The truth about the costs of Macs vs. costs of PCs.

Today I was reading digg and was inspired to find out the differences in price between Macs and equivalent PCs, to see if the bit of trouble I go through in using linux is really worth it.

The first thing I did was go to the apple website, and find the cheapest computer they offer. That happened to be a $600 Mac Mini. 1.66 ghz, 512 ram, a 60 gig hard drive, and OS X.

I then did the same on Dell’s website, since they are an average well-known PC manufacturer. Their cheapest computer happened to be a $359 desktop. AMD 3400+, 512 ram, and an 80 gig hard drive. They didn’t have any processors as slow as 1.66 ghz.

Since not many people actually buy these types of computers, I decided to go up in specs. So, I went to the Macbook section of the apple website. A 13-inch black Macbook costs $1499 and comes with a 2 ghz intel processor, 1GB ram, and a 120 GB hard drive.

I found an equivalent dell laptop for $959. The only difference was that the dell has a 15.4″ screen instead of a 13″ one.

I decided to do one more test. I looked at the most expensive laptop on the apple website, the $2799 17″ Macbook Pro. It has a 2.33 ghz processor, 2gb ram, and a 160 gb hard drive.

At Dell’s website, I found a 17″ Inspiron laptop with a 2.16ghz processor, 2GB ram, and a 160GB hard drive for $1,674. That laptop came with integrated intel graphics, so I decided to add on a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS video card. The new price was $1,973. 2.16ghz was the fastest processor they offered with that laptop, but I’d be happy to sacrifice .17ghz of processor speed to save $826.

I have compared the prices of three groups of equivalent Macs and PCs, and all three times the PC was significantly cheaper than the Mac. If you use linux you can also get a refund on the copy of Windows that came with your computer from dell, which would lower the price even more.

---

EDIT: As you can see from the comments about this post, there is a bit of disagreement with my conclusions. The basic disagreements are:
1) Black Macbooks are not a fair comparison because it’s $200 more for black and a 40GB larger HD.
2) Macs come with the iSight.
3) Macs come with much more useful software like iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, Garage Band, and iWeb.
4) Comparing Macs with the Inspiron series of laptops is not fair because the Inspiron series is of lower quality and is less durable than the Latitude series, and therefore cheaper.
5) OS X is better than windows so it costs more.I will offer responses to each of these four arguments.

1) The $959 Inspiron laptop is cheaper than the $1,299 white Macbook, and still has a 120GB hard drive instead of 80GB like the white Macbook.

2) Many laptop manufacturers include cameras in their laptops. One example is IbuyPower. The red laptop costs $1295, comes with a built in camera, extra battery, 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 PCI Express Video Card, a 15.4″ screen, 3 USB ports, a firewire port, card reader slot, etc. I guarantee that video card is better than the one you’ll find in a Macbook. Never mind the extra battery and bigger screen.

3) There are numerous free, open source applications that will do all of the same things as all of the aforementioned apple programs excluding maybe Garage Band. If you use linux there are even more and you lose the cost of Windows Vista, lowering the cost of the PC even more.

4) I hesitate to believe the claim that inspirons aren’t as durable as latitudes because if you dropped them both they would both probably break into a million pieces. However, I will still do a comparison. As you can see from this page, a Latitude equivalent with the white Macbook mentioned above still only costs $994 but comes with a 14.1″ screen and free upgrade from a 4 to 6 cell battery.

5) I do not disagree that OS X is far superior to windows in most cases. The lack of spyware, viruses, and malware generally make it much less troublesome to use. Plus, the adoption of Intel chips and programs like bootcamp allow OS X to run any windows program that one needs that is Windows-only. (autoCAD, etc). That said, if you subtracted the cost of the operating systems ($129 for OS X, and $99 for Windows Vista Home Basic) from the total prices of the computer, the cost of the mac would still be greater than that of the PC, excluding the Ibuypower example. However the Ibuypower example isn’t really a fair comparison because it comes with far superior hardware than Macs do.

Another point I would like to make in response to argument 5 is that in my post, I never endorsed windows or recommended it. In fact, at the end I recommended linux because of its low cost ($0), ease of use, security, and the freedom it gives you to choose. The only people that OS X should be “easier to use” for are people that don’t know anything about computers and are afraid to learn. Once someone gets past the basics of how a computer works, any GUI-based operating system is equally easy (or difficult) to learn/use. I don’t want to use anecdotal evidence but when I was in high school I installed ubuntu on my parents’ new computer and they use it just fine.

In conclusion I would like to assert that Mac people need to acknowledge that they are indeed paying for a name and inclusion in a supposedly elite social club. It’s the same reason that generic products in grocery stores are cheaper per ounce than name brand products. The same principle applies to clothes and pretty much any other product that exists.