoting hardware specifications is like saying "she's an X out of 10” and running Windows, Linux or OSX is like preferring blondes, brunettes or redheads.

Hackers, it’s time to agree to disagree - because we all like to think we’re spending our lives with babes.

The notebooks really are price-competitive, especially right after a refresh. People compare numbers saying "oh I can get this from dell with the same processor and memory and harddrive for half the price!" but neglect several things:

-Almost all those inexpensive PCs are significantly heavier than the macbook.

-The screens are not as good as the macs, at all. Even at the same resolution the macs have better backlighting and better color & contrast.

-The macs have better battery life.

Show me a PC that weighs 5 lbs or less, gets 5 hrs of battery life and has a screen as nice as the macbook for the same or less money. They don't exist.

You can get a Sony with all these qualities except the price.

You can get a Dell with all these qualities except the battery life and nice screen. (Or you can get a nice screen in a machine that weighs 6+lbs and still has terrible battery life).

You can get a Lenovo with all these qualities but the screens are awful.

And so on.

One of the things that makes these comparisons annoying is the multiple versions of Vista (is Home Premium really comparable to OSX? I don't actually know) I think they do that just so they can have a positive showing on these checklist comparisons, but it ends up hurting the consumer, who has to make uninformed choices and ends up being dependent on slimy salespeople. In addition, developers also have to deal with multiple versions, which must be a support nightmare.

It's a classic example of marketing directives (market segmentation and looking good in these price/feature comparisons) hurting the overall product.

It's easy to find price differences when you compare the wrong specs. In their example, they compare a 19" LCD with no viewing angle, slow updates, etc. with a 20" one of better quality. Yeah, that's going to cost more. You can't compare the 20 to 19 and assume they are the same; there are lots of different 20" panels and lots of different 19" panels.

Anyway, I still think my Thinkpad is much nicer looking than any Apple laptop. (Oh, and it's more expensive than a Dell. It must be some sort of conspiracy between Apple and Lenovo, yeah, that's it!)

I agree about the Thinkpad being better than any Apple laptop--both in looks and the fact that unlike Macs the Thinkpad has a nipple.

Funny thing, I just discussed this with a friend. We are both mac users. I think they are overpriced if you compare hardware only, but he maintained that if you compare the hw specs on the best MacBook pro with an HP laptop, you only save like 40 bucks (at least in this part of the world).

Anyone got numbers?

fwiw here in India the Macs have a 33% surcharge for some reason ( The dealers say "customs duty", though PC prices track international prices pretty well - something strange is going on). This makes the macs way more expensive than an equivalent PC.

I flagged the article and downvoted everyone who has made a comment because Mac vs. PC flamewar at #1 on Hacker News is sad.

I agree that a flamewar would be sad, but I don't think this conversation has devolved to one yet. Many of the comments cite facts, give both pros and cons of Mac/PC, and are related to the claims in the article.

There isn't much of a discussion imo. The people who like it still like it, the people who don't won't. As for me, I've been meaning to try out Time Machine & ZFS so I just started up my OSx86 torrent.

No ZFS in Leopard.

Well I hear it can read/write ZFS & I'm getting solaris too.

A bland OS X install can't write to a ZFS partition yet. You could try prereleases of ZFS for Mac from http://zfs.macosforge.org if you want write support. However, it doesn't let you boot to a partition with ZFS or index the partition with Spotlight. There's a few other limitations as well - look around the trac wiki and you should find the list pretty easily.

To me, who is about to buy a new laptop, these were some of the most interesting comments on HN for at least a week.

I consider the Macbook's price tag to be quite good with regards to performance and design. Too bad it's not very Linux-friendly...

I agree with that as well-this is more balanced and informative than other sites.

Downvoting everyone who comments seems a bit over the top. Still, I was also dismayed to see the x-th article of this Mac vs PC pricing stuff on HN. I guess somebody is planning to buy a notebook and can't decide. To that someone: get over it already!

I find it sad that people on News.YC think that 'PC' means Windows.

That makes me sad :-(

While I don't deny he has a point, average selling prices are not a very fair metric. Mac buyers more often care about computers, want a higher end one, and allocate a larger budget to their computer.

Correct.

How much is it worth to you to have a machine that is beautiful to look at and which has as few extraneous cables as possible? For many people, the answer is "very little" and those are the people cheap Dell grey boxes are for.

On the other hand, if you want, say, a sub-$1000 laptop (just something for email and net browsing on the go), Apple can't help you at all, and in that regard price comparisons are kind of irrelevant: you can pick up a Dell laptop for $600 that probably wouldn't be enjoyable for heavy everyday work but is fine for the casual use most people intend on when they purchase a machine.

I bought a $600 Dell Inspiron laptop ($350 rebate) and upgraded the memory, and battery to about $800 and have used it for everyday, heavy-at-times work (web design/development) for over a year now. Sure I could have spent $400-$600 more on something with a nicer case (XPS) but just because something is cheap, doesn't mean it can't be used to 'work' (and I didn't need to buy OSX just because I'm a 'designer')

Also, I spend the most money on machines for 'play', like my new Inspiron 1720.

For 820$ you can get a Dell Inspiron 1525 with: Intel Core 2 Duo @2.16GHz, 4GB ram, 15.4 inch display (1680x1050), and a 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM). (http://www.notebookreview.com/dellCoupon.asp)

What more do you need for heavy everyday work?

You can't add in a decent video card (the integrated X3100 is garbage), for one thing.

As much as I prefer discrete graphics, the X3100 is actually quite good. Good enough to be the only video option for the Macbook Air, Macbook, Thinkpad X300 and Thinkpad 61s all well received laptops.

OSX and Xcode? ;-)

> On the other hand, if you want, say, a sub-$1000 laptop (just something for email and net browsing on the go), Apple can't help you at all

store.apple.com -> Refurbished Mac -> Apple Certified Refurbished MacBook -> $899.00, free shipping. Judging by the graphics chip and CPU, it's the latest revision, released in February.

How much is it worth to you to have a machine that comes in a white box (instead of the brown refurb one)? For most Mac users, the answer is "a couple hundred dollars" and those are the people new Macs are for.

To be honest, having a mac doesn't let you escape the too many cable curse. I have a cable for my mouse, one for my printer, one for my itouch, one for my cellphone (iphone = unwise in canada), one for my backup HD, one for my second monitor, one for the gigabit ethernet, one for the power and one for my headphones which equals 9 different cable outputs. I could go wireless(ish) w/ the HD, printer, mouse, headphones & network, but that compromises speed or quality in some way.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE...

Newegg bestsellers is a great place to find anything. Those are all $500 - $750 & all very decent.

Yet another Apple-bashing article. Really, I thought HN was above this crap, this kind of submission is better on Reddit or Digg...

Cmon folks, get real. Most of the people who buy Macs want OSX, they aren't even considering a Windows machine. And this article had deliberate mis-prints on the Apple specs, for example the iMac has a Core 2 Duo processor, not the older Core Duo.

When I bought my MacBook Core 2 Duo laptop in December, 2006, I went to Dell.com and the exact same machine spec'd out to a few hundred more for the Dell vs. what I got with my Mac.

Apple does indeed have an entirely new laptop line planned and rumors say they will be introduced in September. And they also say the Apple laptops will have entirely new Intel processors in them.

I can run Windows and OSX on my MacBook, very useful really. But I only run Windows to play games, I get my real work done on the Mac. :-)

"I thought HN was above this crap"

Who reads TFA? ;-)

I'm here for the comments.

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