It’s been a long time between drinks. My last new desktop computer was a 2.4GHz Dell, which is now pushing four years old. When I bought it, the fastest PC I could have gotten without paying ridiculous prices was a 3.08GHz P4. This machine matched my philosophy of buying the fastest cheap machine or the cheapest fast machine available. The other side of my philosophy is to only buy a new machine if it’s going to be at least twice the raw speed of the last one; anything less isn’t noticeable a day or two later.
The biggest leap I’ve ever made from one computer to the next was probably from my first Mac 512kE (upgraded twice from a 128kB original Mac) with its 8MHz 68000 to a Mac IIci with a 25MHz 68030, 5MB of RAM, and a 40MB hard disk. That was a simply amazing leap. (I’d gotten a Commodore Amiga 500 in between the two, but the Amiga was slower for most anything except games than a Mac, so that was not a speed boost).
My new computer is a standard config Mac Pro. So I’ve gone from a dual 1GHz G4 Mac on the Apple side and a singe 2.4 GHz P4 on the PC side, to a quad core 2.66GHz box. When you do the math, it’s actually a jump comparable to the jump from the Mac 512kE to the Mac IIci — at least on the cpu side. I can theoretically put 8x the RAM into the G5, but I can’t practically afford to!
The real beauty of this, from Apple’s point of view, is that instead of someone like me buying a Mac every four years and a PC every three years (for important productivity tools, like World of Warcraft), both Apple and its customers can have their cake and eat it. We can spend less money on computers and upgrade every 2-3 years, buy a better machine, and not split our incremental upgrades (new graphics cards, more RAM, more hard disks, nicer displays) between our two current boxes. Yes, Apple stuff often costs more (although, try buying a quad Xeon for $2500 from Dell), but it doesn’t cost as much as Apple stuff + Wintel stuff.
It’s bad news for PC hardware makers, since they’ll be losing sales to Apple, but also bad news for Microsoft, because their target audience doesn’t buy a copy of Windows with each box. Yes, the retail version of Windows costs more, but you only need to buy it every five or six years (based on the time elapsed between XP and Vista), during which time many of us would have bought two or three OEM Windows licenses. (In our household, we’ve bought four OEM Windows licenses in the last five years.)
The Macintosh Difference
Dell makes pretty good PCs, as PCs go. Here’s the Mac Pro out of box experience. You open the box. There’s a keyboard and a small black box with CDs, mouse, and such, and some cables (two video adapters, a USB extension cord, power cord). You lift up a styrofoam tray, and there’s the Mac’s handles, and it’s wrapped in thin foam sheeting. You break the seal, the Mac lifts straight out of the box. You stick it on your desk, attach power cord, keyboard, and monitor; hook up the mouse to the keyboard; plug it in, boot. You’re asked to enter a few pieces of info (e.g. your AppleID), which populates stuff like your address automatically and correctly, and then you’re good to go. Elapsed time, five minutes.
Everything, from the fact that the Mac just slips out of its box to the system pinging Apple for your customer info to minimize form-filling is an example of why Apple and Macs don’t suck.
Anyway, first impressions last, but I’ll write about my second impressions later. So far, so very very good.