Comments on: Does High Price Attract Mac Users?

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:26:15 +0000

I recently had this discussion with a friend of mine, right after I purchased my first “PC” in nearly 10 years, a Toshiba Satellite.

“Why? I thought you were a Mac guy?!” my friends all asked. The answer is very simple: “This Toshiba has vaguely comparable power to your MacBook Pro, but cost 520 $ instead of 2000 $.”

Sure, it came with Vista 32 bit (the Satellite L300 is a 64-bit machine), but it’s nothing a little Jaunty can’t cure.

(You might also be interested in this FOSS notebook http://egovsergo.com/2009/05/22/got-a-look-at-the-gdium-liberty-1000-at-fosslc/ )

By: linuxcrypt

linuxcrypt — Wed, 13 May 2009 03:07:11 +0000

From a consumer perspective, compare customer service satisfaction from Dell to Apple.

Ouch.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/forrester_survey_shows_apple_tops_in_customer_service/

Forrester survey, April 17, 2009 is reporting:

Apple: 80%

Dell: 58%

People who are in the market to make a purchase do take this into account. Sprint is losing customers in the millions because of crappy customer service. Apple recognizes that, and takes advantage of this.

Michael Dell was pulled out of retirement to save the reputation, the CEO for sprint is now doing his lame ass “hip” commercials also for the same reason.

Cost is only one aspect of technology to people these days, how they are treated pays its weight in gold.

I realise most of the people reading this “myself included” understand the value and cost savings in building our own rigs. But for the common consumer, who doesn’t know the difference between a mobo, proc, RAM and Bus speed, really is looking for more than just the hardware price. Especially when it comes to laptops.

This is also another reason why VW is still yielding net profits, even though they are more expensive than KIA, and only have a 50k mile warranty as opposed to 100k offered by KIA. Sometimes you just want the total experience…

For the record, I do have a Quad core AMD, 8 gigs of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 260 running my main Linux desktop.

I have two laptops, one is an HP nc6400 with linux, the other.. well, a macbook pro, and it’s awesome.. I love it.

End of the day, it’s all about personal preference really..

Great article, great discussion..

By: Donovan

Donovan — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:40:18 +0000

One other issue about software influencing hardware decisions… I’m not a Macsnob that maintains that everything is better on a Mac. To the contrary, I’ve been a Windows user for many many years.

So with that in mind, I was needed to edit a video clip yesterday for YWAM England. I started on our Vista machine using Adobe’s Premier Elements. It was slow and clunky and in the end, it did not give me the kind of quality that I was looking for to upload it to YouTube. For some reason, Adobe’s presets for YouTube are awful.

The thing about Premier elements is that we had to buy it as a separate software add on. We did a lot of research and some argue that it is one of the best for the Windows market. It’s okay, but Adobe is obviously neglecting it to get people to upgrade to their professional package.

After fighting it for a bit, I finally put the video on my mac and within 5 minutes was able to achieve what I wanted and upload it to YouTube with iMovie. iMovie along with a number of other apps are included with every purchase of a Mac. There is no extra cost and the quality is really respectable.

Some other examples? For years, I have wanted to see decent multivideo conference support in things like Skype. iChat has had this feature implemented and until recently, their one to one video was better than Skype. (I am so looking forward to when Skype has multivideo!)

One more example… Time Machine (Apple’s backup). It’s the first user friendly detailed backup programme that I have see that works out of the box with no set up. I see that Genie is now coming up with something similar http://www.genie-soft.com/products/genie_timeline/default.html But the average computer user doesn’t have a good backup plan because many of the backup programmes are inadequate or too complicated to set up.

Are there alternatives to all of the above? Yes, but one of the things about Apple is that the software tends to be generally very, very good and works out of the box. To the techies, this is not appealing, even insulting and too confining, but for people like my mum, it is brilliant and the extra cost is worth it.

Again, value for money, Linux is light years ahead.

By: Tim lease

Tim lease — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:56:04 +0000

when i’m talking about service i’m talking about how helpful they are at the mac store. so its not like they can make that optional. haha.

1 year applecare warranty is included with all mac computers, the 3 year extended warranty is optional

By: Douglass Clem

Douglass Clem — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:27:12 +0000

I’ve addressed my take on the quality issue, so I won’t repeat it in this reply. However, you bring up a good point regarding their quality of customer service. Apple certainly has the best service of any big OEM I’ve ever seen. I’m still skeptical that providing this extra amount of service requires an extra $1,170 per computer. It would certainly raise prices, but that much? However, even if they do need that much extra for the service, why not sell service as an add-on option at the time of purchase (or a separate purchase later on). This would allow them to still provide the extra services that seem to be in significant demand, and yet complete with other OEMs on price. The only way I can think of that this approach would not work would be if the Apple marketing department was of the opinion that the higher price was a strategic marketing tool.

By: Douglass Clem

Douglass Clem — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:18:21 +0000

I think that would depend upon your definition of the word “viable.” From a technical standpoint it is certainly viable, though you are best off making sure you design the system with OSX in mind. The guy in the video’s main point is that it is a violation of copyright, and a DMCA violation. I personally have no ethical dilemmas about infringing upon a government sanctioned time limited monopoly (copyright), as I think monopoly of any sort is unnecessary and destructive economically. I know that many people do have an ethical issue violating copyright, and I respect their decision in that. The DMCA violation though, I am whole-heartedly willing to do. The DMCA is an incredibly stupid law that violates our 1st Amendment rights.

That said, I tend to avoid anything with DRM in it, and only use Free / Open Source software.

By: Douglass Clem

Douglass Clem — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:34:29 +0000

You bring up a good point about quality of parts, but many of the parts in the Apple desktop can be found in the other desktops. The Nvidia graphics cards would be a good example. As far as product life spans, at least with these builds that would come down to the OS installed. The Mac with OSX would probably outlast the Dell Vista machine for example. Also, I suspect that the System76 machine with Ubuntu would last at least as long as the OSX machine. I’ve seen a few case studies to back this therory up (along with personal experience).

By: Douglass Clem

Douglass Clem — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:26:38 +0000

You bring up some good points. There is a reason that I did not factor in software, and that is because IMHO it is an insignificant part of the cost. For example, it might have cost M$ 10 million to make Vista. However, they sold hundreds of millions of copies to OEMs. If you estimate that each OEM pays MS $50 per license, then it probably costs Microsoft pennies to put it’s OS on any given machine.

Also, it is even harder to estimate the costs of putting OSX on a Mac, as you cannot get a Mac without their software. However, the ratios probably work simularly to how they work with Windows.

Finally, the first two OEM builds did include a copy of OSX and Vista respectively, so at least for the comparison between those two OS was a factor.

By: Douglass Clem

Douglass Clem — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:13:35 +0000

The fact that you are talking about laptops throws another variable in the loop. However, assuming the pattern holds there, laptop hardware from Apple is going to be very simular to a comparable “pc” from a different OEM. This means that the main difference between machines is the case. I love a great case as much as the next geek, but I don’t love good cases enough to pay over $1,000 more for a computer.

By: JP

JP — Mon, 11 May 2009 14:06:44 +0000

All the above comments are interesting. However, the key is where/how the parts are built. Same goes for cars. A KIA is built with crap parts by people who don’t give a crap. A VW is built by people who do give a crap and use GOOD parts.

Same goes for a macbook vs a dell. A macbook will be one of the few that last well beyond it’s useful life AND it will keep a high resale value because of that.

The moniker “You get what you pay for” does count here, but the proof is in the pudding.