why are macs so goddam expensive???

skab · Post by **skab** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:00 pm 0

gravy wrote:Still, haven't seen that many "fuck me I love my PC" posts

Point made.

The typical PC user usually leaves out the "me I love" part.

But then again, as I said not too long ago, I feel fine in my pretty niche.

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:05 pm 0

skab wrote:
gravy wrote:Still, haven't seen that many "fuck me I love my PC" posts
Point made.

The typical PC user usually leaves out the "me I love" part.

But then again, as I said not too long ago, I feel fine in my pretty niche.

Life's too short for this PC shit.

matt303 · Post by **matt303** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:13 pm 0

You lot only complain Macs are so expensive 'cos you all want them

One a serous note I did really agonise about getting a PC laptop or Mac laptop for ages before taking the plunge. Even for the first day of owning the Mac I wasn't sure it was worth the "extra" cost over getting a PC lappy but you know what the thing has been so problem free in the 6 months I've had it. No problems with drivers and I've not had a single OS crash, the battery life is still good, not a single virus problem, honestly compared to any PC I've had in the last 10 years this thing really does "just work".

The best thing about this Mac is how easy audio work is on it, I've had years of pissing around with PCs and music never to get anything as stable as my old ST setup, My Mac out the box plug in midi interface load up Reason using the inbuilt sound card, 12mS latency

btw for the record I spend my working day sat behind a stupidly powerful PC (it really is a mental spec) so I'm not saying Macs are the answer for everyone and it's good to have a choice

sty · Post by **sty** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:19 pm 0

Macs are expensive.

You are paying a price premium for the Apple Brand, while there are certain positive value benefits in the Apple Brand (quality of design/build, manufacturer integrated parts etrc) a large part of it is simply "Brand". This is the same as the premium you will pay for an Audi over the equivalent Volkswagon (exactly the same cars bar the odd body styling bit).

There is the MHz myth of course, but unfortunately at the moment Intel CPUs do appear to be kicking out more power for compute intensive applications. I don't know if this is a raw CPU speed issue, an application porting issue, or an OS/HW/Application issue. Bog did a side by side comparison on some lightwave reders and seems to be happy that the PC choice for him is the best one.

Now looking at some future events things could get interesting, Apple have done some pretty good things with their new HW designs and should I believe at some point in the near future start delivering real end user application advantages, speeds of Front Side Busses Cache sizes, memory pathways, and all sorts of other wondeful technical gubbins. I'm sure that some of these benefits will start to find their way into PCs but given the massively diverse and fragmented nature of the PC market I'm not sure it will be as cohesive.

I'm also curious to see what the 90nm technology for CPU technology fallout is going to be.

OSX is a superb OS, and makes it very very easy to get the benefit, to an end user runnind normal applications, out of multiple CPUs so I have a feeling this is where Apple are going to start closing the gap and even overtaking the PC in real world usage. If you think how close Apple now have got, compared to the appaling state they were in 18months ago this is promising.

The final point to try and bring the Price/Value thing back into a slightly better/fairer perspective is to look at the entire package and Total Cost of Ownership with Apple. When you consider the application and productivity software that is included with an Apple the actual cost does start to come down, also the amount you tend to spend on an Apple over a period of time seems to be less, and they certainly get used longer in life than PCs.

now this last point isn't going to cut any ground with those of us who are able to build our own systems, or are familiar with raw component costs etc. which is a shame, but c'est la vie.

Bog wrote: That's an *enormous* disparity in price/processing power. Didn't that, you know, largely kill Silicon Graphics?

I was at Silicon Graphics put the seeds in place that led to their downfall, and while you are almost correct the fatal blow was when they forgot what sort of business they were in and what their customer base needed from them, and they decided to drop down into the generic market and slug it out in the NT arena (they should have stuck to delivering high performance, reliable, bespoke solutions (video editing, hiperfomance real time 3D graphics for simulation etc.)

As soon as their hardware was lined up against generic PC manufacturers people were able to make lower performance purchases, ie. why buy the sgi equiv of an Indy for these low performance jobs (like modeling say) when I could buy a generic version for much less.

And of course once they had made the switch they were doomed. (I still have my SGI stock to remind me that the price of shares may go down as well as up).

Apple have been quite successful into moving into some of SGIs old niches, video edit etc. and it could be quite a profitable niche for them, so fingers crossed they never lose their brains and switch to generic HW

ophion · Post by **ophion** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:21 pm 0

moobaa wrote:Um... you get what you pay for, maybe? Want decent build engineering and integration, then pay for it...

This was once true of Macs, but now, sadly, the claim rings hollow.

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 12:27 pm 0

I mostly agree with Sty. People seem to focus only
on the hardware. You know if there's an Apple tax
in order to run OS X, well it's worth it to me, what's
more I believe most people once exposed to OS X
for a while would be willing to pay the tax too.

For 90% of people a Â£549 eMac would be fine,
it's not a 'power-user' machine, but most users
aren't in that category.

Anyhow let's hope the new iMac improves upon
the old one.

Post by **RiK** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 1:55 pm 0

matt303 wrote:You lot only complain Macs are so expensive 'cos you all want them

Yes I do. I'm not afraid to admit I'd love a mac, but when it will cost more that twice as much money for a similar spec I find it very hard to justify the expense compared to a monster PC setup, especially given that I would be running the same applications as I do now... Photoshop/InDesign/Word/Excel are exactly the same so other that the 'tart' factor there is little to sway me to the Apple camp...

matt303 · Post by **matt303** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:06 pm 0

I find that these threads are a bit pointless, some of us have Macs, some PCs, some even run odd stuff like Sun hardware, it's all good and having a wide range of platforms helps drive innovation. I expect that in a few years time it'll be normal for people to post on here from all sorts of things, the only thing that is for sure is we are entering a period of new platforms becoming usable for traditional PC type stuff like internet services and music/media management/playing.

Bog · Post by **Bog** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:12 pm 0

I love my PCs.

I love my venerable 1.4GHz Athlon, that's had SMT components melt off it's motherboard, be soldered back on with tweezers, and keep on rendering.

I love my Toshiba Satellite laptop, with it's 1920x1200 screen, big enough to have both A and B rolls on in full broadcast res while I'm cutting tape - and incidentally a faster rendering machine than a dual 1.8GHz G5 by quite an acceptable margin. 3GHz goes a long way, especially with Hyperthreading. I'm sat here in bed, with my 'flu back, and the wireless connection was just as easy to set up as on an Apple. (Connect base-station. Switch antenna on. Browse porn).

I love my new box that I bought for Â£600 from PC world. It's yet to crash, it's got all the trimmings, and it wrapped around my new edit card with no complaints. It quite cheerfully layers four different postprocesses on a video stream in realtime at full Broadcast res. That'll do nicely, Sir. And it's even faster than the lappy when I hit F9.

Best of all - it cost so little that I could bag one with the proceeds from a short job. This is nice on so many levels - I don't have to outsource to a render farm for long projects. My rendering power is cheap-as-chips. I get to pass that saving on to my end clients, because they don't care what computers I'm using - just that they get their animations on time. And speaking of on-time, with all that cheap grunt available, I get to pack more contracts into a shorter period, because the turnaround is lower.

Basically, if I ran a Mac Shop, I'd have to charge people more to get less work done - and that's no way to run a business.

I love my PCs.

teamonkey · Post by **teamonkey** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:22 pm 0

Bog wrote:What's wrong with my thinking here? If x86 is a "dead man walking", then what the hell am I gonna play Half-Life2 on?

XBox 2. You know, the triple-G5 XBox 2.

gravy · Post by **gravy** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:31 pm 0

Off at a tangent but how does your home setup work?

Do you have a seperate render server or do you edit render on the same box?

Bog · Post by **Bog** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:41 pm 0

Off at a tangent but how does your home setup work?

All the machines have the LightWave ScreamerNet client installed - that's a distributed rendering tool, so all the CPUs in the building (and once in the back garden. I love wireless) can chomp on the same scene.

The workstations are on a KVM, and live under my desk. The faster machine (the Â£600 one) has the Matrox card in it, so that's Edit 1. If I've got Lots of 3D to do, that's the machine I use - the faster LW's interface is working, the faster and more easily I can do my job. If I've got multiple gigs or a multi-part job on, I'll have the Quick Workstation doing rendering, while I keep setting up more scenes on the slower Athlon, or on the Lappy.

The lappy's a very competent 3D rig in it's own right, but it's screen's very squad (15.1" 16:9), so that's mainly used for road trips, or sitting quietly in the corner churning out frames. Sometimes, though, it's quite nice to sit in the back garden and work, so that suits

If it turns out that my wireless range will reach to the new Italian restaurant at the end of the road, then VNC is getting put on all my boxen again

I'm re-juggling a little, as there's now a row of 3 machines under my desk - there's a P3 800MHz which has my old DPS Perception card in it, which we'll call Edit 2 for now. Seeing as it's still living here for whatever reason I figure I might as well get the extra dozen or so frames an hour she can still turn out - it all helps.

Was that what you were asking?

Kemper_Boyd · Post by **Kemper_Boyd** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:42 pm 0

teamonkey wrote: XBox 2. You know, the triple-G5 XBox 2.

I'm not sure how 'G5' it is. Three PPC970 even in
65nm at any sort of sensible cost seems a bit... I
don't know, just pushing the envelope. I've
seen suggestions that it's not derived from the
Power4 line but something new, and possibly
similar to the Power6 which IBM has said will
have ultra-high clockspeeds. If you want to
control power, and you would in a games console,
the speculation is the first thing you'd drop, which
suggests IBM may be building a 3 core relatively
narrow in-order chip. I still can't fathom why
it would be 3 core though. Unless MS surveyed
games developers and came to the conclusion that
three major theads was the ideal/common partitioning.
i.e. Graphics, physics, and a thread for I/O, game
logic and audio. Hmmm.

matt303 · Post by **matt303** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:44 pm 0

Bog wrote:Basically, if I ran a Mac Shop, I'd have to charge people more to get less work done - and that's no way to run a business.

For most people more CPU power does not mean more work done there is only so fast a word processor can go, in fact some of the faster PCs are getting quite noisy and that's the last thing you want to add to an office environment.

Don't underestimate the amount of time lost keeping PCs patched up to date in a company with lots of PCs, with about 100 PCs you loose around 1 man week per security update.

Bog · Post by **Bog** » Sat Jul 10, 2004 2:44 pm 0

I will say that if Macs were even within 20% of the equivalent-power price of PCs, the easier less maintainance-intensive working relationship would make 'em worthwhile. But at over four times the price for equivalent power, it's just unfeasable. Which is a shame.

<edit>

Matt: That's a valid point in virtually any other business than mine