But…

There is true that if you want a car, you will buy it for your needs, not after the price, in the first place. So, if you move furniture, you will buy a "Linux", if you want just a ride with your family, try a "Win Me", but, if you want to tune up a truck, to search for a better sound of your "engine", you can do it with every "OS". And, of course, to look slick and bling, get the latest "Air", but will not make you smarter.

So, tunning up a Beetle to look and speed up like a Veron, it is a challenge. Good work for making a crappy system to work with a such good OS. Really, working with Leopard it is more flawless then any other Windows. That's all.

I recently priced a top of the line iMac in NZ. The price difference for comparible hardware alone was over $1000NZ. By spending the same amount of money I got a WAY MORE POWERFULL PC than I could have ever got in Mac terms. This is not to say I hate Mac's, I simply dont see them as being a practical option when it comes to spending my money. Before you burn me at the stake, I own both an iPod and an iPhone. Both are wonderful devices, but as having been mentioned here earlier, these devices are not the best in their field.

At the end of the day, Mac's are for people that want it to simply work, dont want to know how it works. Dont want the hassles of spyware and virus's (this is really negated by the fact if your not an idiot, neither of these will ever really affect you). And they are happy with having an apple logo on their devices instead of a colored flag.

End of the day, the choice is yours and yours alone, much like buying a car. Do not be too quick to point out to others flaws in their choices, because not everyone likes the same things or has the same requirements.

However I came across something today that reminded me of this discussion so i came back to it.

It's no secret that different companies operate at different profit margins on similar products. You can buy $100 Nikes or $50 new balances and get shoes that are virtually the same quality.

at least nike makes a quality shoe

a good example of the mp3 player comparison – http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/06/creative-zen-stone-plus-officially-in-4gb-for-90/

is the creative zen stone. which is approx. the same size as the shuffle. but for $10 more you get 4x the memory of the shuffle, and a display.

some people look at this from the perspective that you're 'buying' the apple brand'….other people consider it a rip-off considering the high markup apple charges for a mp3 player that's inferior in virtually every way.

120 million people didn't buy ipods because they were technically better or a better value than other players. most of their sales are due to effective marketing. the growing user base provided more of a market for accessories which brought more vendors into the market providing accessories – which finally is the reason i bought one (and in my opinion, the one and only thing ipod has over any other mp3 player). You said it yourself: "by all means look at other MP3 players that has more value for your money. "

No, you are not comparing apple to apples. If you want to compare apples to apples, compare the cost of buying a hard drive from Apple to that from Dell or HP. And what prevents you from installing that cheaper HD from CompUSA or Fry's into a Mac? What prevents you from installing those cheaper memory into a Mac? Mac uses standard DIMM, Firewire, SCSI, USB2, PCI, PCIx, IDE, EIDE, AGP and Bluetooth. It doesn't matter whether you have Dell, HP or Apple install those memory or HD, it will always be cheaper if you buy them yourself and install them yourself. Get with the times. There are very few proprietory components in a Mac that you HAVE to purchase from Apple. The only one I can think of right now is the dual dvi output graphic card that is needed to run their 30 inch monitor. Otherwise you can install any EIDE HD and memory (that meets the MB specs). The only two limitation I know of is in the graphic card choices and internal CD/DVD burner. There are very few low end graphic cards for a Mac. But their high end cards are only slightly more expensive than their PC counterparts. And iDVD software only works (this may longer be true with iLife 08) with the brand of internal CD/DVD drive that came with the Mac (usually a Sony or Pioneer). However the Mac can use nearly any external Firewire or USB2 drive and third party burning software will recognize nearly any internal drive. After all, Mac with Intel chips can run Windows XP or Vista. You can't get more PC compatible than that.

The slightly (if any) extra cost of components is nothing compare to the extra cost of constantly maintaining and running anti-spam and anti-virus software on a PC. To Mac users, the cost and performance hit you get from using anti-spam and anti-virus software is nothing but a tax that PC users must pay.

The only reason why PC users thinks it more expensive to own a Mac is because they don't know any better.

This is why PC owners don't like to buy Macs. So yeah, I compared the same hardware to the same hardware and guess what…Macs are just darned expensive.

It reminds me of a certain NLE vendor who used to charge $900 for their 9GB hard drive that otherwise had a street value of $100. Why? Because customers didn't know any better.

My two bits.

If you want to build your own computer and you enjoy doing that sort of thing, there's no doubt that you can build a PC that have a better price / performance ratio than a Mac. But to be fair, that PC you build will also have a better price / performance ratio than a Dell, Hp and Alienware. So why complain about Apple being too expensive? Why don't you compare the price / performance ratio of a Mac or iMac to a comparable Dell, Hp or Alienware. You may be surprise at what you find out. If your time is worth anything at all, your cost savings of building a PC will not be worth it. Buying a Mac, Dell, or HP is the better and cheaper way to go. Unless you need some sort of specialize PC. I know you can build a gamer machine at 50% the cost of a comparable Alienware. It just may not look as nice. If you want to complain about an Apple computer being more expensive than building a white box, do it yourself PC, then you should also be complaining that a Dell, HP or Alienware computer is also more expensive than that DIY PC. I also notice that most build it yourself PC guys (or gals) never include the price of the OS in their cost. (I know I didn't when I was building them) It just so happens that most of them (me included) have an "extra" license of the OS needed, hanging around.

In the good old days building your own PC was the way to go. Technology was advancing at such a pace that a PC became obsolete in 6 months. But now, even though technology is still advancing, it's advancing in big steps rather than the small incremental steps of the old days. You no longer upgrade graphic cards from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16MB and so on. You no longer go from 14 to 28 to 54K modems. You no longer upgrade your chip from a 90 to 100 to 120 to 133 to 166mhz Pentium. And then to a P2 and all their incremental Mhz increases. And so on through a P3 and P4. The steps now are much bigger and farther apart. No one upgrade a chip base on small increases of ghz anymore. Any meaningful chip upgrades now requires a complete change of MB. The computer you buy (for $699 and up) or build now will not need to be upgraded for years. Now of days, a PC upgrade cycle is based on software (thinking Vista here) rather than hardware advances. If you're not into gaming or video editing, you don't need anything faster than an old 2ghz P4. Providing you can survive with XP.

Yes. Apple makes a server. Xserve with dual Zeon. Look it up. A better deal than a comparable Dell.

ATX form factor may be used in cheaper PCs from Dell or HP. But buy a $3000 work station and I bet you can't just drop in a $50.00 ATX PS. You may not even be able to use the slower but cheaper memory modules. (I'm talking latency not Mhz) If parts are that much cheaper in the PC world, then Dell should be able to sell a PC that is comparable to a $2500 MacPro at a much lower price. But they don't. And if they can, then isn't it Dell that is way over priced?

Complaining about the price of a power supply for a laptop is just petty. Neither Dell or Apple are in the business of making money by selling "marked up" power supplies for laptops. Dell can sell their replacement PS at a lower cost because they sell more laptops in a quarter than Apple does in a year. Thus Dell can order in larger quanity. This result in a lower cost for their PS. It is not a matter of Apple "marking up" their PS more than Dell. They both probablly "mark up" their PS the same amount. It's just that Dell has a lower base cost to start with. And if you ever seen a PS for an Apple laptop, it's a far cry from the brick you get from Dell. Well worth the extra cost. And to be fair, many PS for laptops has the battery charging monitoring circuit in it. This drives up the cost of the PS for certain laptops models. It doesn't matter whether it's a Dell, HP or Apple.

PC owners are use to thinking the Microsoft way of "improving" an OS. That is to just add more and more lines of codes. Sure this slows down the PC. But upgrading computers in the PC world is cheap. Apple way of thinking is to write better codes. It's not a matter of an old OS being "flawed" but new programers finding more creative ways to write more efficient lines of codes. Good programing is an art not a science. Rather than call an older version of an Apple OS "flawed", I rather think of it as the best the programers, at the time, could come up with. Remember, the OS is just that layer of software that links the computer programs to the hardware (by way of the BIOS). The better the OS is written for the hardware the more efficiently the programs runs on it. This is the advanage Apple has over MS. Apple doesn't have to worry about thousands of "cheap and better" upgrade parts. I never, ever had to go on the interet to find a new "driver" for anything on a Mac because I loaded a new OS.

When MS went from 98 to 2000 they got rid of DOS. This is why there was a mark improvement in performance. 2000 is based on MS NT. This goes to show you that the OS does affect the performance of your PC. NT codes are written more efficeintly than DOS codes. But MS NT was still 10 year old techonology when 2000 came out. There is no performance improvement for the average PC user when switching from XP32 to XP64. XP64 is mainly for servers using a 64 bit Zeon or AMD? (I forgot) chip. I'm not even sure if you can even load XP64 into a PC with an Intel 32 chip. I know AMD makes 64 bit chips for consumers PC but all of Intel consumer chips are 32 bit. As far as I know, there aren't any consumer PC programs of any kind that is written for or can take advanage of XP64.(There may be by now, but a bit late for XP). The only true 64 bit system for consumers that I know of, was Apple OS 10.4 (Tiger) for a G5 chip. And there were programs written that took advantage of it. If you don't understand it, then it is "MAGIC".

To call an iPod the worst value to performance MP3 player is way off. What you may consider added "value" to a MP3 player, others may see it as a waste. There's no such thing as a free lunch. You may want user replaceble batteries. But this increases the size of the player. Want a larger screen or more capacity? Then prepare to have a shorter battery life. If you don't need a FM radio or in line recorder then they are not missing features or even features at all. There is no "value" to things you don't need. Just like there's no added value in having a $300, 256MB graphic card in a server. I'm sure that 120 million people didn't buy iPods because it's the worst value to performance MP3 player. I'm not saying that the iPod is perfect for everybody. If you need built in FM radio, in-line recording, replaceable batteries, a larger screen, more capacity, ect. then by all means look at other MP3 players that has more value for your money. But the fact that there are 10's of thousands of accessories for an iPod is "value" in itself and should be included in your "value to performance" formula. Don't you think?

Sorry, I should've clarified what I meant about upgrade parts in the last post. I should've said "cheaper or better cost/performance ratio." I think that for the pc world.. if you're building a high end performance system – you pay slightly less for a certain level of performance (graphics, cpu, etc) than you would get from the mac side of things. This savings might only be 5-10% over buying a mac of approximate equal performance. however I'm also looking at this from the perspective of a system builder -

If I want to build a cheap "bare essentials" pc to serve as a ssh proxy tunnel/vpn endpoint and home automation web server in my house – I can buy a low end pc or build one w/ a cheap mb, small hard drive, and a $8 graphics card. I could even save the cost of the windows OS by installing linux. On the mac side of things the cheapest i can go is probably a mac mini ($600?) which is way more than i need for that application. Or – if i want to go high end, and make a server with a couple raid cards and several TB of data ….is there any way to do this on the mac side of things? (they dont even make 'server' class machines?). Larger numbers of pc hardware/os computers and more people using the platform – means theres a larger motivation for hardware and software companies to develop for the platform. Thus making the market more competitive, lowering cost, and giving you a better chance of finding some obscure piece of hardware/software you've been looking for.

My rolls royce example works fine if we're talking about the same part. say you're pricing regular, steel brake rotors for a rolls vs an escort vs a midrange foreign car (how about a mitsubishi eclipse). They're all just machined pieces of steel, but because of market demand vs supply – the prices vary from several hundred dollars for the rolls, to about $100 for the eclipse, to less than $30 for the escort. This example holds true in the computer world when we're talking about things like power supplies /cases or even sometimes things like mainboards. I don't know if you can throw a standard atx power supply in a mac pro should yours go bad – but i guarantee you apple will charge 4x the price for the same quality of power supply that you could buy elsewhere for a pc. power supplies are a commodity item for pc's though. However, even if we compare proprietary power supplies – I paid $30 for a second ps for my dell laptop – a quick ebay search shows $60 for a macbook adapter. There's no reason for this other than apple's markup.

the way things go with computers nowadays – basically doubling in speed every year – it hardly ever makes sense to upgrade a processor w/o upgrading the mainboard which for most people just means buying a new computer. a processor is as fast as it is (well, unless you overclock it)- if you gain speed in your machine just by upgrading the operating system – then there was something flawed with the operating system you had installed before. sure maybe you gained speed going to a newer OS in the mac world. That's just admitting they made an inferior product. I'm sure not going to brag about how i gained speed and reliability upgrading from windows 98 to windows 2000. or how on my amd machine i gained speed from upgrading winXP x32 to winXP x64. That's my own fault for not installing the right OS to take advantage of the 64 bit processor in the first place…not the MAGIC of a new/better operating system.

oh.. let me elaborate on my mp3 player/ipod example. The ipod is about the worst value to performance you can get in a mp3 player out there. However- i own one. Two years before i got my ipod – i bought another brand that had the same storage capacity, plus a fm tuner and line in recording. The only advantage (to me) the ipod had over my previous player – was compatibility and the vast amount of accessories available. (aside from that – the ipod is smaller and has a nicer interface). literally hundreds of companies make ipod accessories and the selection is amazing. My car stereo has a dock connector interface that will charge the ipod and let me control it from the stereo itself. my home stereo has a dock w/ remote to do the same thing. I have an armband case for the gym and if i wanted to there are even waterproof cases and headphones for swimming. a waterproof case is an obscure part that i've only ever seen made for one or two other mp3 players besides the ipod. sure most people dont need to take their ipod swimming or could care less if the track names show up on their stereo. just like alot of people just use their laptops for word email and web browsing and could care less about some of the hardware and software options available for pcs that aren't for macs. but I like flexibility and choices and i want to be able to do more with the products i buy. we can argue all day about which is better pc vs mac or ipod vs 'brand x' but in the end for me it comes down to which is more functional for the things i want to do now or might want to do in the future

You need to compare apples to apples. You can't compare parts available for a Rolls Royce to parts available for a Beetle. That's like comparing availble hardware upgrades for a MacPro (or Power Mac) to a $399.00 Dell. Sure the owner of the $399.00 Dell has thousands of "cheap and better" hardware upgrade paths. But the owner of a $2500.00 Dell or HP or Alienware don't have anywhere near thousands of "cheap and better" hardware upgrade paths. Who in their right mind would put a $50.00, 8MB graphic card in an Alienware PC. Or need to install a $10.00 sound card into a $2500 PC. What $2500 PC doesn't already come with built in Ethernet, modem, USB2, soundcard, Bluetooth, wireless, CD/DVD burner, ect. 90% of the thousands of "cheap and better" upgrade parts availble for PCs' would be a downgrades for a $2500 PC. Your choices for upgrading a $2500 PC is nearly the same as your choices for upgrading a $2500 Mac Pro (Power Mac). And upgrades for firewire, bluetooth, 801.1n and DVI output don't count because a Mac already has them built in. In the PC world, changing out a CD player for a CD burner, adding a real graphic card or adding USB2 are consider some of the thousands of availble "cheap and better" upgrades.

Plus the "upgrade" mentality of PC owners is going the way of the dinosaur. Nearly half of all computers sold now are non user upgradable laptops. And half of the desktop are sold to businesses. These business PCs will never, ever have their case open. (Except for maybe memory upgrades.). That leaves about 25% of the computers sold that may be "upgraded" in their 3 years life span. And a good percentage of these are computers that sold for less that $600.00 and needs to be "upgraded" as a matter of necessity rather than choice. I don't care how many thousands of "cheaper and better" hardware options there are in the PC world, it's still not enough for you to be able to "upgrade" a 2 year old, $399.00 PC to run Vista (short of replacing the chip and MB). On the other hand I can get my older Macs to run faster and better just by upgrading to the newest OS. See if you can do that in your PC world.

there is something to be said about a product's higher initial quality – but many people dont like closed, proprietary systems. your comparison needs to be made with "volkswagen beetle, jeep cherokee, or honda civic" in place of "ford escort" due to the huge number of aftermarket parts for those cars, huge communities of enthusiasts, and cheap replacement parts.

the reason windows is my operating system of choice is the same reason the ipod is my mp3 player of choice – the 3rd party market w/ all its options. I don't like limitations. It'd be nice to have a Lamborghini but not when it breaks and i have to fly in parts from italy.

in the pc world – there are way more options for better cheaper hardware. apple cant touch the variety of options available in hardware or software. I know alot of pc software will run on macs now but the reliability still isn't the same as running pc hardware on a pc platform. I have an ipod because i like the fact that accessories are everywhere – it interfaces well with my home stereo and car stereo. nothing else has that level of compatibility.