Apple's Price Beats Dell and Hand-Assembled Computers

Just because some people can afford to buy a mercedes doesn't mean they're a required car. Some people just want to be able to drive fast, that doesn't require a mercedes.

http://www.alienware.com/Product_Pages/notebook_all_gaming.aspx

there are two there for you to chose from... 17" and a 19"

Case != Hardware. Case = Thing that hardware goes into. I'm no fan of Alienware, and they suffer from Mac Syndrome (You pay for brand name), but their actual hardware is beyond reproach.

If you want an elegent case, you aren't going to top the Falcon Mach 5 stock case, IMO.

Nah,

Ulrika is totally right here and you don't know what you're talking about.

Circular logic/reasoning is not that at all.
You are talking about repetition as she pointed out.

For my two cents in this debate, the PC argument that their computers are cheaper is disingenuous.

While you can always point to a low end, low price Windows box, every PC I ever purchased or heard of anyone purchasing in the real world that wasn't a piece of crap was about 2,000. Macs on the other hand used to always work out to be just under 3,000 and now generally run at about 2,500 or so.

i.e. macs are generally a bit more and probably always will be, but they are all really in the same ball park.

The Mac is a better, more reliable computer and is better designed, thus it costs a little more and is aimed at discerning buyers that are willing to pay the small premium to ensure getting a really good computer.

Smart poor or mid-income people buy a computer that's 1 to 2 steps down from the top of the line. It costs half the price, usually around $800-$900, and you upgrade ever two years. Rich foolish people buy top-of-the-line every time, and end up spending $2,500 or more every two years.

So, in other words, PCs are cheaper than macs.

Good, we cleared that up.

For the record, while mac people may not understand this, for some of us, the difference of $500 is a dealbreaker on buying a computer.

As for mac being "more reliable", as Ulrika has so kindly pointed out, the only real difference anymore is the OS - which a windows system is capable of running, except Apple decided to lock it to specific hardware - this has been cracked, and it runs fine on a standard wintel box once you get around that issue.

Dictionary.com definition of "circular logic": a use of reason in which the premises depends on or is equivalent to the conclusion, a method of false logic by which "this is used to prove that, and that is used to prove this"; also called circular logic

Well yes, why anyone would pay 2400 for a mac pro home computer with dual xenon processors, and then spend over a thousand buck to upgrade it,

When they can get a plain old single processor machine, with a very cheap, non fx2 amd processor for 700 bucks and then buy a thousand dollars worth of upgrades is beyond me.

There is , somewhere a market for an $8000 alienware machine, that runs on a single top of the line AMD and has terabytes of storage. That does not make it reasonable.

Macr creates this artifical economy by saying to work station users (our entry level price is better than theirs. However the ultimate upgrande and capabilites for what the appropriate end user is may not be the same, and reasonably, neither system is going to do much good to a professional in basic configuration.

And lets not mention that dell comes with a monitor, and for apple thats a 600 dollar upgrade. Also, chances are the motherboard used in the article is far superior to the motherboards used by either apple or dell. In general a home assembled PC uses better products than the mass market pcs-which is why outfits like alienware charge so much.


Ultimately an apple mac pro, out of the box is a a joke for a gamer. Of course both the systems the article copares it to are jokes for a gamer too. Processor speed is a secondary, but still serious consideration, in the game world frame rate is about draw speed and thus its all about the graphics card redering is critical. Now the next step is going to be physics processing, to do for movement what a 3d-card does for video.

Now the notion that an apple can run windows to play games strike me as counterproductive to apple claiming 0/SX is better than windows. Ok so for the low end professional, with a spare monitor floating around the house, a mac pro might seem reasonable. The can go to bed telling themselves they have four xenons under thier hood, and they can compress and decompress like monsters. Hell it can perform all the calcs necessary to rebuild the world trade center in about an hour. Great.

But hey, if you want to play SL, want to mess about with photoshop, poser and maya, and even do world class profeessional quality maya-rendered builds in SL-you can do it with a single processor amd, and with the right upgrades, you can do it with all the video bells and whistles maxed.

Of course if you want to run quake four witha screaming framrate, and appreciate cutting edge physics and state of the art video..well you can do that on a $1700 amd, but not on a $2400 mac pro, hell you might not even be able to do it on a $3000 mac pro, and god help you if you don't own a monitor already.

They only myth about macs and gaming is that a mac is a good gaming machine. If what you want to do is make movies on your hom pc...get a mac pro. But please don't insult everyone's intelligence by saying that the mac pro oput of the box is a good gaming rig. Its just not, and really it cannot even be made to be.

I don't buy a new computer every two years. The first computer I've ever bought was a six-year-old Mac G4 that runs brilliantly, still.

While today, I am tearing the guts out of half a dozen six-year-old workstation PC's that can't run Windows2000 without gasping for air.

PC's have to be upgraded every two years, maybe. Unless you are willing to patch after patch them. Macs need upgrading about once every five years, maybe seven - unless you absolutely must be covered by warranty.

Which is what Ulrika said, and opposite to what you said and your examples.

My experience is that ~60% of them make it past the warranty period, but only barely.

Every time people prove her arguments wrong in one area, she goes back to another argument, and every time people prove her arguments wrong in that area, she goes back to the first argument, which was already proved wrong.

ok

we use macs here at the school (imacs )
I have a PC at home and my work laptop is a PC (the software that came with our textbooks only runs on windows and the school system can't afford to redo the whole network)

I can't tell all that much of a difference between them. Now granted I am not a techie by any stretch of the word, but I don't see the differences as being all that worthwhile.

It's the nVidia vendor-proprietary protocol for distributing rendering tasks amongst GPU's. Aaaaaaaaand there's no reason it wouldn't available for a Mac.

I have a P-100 that's god-knows how many years old that still runs brilliantly. It won't run modern software all that well, but I suspect your G4 won't be playing much World of Warcraft any time soon, either (Sorry, couldn't think of another game out for mac at the moment). How long things run isn't the issue.



My bathroom laptop (Don't ask) is a... (counts on fingers) going-on-7-years-old laptop that has ran Windows 2000 most of it's life just dandy, and has run XP on occasion.



PCs, like macs, only HAVE to be upgraded if you want to keep up with all the latest cutting-edge games and such nonsense. For the average joe or jill who browses wikipedia and maybe does some accounting, the whole question is just silly.

If one is using a mac for everything but games, then 5 years is not unreasonable. If one is using a mac for games, it's going to be every 2 years (or less) just like on a PC.

And here is the crux of it - for the average user, there's jack all difference except ease of getting software (which goes to windows), and ease of use (which argueably goes to mac, although being a lifelong PC user and occasional-but-lifelong mac user, I've never found the mac "experience" to be that much slicker, TBH, particularly not since the XP/OSX plateu we are at now, and almost certainly not once Vista goes public).

No reason, no, I agree, but I don't believe it is at the moment.

so would the mac powerbook..its not the processor in a pc that needs upgrading, its not even the memory..I have an 8 year only lap top that runs word perfect just fine and Right now runs the engine management system on my miata. Of course I have bought two new laptops since then..a powerbook and now a HP Pavillion. I liked OS/X but not that much, and I have had no trouble with my pavillion in the year I have owned it.

What does need upgrading is the video cards..technology advances, and hell the games released today have as thier minimum specs the video requirements of two years ago. I accept this. My point is that I can play a bleeding edge game on a PC platform with a basic 1800 investment. I cannot on the mac.

not to turn this into what that other thread was between me and Finning, but i do believe you guys might start having to upgrade every two years or so now that you are using our hardware, and our hardware changes on an almost day by day basis, new macs come out once every two or three years didnt they when they wre all PowerPC's? sure tweaking a few settings here and there along the year or so, but it was still basically the same. now windows XP will run on a 500mhz machine with 512 megs of ram, i've seen it done, it doesnt like it but i've seen it done, and it was still able to be used (sure not for gaming but that always requires new hardware changes), and i have seen a 366mhz P2 run win2k somewhat respectably with a small ram upgrade. now i have done this experiment, take apple's website pick a notebook and price it, then go to alienware with that price you got from apple and compare... which would you play games on? and which would you use in publishing ect... that seems to be the bottomline for the argument here.

Well she's a wiley one for sure, and no friend of mine as most people know, but right is right and wrong is wrong.

She is a mac evangelist, but IMO most of the replies on this thread, despite elaborate attempts to position themselves as "unbiased," are just as evangelical on the other side of the coin.

Personally I do think MS should be very afraid of Apple at this point, and they are showing signs that they are.

They have been choking off their Mac development efforts recently like they used to in the bad old days. Hoping to cripple the platform one suspects.

My mother's Windows XP computer is 5 years old. It still does everything she needs. The web, photoshop, scanning documents, printing documents, and it does things like Google Earth just fine. She can play games from 2001 and earlier just fine as well. No problems at all.

I'm not an evangelist, I am a gamer. I don't hate macs at all. Thye just aren't machines that are good for gaming, nor are they good for most users. To be fair, neither is the dell worstation or the home build copy. Dual Xenon processors are just not what a home user needs. In a small business the argument for macs gets much better. My ofice does use a dula xenon work station as a sever...and with ten users accessig the system at once, it makes sense. But hell, the price difference between a mac and the dell, in terms of the business..is minimal.