This is another one of those long comments that turns into a blog post of it’s own. I am responding to my brother Bob’s blog, New Microsoft Ad: Macs are “so sexy” but… This is about the new laptop hunting ads where someone gets $1500 to go find a sweet laptop, which of course rules out Macbook Pros… unless you are me 😉
I agree that the new Macbook Pros look really good, but the best thing about the new macs for me is that they caused a major price drop of the “old” Macbook Pros on Amazon back in December 2008. I picked up a 15″ 2.5 GHz Macbook Pro with 512 MB NVidia video RAM for $1500 on Amazon after rebate. Don’t get me wrong, $1500 still seems like a TON of money to spend on a laptop, but I dare you to match those specs for less — on whatever OS. Of course I wasn’t about to spend $700 more for the new version of MBP with the same specs either (plus I had to have a matte screen — just personal preference).
I like macs and pcs for different reasons. They both have their strong points, and the truth is that I can do what I need to do on either one. So while it looks like there is a huge price difference between the two, if you shop around you’ll find that it’s not as big as you think. I say that, but the deal I got is gone. The same laptop I bought is now back up around $1700 — which is just out of range for the $1500 spending cap in the ad. If you want to look at extremes, the new 17″ Macbook Pro is “insanely” priced at a cool $2700. The laptop hunters should have fun with that one. (Apple, what are you thinking?!?)
Ultimately, I think Windows 7 will even things out quite a bit. I’m already running the beta in a VM on my MBP, and I think Microsoft is headed in the right direction. (If only they would get rid of the whole hide-everything-in-the-registry idea and go with a more stable Unix-based architecture. Just think what all those programmers could come up with if stability was more important than DRM!) Maybe I’m just too practical to really engage in this mac vs. pc thing. It seems to be a lot about personal preference. I like the hardware I chose because it’s fast, light, thin, and has a decent (3 hr) battery. If someone else finds a better deal on something else, good for them. At this point I am a little partial to macs — mainly out of habit and ease of migration. That said, I am seriously considering a PC for a media center.
I know I haven’t done a good job separating hardware and software here, and part of this is because pcs and macs have such different approaches here. With pcs, you have lots of hardware choices, and with macs… well, you don’t. I think it would be really interesting to separate the operating system from the hardware on the mac side of things, and it’s starting to happen. I would like to see more “hackintosh” desktops in the future — non-Apple desktops capable of running OSX. I don’t see a clear winner in the mac vs. pc race, but it’s great to see the user experience improving on both sides. For that reason alone let’s keep the competition going! In the end I hope the winner will be the customer. 🙂
