Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Monopoly (Apple MacBookPro) vs Competition (Dell Latitude)

After about 30 years of brainwashing the macfans somehow believe that the price for Apple products is equal to or at most marginally higher than the price for products on a free/open market - let's take a closer look at that - now that both Dell and Apple are shipping their similar models (but with the distinction that Dell only announced them when it was possible to ship - and not months in advance only to create some media noise - like Apple did).

So we will compare two very similar top-level configurations - generally speaking the hardware level is a little on the overkill side and while with Apple you have VERY little choice, with Dell you can get a cheaper CPU (also with less heat than the Apple machine, that can not be hold on your lap) and you will pay less. Also with Dell you can go to a HIGHER configuration - for instance you can get 4 GB of RAM - but again that would be an overkill option for 99.9999% of the users, but you can also get a video card with 512 MB RAM, and that will just leave the MacBook-nonpro miles behind ... in the amateur class :) With Dell you WILL get a FULL KEYBOARD (and not the brainwashed Apple version), TWICE more mouse buttons (actually 4 times, and both the touchpad and the "trackpoint") and you can also get for 19$ extra full a/b/g wireless and many, many other options ... but with Apple you are mostly locked :(

The Apple configuration is:

2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 - 2x1GB SO-DIMMs
100GB Serial ATA drive @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
Apple USB Modem
AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro/PowerBook (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
15.4-inch TFT Display

PRICE: 3497 US$
(and the modem is external, so is probably the mouse, probably macfans never move their notebooks :) )

Dell configuration:

Latitude D820:
Intel® Core™ Duo T2600 (2.16GHz) 667Mhz Dual Core
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2, with media
15.4 inch Wide Screen WXGA LCD Panel
Graphics:256MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 110M
Memory:2.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM, 2 DIMMS
Hard Drives:100GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 5400RPM
Optical Drive - Modular:8X DVD+/-RW w/Roxio Digital Media™ and Cyberlink Power DVD™ 8XDVRW
Dell Wireless™ 1390 802.11g Mini Card
Bluetooth:Dell Wireless® 350 Bluetooth Module
Hardware Support Services:3 Year Mail-In Economy Plan

PRICE: 2554 US$


So yes - you CAN think that the Apple configuration is only marginally more expensive ... if in your case about 1000 US$ are peanuts :)

There might be two other "arguments" from the macfans - that Apple build quality is better - that might be true if we compare a 2000 US$ Apple notebook with a 500 US$ consumer-level Dell, but believe me - a Latitude is actually miles AHEAD of Apple in quality!

And the other "pseudo-argument" that you will certainly hear is that with Apple you will get OSX - leaving aside the fact that the MacBookPro does not have WinXP and that currently you can not install a legal (meaning non-patched) version of it (as a result of Apple restrictions and not the other way around) - OSX is just an operating system on which you will have about 100 times less choice and only the ILLUSION of marginally better security - maybe some people might think that at the same price point as XP Pro the Apple OSX might be worth it (if you are a real computer pro you already know that it is not) but when it costs about 1000 US$ MORE than XP Pro only an idiot will continue to claim it is a better option !

Small update: any user with at least some technical knowledge would expect almost identical results from computers with almost identical electronic parts (only the video cards are different but even on that I expect Dell to be better); however if a lot of delusional macfans still would like for somebody to kill a lot of time in a rather useless way and benchmark those two configurations I am OK with that as long as they will pay for the entire test - so if there are any takers I will open a PayPal account and if it goes over 7000 US$ (no, it's not a mistake, there ARE other costs in benchmarking stuff) I will order those two and actually kill some time just to show that one or another is probably on average 0.01% faster :) (and obviously I will keep both - small payment for my time but at least I will be able to later debunk just another myth - like for instance the one for "resale value").

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

WTF

I thought you were gonna compare the two notebooks, not just list specs.

How quickly do they boot? How fast do they rendor images? What about battey life?

And HTF can you say '100 times less choice and only the ILLUSION of marginally better security' You DO realise OSX is built using Unix. If you KNOW how you can do anything and for security . . . you remember rm-my-mac? The *Bogus* mac hack? A guy in America put up a webpage run on a minimac and told the net to hack the page. As far as I remember it was never hacked.

So just sssshh until you do some REAL research

3:33 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What it is not clear is what video card does Apple use ?

Anyway a niche player like Apple has to have high margin otherwise it wouldn't survive. As long as the user thinks that it's OK to pay 1000$ for looks/prestige Apple will be fine.

3:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hehe, not biased at all!

This was the most stupid article ever. Firstly you say that apple has a monopol(y), which implies it has an advantage and that andvantage is OsX, which you say suck anyway. You compare hardware, and apple doesn't have a hardware monopoly.

Also, the reason you can't install xp on the new intel macs isn't because of apple not wanting you to, it's because MS doesn't support the "BIOS" replacement that apple uses.

5:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sounds like a biased anti-Apple article to me. As far as operating system security goes, check these out:

Secunia Windows XP Pro
Secunia Mac OS X
Secunia Ubuntu Linux

Surely the last two operating systems are much better, don't you agree? Don't use the old "market share" excuse because anyone smart enough can tell that XP has problems because of running as admin. Not running as admin? Good luck running the majority of programs out there. Here's some Wikipedia links for your information also:

Criticism of Microsoft
Criticism of Windows XP
Criticism of Internet Explorer

Sounds like you need to do some more research!

7:46 AM  
Blogger cool_stuff_or_not said...

A few answers:

- probably the Apple machine boots slower but that is not relevant since most people will just place notebooks in standby or hibernate;

- the fact that nobody cared to use some not-yet-fixed exploit on a highly watched Apple machine does not mean anything (only morons without any experience would make security decisions on generic descriptions like "it is based on Unix" - just so you know, Unix was the place where all the initial Internet worms were started - but that was probably when most macfans were playing with colouring pens);

- as far as I can say the video card for the MacBook is "fixed" for each of the two major coombinations, I have used the better one (X1600 with 256MB)

- the "monopoly" is the fact that you can NOT buy OSX and (legally) install it on a computer from another vendor - so you are stuck with overpriced junk from a single vendor (which is pretty much the definition of a monopoly);

- is it surprising that only one of the people leaving comments was speaking about the content of main the article (pricing) and ALL the anonimous post were rambling about how great OSX is (with the implied meaning that everybody should throw away over 1000 US$ for it) ? :)

7:55 AM  
Blogger cool_stuff_or_not said...

Yes, dear tk - "I could almost feel the envy of those around me" - it is well known that people buy computers mainly for that envy ... oh, wait, correction - morons buy based on that and hype, most people buy based on performance/price !

7:48 AM  

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