It’s always fun to watch Apple and Microsoft slug it out in the advertising space – here in the UK we mostly have to do this via YouTube, since apart from a short stint of amusing Mitchell and Webb Apple ads and those pretty bland “I’m A PC” ripostes, we don’t really see the front-line assaults which take place on US TV screens.
So I hear that MS have a new set of ads out, where “regular” people go and look for a laptop, whereby they look at the Mac and say “whoah, far too expensive!” and then go and buy a Dell instead. Fair enough, the 3rd party PC market certainly gives you a wider choice of blending specifications than Apple does – in practice, Macs aren’t actually much different in price to a similarly specced PC, it’s just that all the components are generally of similar ‘grade’ – so you can’t cut corners to save money like buying something with a big screen but a crappy GPU, or a large HD with a slow motherboard, or a fast CPU but crappy battery life. Of course, many people don’t realise they’re making these sacrifices and just look at the price – but if you do know what you’re doing, you can tailor a machine closer to your needs. Anyway, I enjoyed the “Homeless Frank” spoof of these new ads:
A couple of years ago I would have made the same arguments against the Mac that MS makes with it’s Laptop Hunter series; and indeed I did, when a Mac-owning friend tried to convince me to buy one, despite being a .Net guru (who now works for Microsoft!). However, now that I’ve owned a Mac for almost 2 years, I feel completely different – in a laptop at least, I’m very willing to sacrifice a little configuration flexibility in favour of having a device that is of uniformly good quality, and is nice to use. After all, laptops are always compromised in terms of upgradability once you’ve bought them, so it’s generally better to buy something decent from the outset anyway.
I know that buying a Mac laptop is going to encourage me to spend a little more money than I otherwise might get away with. But, what I get for that is a really nice device, that has the added bonus of being able to run OS X as well as Windows. I still use Windows every day, almost exclusively because of Visual Studio these days (and some games) since everything else I use runs on the Mac too anyway, but running both Windows and OS X on the same machine merely serves to make me love OS X more, despite still being a newbie with it in many ways. Windows is fine to use and all, but there’s something about the way OS X just gets out of the way, doesn’t pester me with stupid warnings all the time, doesn’t need a virus scanner to slow it down, allows me to unmount my USB drives without hunting down every Explorer window that is using it first, and countless other little things that have slowly endeared me to it despite being a total skeptic to begin with. I’m a technical guy by nature, but even I can appreciate technology that doesn’t waste my time with trivial stuff I don’t want to care about – and at the end of the day Windows (and Linux) still feels like it’s designed for “PC users”, whilst OS X feels like it’s designed for people, specifically people with stuff to do other than worrying about keeping the computer happy. The day that XCode equals Visual Studio in functionality (it’s not far off, but it’s not there yet), and I can run Steam on OS X, is the day I might seriously consider not using Windows on a daily basis anymore. But, we’ll see whether Windows 7 changes that view.
May 15th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
One day I aspire to have enough money to have a MacBook Pro. But I’ll have to do with my Dell for now, can’t afford that initial premium. Same way how I drive a car from ’93
(though it is a Toyota Corolla, which rules)
Enjoyed Windows 7 so far, works better on my 5 year old Dell laptop than Vista does (though I spec’ed it with a ATI 9200 at the time, glad I did!)
Poor homeless Frank, would rather have used a more expensive face shield to sleep on the streets with huh.
May 15th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
It’s a known fact that Toyota Corollas will outlast the human race. Fallout 3 should have licensed them for extra authenticity.
I’d slowly been getting more expensive with my laptops anyway – my last before the Mac was a Sony Vaio, because the screen was awesome – even so the Mac stretched my budget (and they’re cheaper now), and had it not been for the fact that I was buying it to help with Ogre development so I could use my company funds, I wouldn’t have bought it. Now I’ve had one, I’d definitely save up a little longer to buy one over a regular laptop in future.
May 15th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I’ve been a MBP user since November now. I got to agree, the OS in some way is just awesome and I never ever want to go back to Windows, unless I have to. I’m forced to work on windows at my current day job, which is a pain (made extremely worse by Citrix btw). Almost 100% of my time I’m on OS X now, as I hardly ever find the time to play games anyway. All the other stuff I do is Java-development which is completely Microsoft independent! Wohoo!
There’s just one thing about OS X that really bothers me: File handling simply isn’t as easy and comfortable as with Windows Explorer. Maybe I simply don’t know how to do it right or I need to get even more used to it, but even after more than half a year of working on a Mac I still can’t get around file handling in Finder. Any thoughts?
May 15th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Couldn’t agree more. I started using OSX at work since we’re encouraged to support both platforms equally. I’ve always liked how slick OSX looked. However, I realized I was now forever hooked on Apple when I came to the conclusion that OSX simply pissed me off less on a day to day basis than Windows or Linux does. The moments of my being upset at my operating system are less frequent, which is worth the premium as far as I’m concerned.
Now, if XCode was closer to VS, more games worked natively on it, and they changed the stupid behavior of dragging one folder into another completely deleting the destination and fully replacing it with the moved one and MERGED them instead like Windows does I would be a very, very happy man. These annoyances and others aside, my quality of life has definitely gone up by using Apple, since I’m now happier more of the time.
May 15th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
@Martin: The main thing to get used to is that you don’t have a tree on the left-hand side, you’ve got a shortcut bar instead (incidentally Vista copies this by default, but doesn’t quite do it as well). I’ve dragged all my common locations into my sidebar so I find it pretty easy to get about, and if you need to drag something into a nested folder, then all you do is drag onto the entry, and in a second or two a window pops up allowing you to drill down, which works fine on demand. If you need a deeper structure because you’re doing repeated copies, I usually hit CMD-N to open a new window and switch to the tree view, then drag between windows – Finder is generally happier using multiple windows to keep ‘state’ rather than the file treeview as in Windows, and I actually think it’s more intuitive that way, it’s just we’ve got used to the sidebar tree.
Oh, the other issue I guess is displaying file details (date, size etc) alongside, I use the tree view for that because the icon & three-column view don’t show that (unless you hit CMD-I).
Single best feature in Leopard is quick look: select anything at all and press ‘Space’. Invaluable.
@Eric: oh yes, the ‘overwrite folder’ issue is the single biggest gotcha on the Mac for sure, I came a serious cropper over it. It’s the only case of unintuitive behaviour that I can think of – well, I guess actually strictly speaking it makes sense, but we’ve just been conditioned that copy means ‘merge’ by now. It makes it worse that it isn’t undoable (except via Time Machine). Wish they’d fix that!
May 15th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
I hate to rain on the “mac is teh aewsum” parade, but everybody I know, given 1-1.5k, would take a PC over a Mac. I’m glad you pointed out the notion of actually looking at the specs. I’ve done this quite a lot in the past, and I think its unfair to say that “PC laptops are cheap and their parts equally so”, this is simply not true. Lots of manufacturers create different PC laptops, and with such variety in the marketplace, they have competitive pricing, its how business works. Take a look into any software store and compare the PC section to the Mac section, there is a definate difference in size and diversity. I’m not saying that Macs are totally bad, I think having a set hardware and software increases the software quality because the conditions are known well in advance. However, if anybody came up to me and handed me 1.5k to buy a laptop, its a definate no brainer. Finding a PC laptop with a good graphics card, high screen resolution, HDMI output, good processor, ram, etc. for this price is easy to do. The same can’t be said for Mac laptops. A quick browsing of newegg.com will confirm this.
May 16th, 2009 at 12:16 am
@KungFoo – I won’t argue that for the most part that is true and you’ll usually pay some premium for Mac laptops. However one variable that I’ve found to usually suffer in the comparisons that you’re listing is Battery Life. Most of the cheaper but powerful Windows laptops that favorably compare in specs to the MBP that I’ve looked at fall apart when you compare real-world battery life. Not to say there isn’t a laptop out there that has the specs, battery life, isn’t made of plastic, and still comes in $500 or more cheaper, I just think that they’re rare and I personally haven’t seen them. My current MBP is the longest lasting day-to-day battery life of any laptop I’ve owned by a factor of 2 and I’ve had many similarly spec-ed laptops before (relative to the rest of the industry at the time I bought them), from multiple manufacturers.
May 16th, 2009 at 1:56 am
Apple doesn’t even sell the two configurations of computers that I’m actually interested in. Specifically:
1.) a midrange desktop that’s upgradeable.
2.) a low price netbook
The cost of 1+2 is about the same as a midrange laptop except your portable computer is far more portable and your desktop computer is far more capable (read faster). According to Apple, everyone should just have a laptop and be happy about it.
May 16th, 2009 at 10:21 am
@KungFoo: well, you misquoted me anyway – I didn’t say all PC laptops were cheap & nasty at all. What I did say is that if you actually try to buy a PC that is equivalent to the specifications of a Mac, you really won’t save *that* much money. And I mean the whole deal – weight, size, build quality, battery life as well as the usual suspects of HD, CPU, GPU etc. When you take the whole deal into account, the premium you’re paying is not as big as all that, and it’s 100% worth it for the ability to run OS X. As I say, I was a typical PC-owning skeptic too before, balking at the price – even though I was buying what I considered to be ‘premium’ PC laptops. In the end owning a Mac completely changed my opinion.
I agree with Eric that my MacBook (when running OS X anyway) beats any other laptop I’ve owned on battery life by a factor of 2, yet while still running a swanky interface, building code etc. I’m not quite sure how it does it, given that Vista drains my battery twice as fast even with Aero disabled. Also, it’s far lighter than any other ‘power’ laptop I’ve had. And I love the trackpad, beats any other one I’ve used. And the LED backlighting is awesome. And the remote is great for presentations. And the sleep / wakeup function is loads faster than Windows so it’s better when I need to move about.
It’s really all about the little things. I think it’s hard to justify to anyone who hasn’t actually used one – I was exactly the same as you when my MBP-owning friends tried to convince me; I was happy with my pretty swish Vaio (which at the time had the best screen & GPU combo I’d seen, for a good price). Now I’ve owned a MBP, I would *definitely* buy them again over any other laptop – it’s really that simple. I honestly think that to give an objective opinion about the merits of Mac or PC laptops, you have to have used both for a decent amount of time. Only then can you really know which one is for you. Except of course, the Mac price makes it hard to make that first leap of faith, because it is higher, and it’s really high-quality everything or nothing
I owe it to Ogre for pushing me over that edge, and now I don’t want to go back.
@btmorex: sure, so don’t buy a Mac
The typical argument is that Apple are a ‘premium’ brand, which means they’re unlikely to go after the netbook market, but I think eventually they will; but the balance isn’t quite there yet. Personally, I dont’ want a netbook – I like a powerful but portable laptop as well as my upgradeable desktop, and the MBP is lighter, thinner and more powerful than any previous laptop I’ve owned so I’m extremely happy with it.
May 17th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
So your desktop is really a PC with XP or Vista XP dual boot and later will be windows 7(may be without dual boot cuz of XPM).
Now that is why I like Desktop due to upgradability. But Laptops I agree are a different story and MacBook scores there.
May be Ubuntu based laptops if done right may change that.Who does not like openness.