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Originally Posted by BeanoNYC  The guy starts a thread because he's excited about his new mac and you go and piss in his cheerios....come on, don't be a Debbie Downer. What anti-virus program do you run on your pc? |
Don't mean to degrade the original statement, I just get frustrated with anti-Windows Apple fanboys that treat Mac ads as gospel. If you like Mac better than Windows, fine. I'm happy it works for you. But that doesn't mean it's the superior system.
BitDefender, by the way. As a backup for my built-in Common Sense software.
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Originally Posted by ckofer What has become nice for everybody is that $1500 will get you a very productive computer-regardless of the platform. |
Agreed. All systems have their strong points.
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Originally Posted by wa-loaf Don't know where you are looking, but prices aren't that out of wack. Laptop prices are pretty close to their PC counterparts in price. iMacs are all-in-ones and carry a slight premium over a similarly specd desktop. Mac Pros are exactly that, you shouldn't be buying them as an email web surfing machine. |
Depends on what your criteria are for a laptop. $300 was the differential for as close as I could match Dell to Apple for the low-end Mac, not sure what it goes to at the higher end. The Air is a niche market that doesn't have a Windows counterpart. My sticking point is dedicated graphics, though; I don't particularly care what the processor speed is in a laptop. You can get dedicated graphics in a Windows laptop for less than $900, on a Mac you need to get to the MacBook Pro, at $2K for dedicated graphics. Maybe it isn't as important on a Mac, or maybe integrated graphics have become a lot better in the last couple years, but it's my criteria for the floor of what I'm willing to get. Again, that's just me. Incidentally, I was reading something earlier today about how Mac has an operating margin of around 19%, Dell is at 6%. Not sure on the exact number, but the magnitude of the difference should be about right.
As you may have been able to figure out, I'm not quite the target audience for either Apple or Microsoft. From here on out I build my own desktops, configured toward the high end (8GB of RAM and dual video cards, but still under $1K for my new PC.) I'm a gamer (beyond solitaire, at least) and engineer, so the solution is obvious: dual boot Windows and Linux. I tried just going Linux, but it was just too much work to get everything working just right that was meant for Windows. At the same time, there is software that I'm intending on using that is only available for Linux, namely OpenFOAM. I'll be getting a new laptop sometime this summer, probably, for use on ski weekends next year. Waiting for the AMD Turion Ultra system to come out, which promises some pretty nifty power saving features.
Honestly, I don't mean to threadjack, and to each his own. But that means allowing me to be happy with Windows, too.