I always hear the chant whenever somebody has an issue with their PC or Windows system. Why I don’t buy Apple? Besides old history with a distributor/seller way back in the dark ages, it simply does not make fiduciary sense: You don’t use a Bugatti Chiron to go to Walmart for groceries or load it with sacks of cement from Home Depot for the patio rebuild you are doping this weekend. I just need a basic computer that allows me to surf the web, play World of Tanks and write this blog, I need the equivalent of a “previously used” F-150 and nothing else.
I just captured this from their respective websites:
Basically I can buy 4.5 Dells Inspirons for the price of the cheapest desktop Mac. My computers usually last me 3-4 years easily which means at the Apple price I have computer coverage for over a decade, less if I decided to get bigger monitors rather than keep using the ones I already have.
Mind you, Macs do amazing work if you are in the Audio Visual business. I have a buddy who is a recording engineer (with a Grammy under his belt) and does all his work with Apple, but his regular human use is done on PC because it does not make sense to risk expensive tooling for anything else.
In gun terms, it makes more sense to spend the same money and buy an used Glock 19, 2 spare mags, ammo and take a class than buying a top of the line HK USP 45 and nothing else.
I’d go with Glock vs Kimber. Glocks are bricks, cheap to repair and cheap to buy. Kimber is expensive, beautiful, might or might not be reliable, and you’ll need to pay for technical support if something goes wrong.
Funny, I was just about to make a comparison to Glocks myself;
Apple is like Glock; they were innovative….in the 80’s, and have pretty much just been riding on brand recignition ever since, even though every company under the sun does the same thing they do just as good if not better.
Apple computers certainly are more expensive than PCs. Not as much as the screen captures you show make it out to be; you’re comparing a desktop machine with a low end hard drive and no display to an Apple integrated machine that includes a high end display and has SSD storage. True, if you have no interest in that it’s stuff you are paying for but don’t need.
I like Macs, partly because of how they are designed and partly because of the OS. As an alternative, and for my work, I use Linux. Once every 6 months or so I start up an ancient Windows PC if it can’t be avoided, but I never do real work on Windows.
That low end Inspiron. Ahem. the combination of 4GB RAM and the 1TB spinning platter hard drive tell me it’s a low end system, configured that way to meet a price point. Both desperately need upgrading, or they’ll be dogging.
The basic business desktop we sell at work (what we’ll try to get you into if you don’t have special needs) is an Optiplex, 8GB RAM, i5 (I forget the speed), and a 256GB M.2 SSD. And Win 10 Pro not Home ($100 difference right there). We sell it for a bit over $800.
Computers stopped getting relentlessly cheaper a few years ago, and the way the Walmarts of the world keep up at the low end is by cheaping out on specs.
Having being in IT as a hobby and a profession for 30+ years, I can tell you that the only reason I don’t own an Apple computer is the price. Half of that cost is just the name brand (screw that… never been a brand chaser anyways), and there is nothing an Apple computer can do than a PC cannot when it is setup correctly and w/o Windoze.
I can only speak on my personal experience, of course. 😉 YMMV, grain of salt, yadda-yadda, etc.
I had an Apple laptop and was happy with it; heck, my first PC was an Apple IIe. Then they introduce the App Store for their PCs — and I realized they were leaning towards a “walled garden” for their PCs just like their phones. They haven’t gotten there yet, but give it time.
Now I have a monster laptop from System76 running Linux (for software development), a super-portable one running Windows, and a self-built gaming/development desktop running Windows.
PCs are tools; as long as it does what I need, I’m not too concerned with the name on it. But Apple stopped being competitive (IMHO) years ago.
If everything you do is web based, look at Chromebooks too.
O2
If you want a desktop with separate display rather than a all-in-one system, the Mac Mini is a better comparison point. The lower of the two standard models goes for $799. That’s with solid state storage (NVMe, the high speed successor to regular SSD). A Dell Inspiron with 8 GB memory and NVMD rather than SATA hard drive goes for $599.
I used to have nothing but macs back in the 90’s in my print shop. Late 90’s we got a PC because we started getting some files in that format but for the most part all our graphics were done on Macs. Somewhere in the mid 2000’s we started getting more and more documents on PCs and the design software started performing just as good as the Mac versions. Haven’t had a Mac now since 2006 mostly because the PCs can do the same job (for me) at half the cost.
As the others have noted a Mac Mini is more comparable to an Inspiron than an iMac but the,Apple tax is still in effect. As an IT pro I dislike Apple because of poor interoperability with Windows domains and management tools. I recommend business class PC hardware for the extra reliability and better support, HP Prodesk or Elitedesk and Dell Optiplex. We sell a lot of HP minis for around $6-700 that are very small and quiet with built-in wireless
You get what you pay for. I DO NOT pay for hardware. I pay for the operating system. Apple just happens to make the hardware that is perfect for the OS. Is it more expensive? Yes. And there’s a reason. I have a 2012 vintage 64-bit Mac Mini that has had every single OS upgrade since then. Nary a peep of an issue. It is the BEST interface of ANY operating system. Period.
I have to use Windows for work because that is the default at most companies. But the OS, Windows 10, is a giant piece of shit. It’s predecessor, Windows 8, was a piece of shit. Windows 7 was stable, but Microsoft killed off support for it in January. The last great OS Microsoft released was Windows 2000, and before that NT 3.51. I have upgraded current devices that have been black-screen bricked by one these genius Windows 10 updates that they force on you, whether you want to update or not.
FUCK WINDOWS. And fuck the cheap-ass mass-market piece of shit machines it runs on.