So, where did Lauren walk in and buy a HP 4gb notebook w/ a 17" monitor for $699?

The BBQ Pit
81

Oh, whatever, I can’t take you seriously anymore. You’re comparing a quad-core Core i7 (“Nehalem”) Xeon and a dual-processor motherboard with a dual-core Core 2 Duo - and comparing a professional graphics monitor to, I assume, two Best Buy specials.

You say you know something about computers - either you don’t understand that those computers are wildly different (hint: the Mac is better), or you do understand and you’re just being intentionally obtuse for the sake of argument. Either way, I’m done.

82

Is there really anything to be said about her at all? I mean, aside from “hot damn, that’s a cute chick in that ad.”

83

The fuck you say–I do this shit for a living. Yes, I know i7 is better than 2 Duo. (holy shit, really? Stop the fucking presses). The Xeon label means shit all for real-world performance under typical desktop loads, and frankly I could update my computer to an 2.66 Quad i7 for the same price I paid for the Wolfdale last July.

I’m not comparing the socket costs because that extra socket is dead weight for me. Big fucking deal it has a spare Xeon socket, if I wanted to compare two dual processor machines I would, but it’s not worth it for me to actually look up current shit when I can whip your statistical ass with my old invoice from last summer.

Hint: You do NOT want me to compare the Mac straight up with, say, a HP or Supermicro workstation in terms of price for a dual Xeon workstation, you will lose just as bad.

I believe I said already I think your “professional graphics monitor” is a big whothefuckcares for anyone not doing professional fucking graphics. I play games on my rig and watch HD movies. I have double the pixel area, good quality graphics (that’s two motherfucking Samsung panels, by the way, which when I purchased them were exactly the same hardware as Apple’s fucking overpriced backlit LCD panels.

Yeah, they’re wildly different–one’s a serious computing rig, and one comes with a few high-cachet-low-added-value add ons that drive the price up by more than double.

Get serious.

Or for added fun, I could price out an XServe too–the Mac price premium just gets worse the higher up the product line you go.

84

Fuck it, this was actually useful for work purposes, anyway, so I went there.

Suppose I’m a sane human being looking for a virtualization server for my company’s build department.

The system specs I’m looking at:
Dual Xeon Quad-Core “Harpertown” 3.0Ghz
1TB RAID1, two drives, dedicated controller
32GB RAM
1U Rackmount

Apple XServe, with OSX Server: $15,099
Dell PowerEdge 1950 III, with Windows 2008 Server 64: $8097

I was nice and didn’t include any of the discounts Dell’s offering this week. I was even nicer and didn’t price out hand-building it.

Let’s get serious, now. Apple has no ability to compete on price, and where their product is “superior”, it’s not double-the-price superior when considering performance alone.

I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I’m anti-Mac here. Aside from hating the internal layouts as a maintenance guy, they’re solid systems if paying for a lot of chrome and OSX is what turns you on. But please, stop deluding yourself and trying to delude the rest of us with the impression that they’re throwing all kind of fairy dust and sunshine in those polished aluminum cases–it’s just a computer, with bog-standard parts and bog-standard to substandard interior design for maintenance, and absolutely brilliant external design for looks and internal design for efficiency at the expense of maintenance.

I do want to address the LED monitor shit once more, though–we’re supposed to be continually impressed that Apple doesn’t offer a consumer-grade or even a pro-sumer-grade monitor at all with their overpriced workstations? Your only choices are the 24" LED or the 30" LCD.

85

This is a completely ridiculous argument. Regardless of whether you need a professional graphics monitor or a Core i7 or a dual-processor motherboard or whatever, you can’t make price comparisons by speccing out a Mac with a bunch of expensive stuff, and then claiming your PC doesn’t need to have it because you don’t care about it!

As for comparing with a HP workstation - good luck. HP hasn’t even released pricing information on their Nehalem workstations, as far as I can tell. Nor has Dell. Just for kicks, I specced out a Dell workstation using the previous-generation Xeon, and it came in at $2,350, as opposed to $2,499 for the Mac Pro with the newest-generation processor, DDR3 memory, etc. The $150 difference is meaningless.

86

If you want consumer-grade, buy an iMac. You are also free to buy your own monitor when purchasing a Mac Pro.

87

I’ll concede the point on Xserves, I’ve never seen the point of them either. But I still challenge you to find a Nehalem workstation with equivalent specifications to the Mac Pro that is significantly cheaper than $2,499.

88

If you could point that out 4 more times, that would be great.

Your argument is fallacious. You continue to compare two products with different features, then claim that they are the same b/c the extra features on the Mac don’t matter to you. No wonder you’ve had to continuously point out that you do this for a living. No one would have guessed it otherwise.

89

My wolfdale 3.33 last year. $279.
A Core i7 2.63 this year. $279.

No pricing difference, there, chum. And again, we’re talking performance here, not currently inactive features, so the Xeon label continues to mean jack and shit.

The original point of the thread was why Mac can’t/doesn’t compete on price with PC. One of the reasons it can’t is that it’s not even trying to do so. I am holding up the LED monitor as the low-end option on the Mac Pros and Macbook Pros as a BAD THING for people who care about Mac having market share at all.

90

There are two main differences between my workstation and the Mac Pro–the processor and the monitor. Hell, leave the monitors off for all I care, that’s actually making it worse for the Mac.

I maintain that A) there are no performance differences worth mentioning between a Core i7 2.63 and a Xeon i7 2.63, B) the Core i7 costs the same now as my for-the-sake-of-argument Wolfdale system last year did, and therefore C) there’s no appreciable difference from a real-world perspective.

91

So, your processor got only $10 cheaper over the course of a year? It’s still $269 today.

Do you know how much the processor in the base Mac Pro costs? $1000. It has been available in the Mac Pro for weeks, but Intel only officially announced it yesterday.

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SkuSearch_v2.asp?SCriteria=BA31350

And like I said, you are welcome to find an HP or Dell or Supermicro or whatever workstation with equivalent specs to the base Mac Pro, and prove that there is a significant price differential.

92

I concur, this is painful as crap–depending on which conspiracy theory you follow, either this is how Intel continues to drive up demand for the old processors (by maintaining the price points so people believe they’re still good) or this is how Intel forces everyone to update/buy their lower-end Celeron stuff. (by maintaining the price points so old processors are prohibitively expensive until they’re so dated as to be unusable.

Yeah, I maintain that the Xeon has no appreciable differences for the average user vs. the Core i7, and that’s really part of my problem with the Mac Pro–the Xeon cachet is all well and good, but in terms of flops you’re not getting anything extra out of the Xeon label until you throw the second processor in there. And if you’re getting a dual-processor workstation, you’re really entirely out of the realm of what the average person is going to buy anyway.

This, to me, is the same thing as the notebook discussion that started this thread–there are people who care about the raw performance under the hood, and there are people who care about the total package. I don’t have anything against you if you’re in the latter category enough to spend the extra dosh on the Mac, (heh, is this the part where I say “some of my best friends are Mac-heads”?) but there ain’t a lot of you out there even in the best of times.

I think this’d be a lot less acrimonious of an argument if we actually figured out what we’re arguing about, because it’s increasingly clear we’re talking past each other.

I only really got into this argument because I thought you were making a ridiculous statement, that is, “MacBook Pros have significantly better internal components than lower-priced PC laptops”. If we can agree that’s wrong and that we can pretty easily find PCs with the exact same processor/ram/hard drive for significantly less than the Mac, I’ll happily admit that I hump my buddy’s Macbook Pro when she’s not looking, because it’s a dead sexy machine even if I don’t want the extras enough to spring for 'em myself.

I’m not likely to back down on the Core i7 vs. Xeon i7 thing, but I will also admit it was kinda boneheaded of me to throw my Wolfdale up there regardless of the price similarities (related: I will not post to tech threads on the 'Dope after arguments at work).

93

I think you have Absolute confused with Amblydoper, which may explain a good bit of the confusion.

94

Y’know, you are absolutely right. Absolute, I’m sorry for flaming you for the flip remarks of another poster.

95

Super cutie. I had no idea what, specifically, the ad was about.

96

It’s more like Ellen DeGeneres on helium.

97

If you have an @edu email address you’re eligible for Microsoft’s Ultimate Steal which will offer you a copy of Office 2007 Ultimate for $75. It retails for $800+. I also got a downloadable fully legit copy of Vista Ultimate (Service Pack 1 included) from them for about $65 (CDN) and for an extra $13 they sent me the DVD.

Most colleges and universities offer the Office package for an educational rate which is far below retail but you get the “Home and Student” version which only includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote.

And of course if you aren’t picky, there’s always OpenOffice which is free like a bird and totally legal.

I tried to find a pirate copy of Office a while back and I gave up. Every site had warnings of viruses in the comments. I know Office can be pirated if you’re determined but it’s Russian roulette with your computer.

98

Also, seeing as Office 2003 is still a perfectly adequate program, you only really have to buy software once per decade.

99

Only a fucking idiot would think that.

100

Wow, Sorry I opened up that can of worms.

I misspoke in my previous post about Apple using higher quality internal components. I was trying to say that Apple’s overall product was a better design: Apple uses X processor, Y Ram, Z hard drive, and costs #3000, while GenericPC uses X processor, Y Ram, Z hard drive, and costs #1500, but packs it into a cheap case that’s ticker and heavier, and doesn’t include appropriate driver support, uses a screen that will scratch, etc, etc, blah, blah.

Now, keep in mind, I already said that this advertisement was very effective at convincing its target demographic that Apple is over priced. These are the people like Lauren ( I want a 17" screen!) and people with a minimal understanding of computers (I want X processor, Y Ram, Z hard drive!). but there is much more to an Apple product then these basic specs. This has been hashed out to death already, so I won’t go there.

As much as I don’t want to admit, I am becoming one of those Apple Fan-boys that we all despise so much. I love my two Macs, and I will buy another one when I need one. But, Apple has made some odd marketing moves that I don’t understand. Some of these have been mentioned or alluded to already, and I would like to address them. I wish Apple would acknowledge these:

The Current Mac Pro is overpriced. Last years model was a bargain when it was introduced, but the year long lack of updates or price drops quickly made this irrelevant. The current lineup, released about a month ago, consists of a crippled base-model priced higher than last year’s model, and a higher-end refresh of last year’s model with the i7 Xeons at an unjustifiably higher price. The memory is more expensive, but that difference is offset by the less expensive CPU. Nothing else changed significantly between last year’s Mac Pro and this year’s, but the price jumped about $800.

Apple’s monitors are overpriced. While the higher priced Macs come with extra features to justify that price, their monitors don’t. I’ll never recommend anyone to buy one of these rip-offs.

Apple’s hardware upgrades are overpriced. Browse any mac forum thread where someone asks which Mac to buy, and one of the first responses will be along the lines of “Don’t upgrade anything through the Apple Store. Buy it from a third party an install it yourself.”

Apple doesn’t sell an upgradeable, “headless” mid range system. Apple won’t get much more of the market share with this gaping hole in their product lineup. This absent product is often referred to as the xMac, and will likely never exist, but should offer a Core2 Duo, or contemporary i7 CPU, PCIe 16x slot for the user’s choice of graphics cards, 4 to 6 memory slots, and 3-4 drive bays… all in an Apple designed tower case, that looks “cool”.

So, this ad, and possibly the others in the series to come, will just target the vast majority of shoppers that want a product that Apple doesn’t sell. Smart strategy, Microsoft. My inner fanboy hopes that Apple will respond with products to satisfy a larger audience, but I think they are too stuck in their ways to change.
One last thing. Zeriel, in a laptop, I think size and weight (and therefore, design efficiency) trump the convenience of repair. You may be biased, considering your profession. People care about how heavy the thing is, and how much room its gonna take inside their bags, and don’t give a crap about how easy it is for you to fix.