Replies

Do you swallow every myth you hear, hook, line and sinker?

Certainly not. I haven’t bought into the Mac is superior myth, for instance.

Both Apple's and Microsoft's CEOs were invited to tour the Xerox PARC facility. After the initial tour by Steve Jobs, he asked Xerox for a return visit with some of his engineers. The truth is that Apple PAID Xerox for the 8 hour tour with the engineers and the rights to use what they observed with 1 million shares of pre-IPO Apple stock (worth about $3,000,000 at the time of transfer - Xerox sold it after the IPO for about $15 million). Microsoft did not return for another visit nor did they pay anything to Xerox.

Incidentally, the Apple engineers walked away with absolutely no code or even screen shots of the PARC work. Two years later, Apple hired some of the research engineers that Xerox let go from PARC in an "economy" move.

Which has what to do with anything? I won’t deny that MS is cheap and that they took their look and went forward with their product while Apple did a bit more research and then went forward with theirs.

I also won’t deny that Apple had the better windowed operating system, then and now, although current comparisons have MS catching up (relative to 1986.)

Your claim was that Windows was copied from MacOS. That claim is patently false. Both were copied from the work done at Xerox PARC, initially, and there was plenty of copying between in later iterations.

Cherry picking? I don't think so. We are the ones who are buying the Macintosh software... and we see the prices.

I buy Mac stuff as well. The last time I purchased Adobe software (CS) I paid over $100 more for the Apple version than the PC version.

I just checked at NewEgg and they are charging a few $ more for Apple over PC, but it’s in the noise relative to the price of the software. I’m glad that product, at least, has price parity.

Microsoft Office for Mac from Microsoft's online sales $399.95

Microsoft Office for Windows from Microsoft's online sales $499.95

Nice try. The Professional version of Office 2005 for Mac is 499.95 but it is older software than the $499 version of Office 2007 for the PC. It also doesn’t contain MS Access which is a key component of the software.

Comparable versions of Office are substantially cheaper for the PC.

Right. Mac software is more expensive than Windows software.

Glad you agree!

When you repeat canards that have been proven false time-and-time again, especially when evidence is produced in the very same thread that you are wrong and then you repeat your FUD, you really cannot say that you aren't "knocking the Mac." You are.

Sorry, but I do like the machines, I just find the people that evangelize them as some sort of second coming to be very tiresome and entirely wrong.

The fact is that Apple has been on a roll since 2001. That's six years, Filo.

Yep, they’ve pulled themselves out of a hole. Mostly by selling iPods and other gadgets. They still lag considerably in personal computers and will continue to do so for some time, if not forever.

They had the world in the early 1980s and then they got cute. They came out with a crappy Apple /// (I have one), a deeply flawed Lisa system (I have several) and a proprietary Mac system and abandoned virtually everything that made them an early success.

They went from a massive market share in 1980 to a meager one in 1990 to an almost non-existent one in 2000.

If they’re lucky they may be able to flirt with double digits sometime this decade. I still don’t have that kind of confidence in them, though, since they are still a proprietary shop in an open system world.

When someone else is selling Mac clones or when Mac OS is offered for other platforms I’ll reconsider my opinion of their corporate strategy.

When do you think you might put a "Buy" on Apple stock, Filo?

I’m more of a buy low sell high kind of investor. Buying now doesn’t fit that strategy.

If they do what I said above I’ll buy.

Did you not just say you did indeed say both?

Yes, but not in the context(s) you imply.

We have continually provided hard facts and price comparisons of as close to equally equipped computers showing that Macs are either less expensive or comparable to the PCs prices and you continue to spout nonsense about $500 computers being somehow comparably useful as $2500 workstations.

My point exactly. I never said that a $500 computer was of comparable usefulness to a $2500 workstation. I said that my wife, as a specific example, doing her job could be just as productive on the $1K PC we just bought as she would be on the new $3K Mac workstation she wants.

That’s quite a bit different than you represent.

So you allege that Mrs. Filo could be just as productive on a $1,000 single dual core computer as she could be on a $3,000 dual dual core computer?

I don’t allege it, I state it categorically. I know what she does (which puts me at an advantage in this discussion, don’t you think?) and the extra performance she’ll gain from the extra cores will yield her no more than a few seconds a day at her job.

I don't think so.

A perfect sentence for the first three words, then you went and ruined it. . . ;-)

If she does any rendering, transforming, apply any filters, then the dual dual will be much faster making Mrs. Filo more productive.

If she were doing that kind of thing often she’d certainly benefit from the speed. She’s not doing most of it at all and the rest she does so infrequently as to make the speed gains irrelevant.

The main reason she needs a new machine is because her old laptop doesn’t have the hard drive space. With the tower we can dump in extra hard drives as she needs them. Of course, the new PC she has could be upgraded with a multi-terabyte RAID and we’d still be well under the price she’ll pay for the Mac Pro.

When I was doing graphic arts production, I charged about $100 per hour. The difference in price of those two computers is a mere 20 hours of work... it would not take too long of me twiddling my thumbs waiting for the slower machine to complete some rendering over the useable lifetime of those two computers to waste the short sighted, false economy purchase of a much slower computer... and after that I am eating productive time while I twiddle.

You clearly don’t have a lawyer’s mentality. If you used a Mac Classic to do your work you’d be a rich man, charging by the hour. . . :-D

We've already shown you that trying to duplicate that Mac Pro in the Windows world actually can cost you almost a $1000 MORE than the fully configured price of a Mac Pro... so to duplicate the power and functionality of the Mac Pro in a PC is considerably more expensive... I really cannot understand your assertion that a $1000 computer can match either one of those.

It all depends on what you do.

And taking a single vendors offering in comparison isn’t a fair comparison. I could build a workstation class machine for far less than Dell or Apple will sell it to me. I can get any number of other vendors to do that build for me.

With Apple I can buy from Apple or I can buy from Apple. . .

If what you claim is true and that she can do her job with a less powerful computer, since she is a Mac person, buy her a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz iMac with a 24" screen, 320GB HD, and an ATI Radeon Pro HD-2600 256MB Graphic card for $1799. Have one of you enroll in a college course for a semester and buy it for $1699. Add a couple of external 320GB Firewire II drives (I just bought one for $97 at Fry's) and Max out her RAM with memory from Crucial and save yourself $1200.

That’s certainly an option. My $1,800 will get me pretty much exactly what I got for $1K on the PC side with a lesser video card than I have. Actually, to be fair, the 24” monitor would set me back another $350 or so.

Unfortunately I’ll probably still end up with the tower. Mac folks are into status that way. . .

Besides, as I’ve said, it’ll end up being a business expense.

And by the way, you should NEVER shop at Fry’s. They are thieving bastards and should have been run out of business long ago.

And taking a single vendors offering in comparison isn’t a fair comparison. I could build a workstation class machine for far less than Dell or Apple will sell it to me. I can get any number of other vendors to do that build for me.

OK... let's see you put together a PC parts list and prices with the following:

2 - 5150 Woodcrest 2.66GHz Dual Core Xeon Processors.
ASUS Grade dual 771 socket motherboard with Dual 1.33GHz FSB.
250GB 7200rpm 3GB/S 8M cache hard drives or better.
1GB (two 512MB) of 667MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM or better.
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of GDDR2 SDRAM (single-link DVI / dual-link DVI)
960 Watt or better Power Supply
16x DVD/RW double layer optical drive
Dual Gigabit ethernet ports
Firewire2 and USB2 ports
keyboard with USB2 ports
Optical mouse with multiple buttons and scroll (ball preferably)
64 bit OS
High quality aircraft grade aluminum metal case.

Any supplier, any builder. Try and keep it under the $2499 price of the Mac Pro.

While you are at it, you might price out similar software for the PC that comes on the Mac free.

It may be possible now... I haven't tried to duplicate Anandtech's attempt to match the Mac by scratch building from available parts in almost a year... but they couldn't do it and I couldn't. I'd be quite interested if you can.

And by the way, you should NEVER shop at Fry’s. They are thieving bastards and should have been run out of business long ago.

What did they steal? Can you find a 320GB external Firewire2 drive for $97 in a brick and mortar store somewhere else?