AndrewTosh said:
This is totally incorrect. OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer. OEM editions of software are only licensed to be sold with complete systems or substantial hardware components. For example, it is legal to buy your motherboard and Windows/Office XP OEM from the same vendor. You just can't buy the OEM copy alone. When building a system from scratch or doing a significant hardware upgrade, buying OEM software is 100% legitimate.
From what I've seen, a faster PC is able to be built or bought for less than what Apple offers. I'm sure there's models that aren't, or you can pick and choose components to make your argument, but it's besides the point. I like the attention to detail. I never play 3D games and don't do anything more complex than some light programming. Apple provides a good product that doesn't need to be tinkered with constantly. Decide what that's worth to you and then compare.
-Andrew
You hit it right on the head. If you buy all/most of the parts for a computer from a vendor and get the OEM Windows discs as well, you are 100%. It is quasi legal to sell you the OEM copy of Windows with ANY piece of hardware (a keyboard, for example). Quasi legal as in you can do it, and won't have any problems down the line (if anything the vendor selling you the OEM disc would, but even that is extremely unlikely), but I am not sure it's 100% on the up and up.
Being a PC user, and a PC tech, and feel like I can safely say that there are no freeware applications that even compare to iLife. Yes, Photoshop is better for editing pictures, but for managing your library of photo's, nothing is like iPhoto. FCP is of course a better editing package (at $1000 it better be!), but comparing iMovie to ANYTHING else out there that is under $100 is laughable. iDVD is pretty damn good, and only the premium DVD burning software packages, like Nero Ultra or whatever they call it now, can even try to compete, and that's also a $100 package.
Good catch on the firewire ports... anyone intereted in doing ANY miniDV work or using an iPod will want to have at least one. A few other interesting things to figure in to this is going to be:
1) Longevity. How long do you think that a Mac mini will
(a)PHYSCIALLY last compared to something on a PC going bad? (remember you are building with bargin bin parts here... that's a lot of cheap fans to go bad... last PC I built went into a crappy case and the fans started going after about 6 months... ifnot caught this can destroy a system pretty quickly) and
(b) be USEFUL compared to the PC? Tiger will likely improve performance on the mini, whereas Longhorn will probably not run well on this PC, without some upgrades.
2) Noise. Cheap cases and PSUs for PCs mean chea[ fans (see above). A normal p4 system is likely to have at least 5 fans (1 cpu, 1 gpu, 1 psu, 2 case). Sure, a machine with 5 GOOD fans won't be too loud, but this one will. I haven't seen a mini in person, so I can't say how many fans or how loud it is, but I will bet it is QUIET. It's built on the iBooks platform, which are virtually silent 'till you start to really work them hard, and even then they're quieter than my TiVo. If this machine is going to go into a bedroom or other non-computer only room, it's a consideration.
3) Electricty. Sounds like a piddly thing, but I've read that the average P4 w/ LCD screen uses something like $45 a year in power. The mini is going to draw next to nothing, so, for sake of argument, halfing the cost of electricity of three years (reasonable upgrade timeline for a home user) you could save about $70. That's not ALOT, but it is significant when you consider it is about 10% of the cost of systems we're looking at.
Just some more 'fuel fore the fire'. Like I said, take him to an Apple store or a CompUSA and play with them for a little. Show him a mini (when they hit the shelves), an iMac and an eMac. Tell him all of the things that have been discussed here as well and let him mull it over.
Oh, also, in my above comment, where I left about $150 for iLife type software, I forgot to include $60+ dollars for firewall, virus, and spyware tools. You're up to $210 just in OS, security, and office applications.
Rob
