[ Mac] New Users

[Lyris]

Those prices for the Mac Pros are steep - but of course, it's Apple so I was expecting this. I'm not sure why, but it still lingers and means I'm not going to splash the cash just yet...

I'm glad to see they haven't removed Firewire this time though

[CMcK]

Are the new prices really that bad? I'm tying this on a 2 year old iMac Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz 20". This was £900 as a refurb. Compare that to the new model which has a superior CPU, better graphics hardware, double the RAM (which is also faster), a larger HDD, more ports and a faster burner.

Considering the state of the £ vs $ exchange rate we've actually got a reasonable deal with these new models.

US:
Entry-level Mac mini (2.0GHz, 120GB)
US price = $599
Converted to GBP = £425 + 15% VAT = £488.75
Actual UK price: £499

Mac mini (2.0GHz, 320GB)
US price $799
Converted to GBP = £567.58 + 15% VAT = £652.72
Actual UK price £649

Entry-level iMac (20-inch, 2.66GHz)
US price $1,199
Converted to GBP = £851.17 + 15% VAT = £978.84
Actual UK price £949

iMac (24-inch: 2.66GHz)
US price $1,499
Converted to GBP = £1,064.23 + 15% VAT = £1,223.86
Actual UK price £1,199

iMac (24-inch, 2.93GHz)
US price $1,799.00
Converted to GBP = £1,278.61 + 15% VAT = £1470.40
Actual UK price £1,499

iMac (24-inch, 3.06GHz)
US price $2,199.00
Converted to GBP = £1,563.20 + 15% VAT = £1,797
Actual UK price £1,799

Figures courtesy of MacWorld.

[fishbowlhead]

Barring the mac mini, all the model prices have gone down. When you consider what you get out the box alone with iLife 09 and the fact that Osx is so stable and reliable, now faster specs etc. Its not all bad is it.

Although it has to be said, the mac mini really needed the same spec upgrades but at the previous price ?399. It would of gone a long way to converting pc people sitting on the fence.


Still, love my mac and will happily pay the price for it. Plus i can sit safe in the knowledge that i can still use my mac in 5 years time and it will still be as stable and reliable as the day it came out of its box.

[abigsmurf]

The Mac Mini price increase is stupid. It's simply not worth that money. I can build a mATX system with a similar CPU but with more storage and HDMI output for £250

[Brim]

The Mac Mini price is ridiculous.

I really don't care about the currency fluctuations, maybe it's equally stupidly priced in US$'s too.

[Extra Terrestrial]

Are the new prices really that bad?

Yes.

Apple, for the past two or so years, have been rising the price of their products.

I'm not talking about how good the conversion rate for the hardware between the US and UK price points is at the moment - credit to Apple for sustaining that though - it's how they have brought out new products or upgrades like the Mac mini today where the price is being increased.

Sure, the performance will be better than the previous models and so forth but what is the justification of the price hikes for new (and existing) models we have been seeing over the past year or two?

Just 'being' Apple isn't good enough any more.

[fishbowlhead]

Yes.

Apple, for the past two or so years, have been rising the price of their products.

I'm not talking about how good the conversion rate for the hardware between the US and UK price points is at the moment - credit to Apple for sustaining that though - it's how they have brought out new products or upgrades like the Mac mini today where the price is being increased.

Sure, the performance will be better than the previous models and so forth but what is the justification of the price hikes for new (and existing) models we have been seeing over the past year or two?

Just 'being' Apple isn't good enough any more.

Its the old question of you get what you pay for. Not all there products go up remember, the imac and macbooks have gone down and increased in spec. iphone went down as well. mac mini went up though for some inexplicable reason, oh well.


Want something thats cheap and will last 6 months to a year tops? buy a windows pc.

Want an investment and something that will still be working like new after 5 years? pay the premium for a mac.



All comes down to what your personal preferences are at the end of the day.

[ne0star]

I love my Mac as well but I think the New Mac mini is a total jip. You don't even get a mouse and keyboard for that price. With that spec it should be £299 at the most.

[Strolls]

...Want something thats cheap and will last 6 months to a year tops? buy a windows pc.

Want an investment and something that will still be working like new after 5 years? pay the premium for a mac.

Blatant fanboism.

Yes, Macs tend to be better made than PCs, and for me they're worth the premium. But nevertheless I see plenty of PCs that are doing fine after 2, 3 or 4 years.

I paid ?1400 for my dual-proc G5 and in under 3 years both the front firewire port and the graphics card have died. I thought I did really well on my G4, selling it for about ?800 after 3 years of ownership. These failures on my G5 are the sort of thing I'd expect on the cheapest & nastiest of PC World boxes - it really makes me question whether I'll buy a Mac again, because I might as well throw this G5 away for all the resale value it has now. I can live without the front firewire, but the graphics card would be at least ?200 to replace with a 2nd-hand Mac-compatible video card; I can live with using a PC 9800 card and flashing the firmware on it, but it's all very unsatisfying and makes me feel like I'm living with a pile of crap for a computer.

Plenty of people buy Dell laptops for half what they'd pay for the cheapest MacBook. Little old ladies or just the average conservative, sensible adult may well get 3 of 4 years of use out of a PC, but worst case is that if it is dropped by the kids then it can be replaced with the money saved on the original purchase and the replacement will be twice as fast.

At the end of the day, a 4-year old Apple is still a 4 year old Apple, and will be showing its age by that time - e.g. if you had a 4-year-old Apple iBook now then it would be a 1.2ghz G4, shipped with 256meg RAM. I'm not saying that's completely useless, but you would have spent extra money replacing the RAM by now, and in the meantime the buyer of the 2005 Pentium 4 laptop could have bought a CoreDuo two years ago for the same total hardware cost.

I would be inclined to the view that a family with kids downloading Smiley Central, Zango, and all that crap on the family PC may well need to reinstall Windows after 18 months or so, and will need to spend money on someone fixing software bugs & stuff, but that doesn't seem to be the point you're making. "6 months to a year tops" is not a fair representation of a PC's life.

Stroller.

[Brad]

Kinda agree with Strolls. I buy OSX computers, Not Macs. As it turns out I have to* buy a Mac to run that OS so that's what I do. Luckily I've found Macs to be very well made and of higher quality that cheap Dell alternatives although I'm sure once you move into top end Dell / Sony Vaio territory the quality difference is negligible (maybe the price is as well though?).

*Ok, I know there are ways around it. Next laptop I get I'll consider a PC type one that I can put OSX on.

[fishbowlhead]

While i can see your point strolls, im hardly an apple fanboy, i simply appreciate something thats had care and thought put into it.

Ive done pc's most my life barring the last year, and had nothing but problems with them. Sure they run fine for a few months, but then problems start to arise, windows doesn't load properly, programs start randomly crashing, etc etc.
I got sick of spending as much time, if not more, maintaining a pc, keeping it up to date, free from viruses (which is a job in itself) than actually using it for anything practical.
Now switch to my imac, which ive had for just about a year now, and ive not had a single problem, no slowdown, no crashes, no OSX throwing a hissy fit because ive dared to try and work while an update is downloading, just a nice looking machine that sits on my desk and works like its just come out the box.

Macs don't tend to be better made than pc's, they are better made, fact.

Although if you can build, find hardware, that can run OSX for a fraction of the cost, then by all means post it and im all ears, who doesn't want to save money after all.

[Brad]

Often when people say 'PC' they mean 'A computer running Microsoft Windows'. From my experience (I'm a software Engineer) Windows comes in various flavours of ****eness. Some are more ****e than others but they're all ****e. A PC running an alternative OS can provide many years of happy computing without starting to degrade months after the OS is installed.

That's all just my opinion, but I am right ;-)

[fishbowlhead]

Often when people say 'PC' they mean 'A computer running Microsoft Windows'. From my experience (I'm a software Engineer) Windows comes in various flavours of ****eness. Some are more ****e than others but they're all ****e. A PC running an alternative OS can provide many years of happy computing without starting to degrade months after the OS is installed.

That's all just my opinion, but I am right ;-)

As someone who knows more about the code that i ever will whats the difference between them then.

I know OSX is done in UNIX, ive no idea what unix code is though, or is it just that apple actually put some effort and pride into what they program.

Ive no idea what windows or Linux is done in though. A friend of mine (who programs security programs for large companies (hes done some security for some big drug companies for example) uses Linux, is that a stable OS and if so why?


What makes me laugh is that ive been running Sage Line 50 in parallels on my mac (i use it for all my companies accounts and invoicing and cant not use it) and ive had less crashes with it (infact none so far on my mac) than i had i the same amount of time on the windows pc it was on.

[Ginger Tosser]

I'm tempted by the base Mac mini, despite the price being total ****e. I could do with more memory and FW800. Just need John Lewis to stock it though (staff discount and 2 year warranty is the reason!).

[Brad]

As someone who knows more about the code that i ever will whats the difference between them then

Well, MS have done many things over the years to contribute to the current condition of their OS. They are a victim of their own success in many ways although Apple's approach to the same problem (enhancing your OS without breaking existing apps) has worked out much better than MS's.

1. The registry. As it gets bigger / fragemented / corrupted so your performance decreases
2. DLLs. Apps installing new versions of DLLs often break other programs that rely on them.
3. Lack of security initially and then trying to apply increased security by changing the rules later on, finding that that broke a bunch of existing apps so creating the concept of a 'virtual store'

I hate the UI as well but I'll restrict my moaning to the underlying core issues listed above.

The majority of Mac apps are written in a language called Objective-C, which I believe to be the language of the gods (this is subjective I grant you) using a framework called Cocoa, which has evolved yet remained stable for the lifetime of OSX. As a developer it's always hard to know whether to follow any of the trends Microsoft start as they abandon so many of them (because they're bad ideas mostly) e.g. J++ (their own version of java; contested by Sun and ultimately abandoned), VB.NET (largely incompatible with old VB), C# (did we really need another new language? Rhetorical question - we didn't). They abandoned MFC some years ago (it was crap) but have now resurrected it. For Visual C++ .NET 2003 they had some crazy ways of extending the C++ language that they then abandoned in .NET 2005 with an apology (IIRC). They are currently trying to get some language extensions approved for C++ but the only reason they're needed is so that C++ can fit in more nicely with their Common Language Runtime idea; no one else in the world would benefit from this so it's going to get shouted down thankfully.

I won't pretend to know how good or bad the underlying code for their OS is as I've never seen it but I have my suspicions ;-)

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to rant