On paper, the Mac isn't such a good deal, although it's more accurate to say that the PC offers stunning value for money at the moment - even in expensive Britain £340 all-in will buy you a brand new PC that IMHO is suitable for everything the average user will want to do. The cheapest Mac I can find costs £200 more, has the same disk and memory but is slower (whatever you make of the G4 vs. x86 argument, i'm betting a 2400+ Athlon is going to be faster than a 1GHz G4).
At the high end, the difference looks even bigger. £1200 buys you a 1.6GHz G5, 256Mb DDR RAM, 80Gb Hard Drive and an old 64Mb Geforce FX5200 Graphics card. No monitor, that's extra. The PC you could build for the same money will totally destroy the Mac in every area. As we're talking no-monitor, I'd guess that the £500 PC that I was looking at here the other day (3GHz Athlon with a gig of memory and a 9800 Pro) would still beat a Mac more than twice the price. On paper, it seems a no-brainer for the power user.
However, very few users are real 'power users' any more. Most people just want email, internet, word processing and the ability to plug in a digital camera and mp3 player, so I recommend a basic Mac to probably 80-90% of the friends, family etc. who ask for advice on buying a computer. It's always been the right choice. At the risk of being slightly tongue-in-cheek, anybody who has worked in IT knows that support costs more than hardware, and Apple have got ease of use down perfectly - it's amazing how many non-technical people can sit down with a Mac and do what they want to do, when they're baffled by Windows XP. And if they can do it themselves, I don't have to help
I only ever recommend a PC to the 10-20% who have a real need for more power than a bottom of the range Mac provides, and that's normally just the games players.
As for work, goates wrote
On the other hand, for work I would much rather be using a Mac if possible than Windows. I can't think of a way to accurately describe it on a web forum, but the Mac tends to keep out of the way better. Windows loves to let me know that it is there. Linux is even worse and practically uses a 2x4. Meanwhile the Mac just seems to disappear into the background.
It's interesting how we get used to things, because I have exactly the opposite view. My very non-technical wife has an iMac (see, I follow my own advice
) and, while i'll occasionally use it for the camera or to surf, I couldn't do work with it (although it helps that i've finally found a Unix console hidden in there!). I use Linux, for exactly the same reasons that goates uses a Mac - I can get it to do what I need instantly, and the rest of the time it's hidden behind the scenes. But then again, I still like emacs, and think that C-x C-s C-x C-c is a sensible way to save my work and exit, so maybe it's just old habits. Emacs is for people who don't know how to :q!
As an aside, AAPL seems to be trading on a P/E of 70, good old .com boom values. I guess that's the iPod effect, but with the competition catching up fast and lack of anything too exciting at the top end of their core business, I'm not sure where they're going but down
