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Apple doesn't seem to be very competitive lately...

I keep hearing that people want a quad core processor, but what can it do? It is just for bragging rights. Professionals that use high end software will buy the Mac Pro for all the cores and memory.

Photoshop has been able to utilize 2 core processors for some time, but nothing higher until the next re-write.
 
nanofrog said:
Bargain computers are a false economy. I absolutely agree with that sentiment. Unfortunately, when I try to make this point to others, it tends to fall on deaf ears. :( They can't get past the sticker price, and realize not all things are equal. :rolleyes:
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My mother always said: We are poor. We can't afford to buy cheap things. :rolleyes: I am not poor anymore, so I changed the rule a bit: If you want to throw it away, buy cheap. If you want to keep it, buy quality.

In many cases, it is a good idea to buy the cheapest of the good stuff. Find a manufacturer that produces good stuff. Usually they will have some cheaper products with all the fluff cut out; that's where you get quality for the best price. They will also have more expensive products, that is where they add unnecessary things to make money from you.

To your original point: With many items, you cannot actually distinguish as a customer between quality and non-quality. Take a TV. You can compare the specs. You cannot compare the image quality (easily). You can't find out if the picture of your DVD player will look good or horrible bad on a 1920 x 108 screen. You can ask a sales assistant, they have no clue. Look at websites, they try to avoid giving you any useful information. If you look at the price, you don't know if the expensive one is more expensive because it is better or because they wrote a bigger number on the price tag. So what is a customer supposed to do?
 
queshy said:
Apple profit margins on its average computer sale are around 30%, sometimes more.

Dell's profit margins are nowhere close to that.

Apple doesn't need to be competitive in the sub $1000 range. It wants to sell more expensive machines which net them more money.

Honestly, on a $399 laptop, how much do you think is profit?
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That is the other main point, companies that are selling their laptops for $399 are not making a huge profit, and are relying more on the number of sales, than the quality of the sale and the quality of the product. Any laptop that you purchased for $399 was probably made of low quality material in order for the company to make the largest profit possible.
 
gnasher729 said:
My mother always said: We are poor. We can't afford to buy cheap things. :rolleyes: I am not poor anymore, so I changed the rule a bit: If you want to throw it away, buy cheap. If you want to keep it, buy quality.
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Your Mom sounds like a smart lady. :) And I have the same philosophy you've created! Buy quality when needed, cheap if it's not. ;)

gnasher729 said:
In many cases, it is a good idea to buy the cheapest of the good stuff. Find a manufacturer that produces good stuff. Usually they will have some cheaper products with all the fluff cut out; that's where you get quality for the best price. They will also have more expensive products, that is where they add unnecessary things to make money from you.
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To a good extent this is absolutely true. Otherwise, I will buy the "brand" I'm interested, just not the top of the line model. Eliminates the features I'd never use, and saves me $$$.

gnasher729 said:
To your original point: With many items, you cannot actually distinguish as a customer between quality and non-quality. Take a TV. You can compare the specs. You cannot compare the image quality (easily). You can't find out if the picture of your DVD player will look good or horrible bad on a 1920 x 108 screen. You can ask a sales assistant, they have no clue. Look at websites, they try to avoid giving you any useful information. If you look at the price, you don't know if the expensive one is more expensive because it is better or because they wrote a bigger number on the price tag. So what is a customer supposed to do?
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Look at the picture, and make your own judgement. Then hope like hell you didn't make a mistake. :p
 
Can you seriously find an Insprion that outspecs the Macbook for $700? A better comparison to the Macbook than an Insprion would be a XPS M1330 in which case a similarly speced Macbook is actually cheaper. There are people claiming "Oh, this $400 Dell outspecs the Macbook!!" when really they aren't properly comparing the right machines.
 
11800506 said:
Can you seriously find an Insprion that outspecs the Macbook for $700? A better comparison to the Macbook than an Insprion would be a XPS M1330 in which case a similarly speced Macbook is actually cheaper. There are people claiming "Oh, this $400 Dell outspecs the Macbook!!" when really they aren't properly comparing the right machines.
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This is obviously true. but your point about the XPS is not. Just search Dell vs Apple you will find threads comparing better spec XPS to a MB and the XPS is cheaper.
 
7031 said:
Last time I called they had American tech support, without me even telling them my service code. I told them my service code, and five seconds later, Indian tech support. Well, they might have just been an immigrant, but yeah. Even so, they were very helpful.

Apple however, I was correcting them last time I called.
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Actually, one of the reasons I want to get a Mac over a PC is because of Dell's tech support. I'm not racist, but I don't understand the point in Dell appointing people with thick accents to technical support for a computer. At least with Apple, I wouldn't have to deal with technical support at all :D

Which is why I've decided to get a Refurb'd Macbook. It just hurts a bit dropping a grand on a laptop with 1 GB of ram and a combo drive.
 
11800506 said:
Can you seriously find an Insprion that outspecs the Macbook for $700? A better comparison to the Macbook than an Insprion would be a XPS M1330 in which case a similarly speced Macbook is actually cheaper. There are people claiming "Oh, this $400 Dell outspecs the Macbook!!" when really they aren't properly comparing the right machines.
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I'm not dumb when it comes to computers, far from it. However had you actually gone to Dell's (or 90% of other manufacturers right now, you'd see my point. :rolleyes: Look underneith my name, I'm not a noob.
 
I know how you feel. Being a student on a stingy budget, it's hard to justify spending the extra $300 to buy a Mac compared to a decent PC laptop.

Just think about it has an investment in OS X. If you really want to buy a Mac, this is your best opportunity. That's the way I'm looking at it. :)
 
Apple doesn't compete on price, they compete on value for the money. And I guess a lot of consumers are no longer looking strictly at the sticker price when it comes to making buying decisions, since Apple's sales growth has been double or triple that of the rest of the industry for quite a while now.

A quadcore iMac would be nice to have as a high-end option, but I doubt the lack of one is holding back any sales. How useful are quadcore processors in Windows, where the OS and applications are far less multiprocessor aware than their Mac counterparts?

And I wouldn't sweat getting a MacBook with 1GB of RAM: third party DDR2 memory is so cheap it's practically free. I would, however, try to spend a little extra to get a model with a Superdrive.
 
Shackler said:
This is obviously true. but your point about the XPS is not. Just search Dell vs Apple you will find threads comparing better spec XPS to a MB and the XPS is cheaper.
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I just went to DELL's Web site, and built an XPS M1330 to compare to the MB. I had to add a 2.4 C2D, and I added Vista Ultimate [to truly compare OS X to a non crippled MS OS], and the price came to $1,423/USD [$1,323/USD after a $100 instant savings] vs. the same spec MB @ $1,299/USD. That's $24 more for the DELL. I didn't even bother to get into what comes with OS X vs. Vista, but I guess the iLife package is worth an additional $100/USD if you add that to the XPS unit...

So, tell me, how do I get the same exact XPS system, as the MB, for less?

CLAP CLAP...I WIN!
 
tmelvin said:
I just went to DELL's Web site, and built an XPS M1330 to compare to the MB. I had to add a 2.4 C2D, and I added Vista Ultimate [to truly compare OS X to a non crippled MS OS], and the price came to $1,423/USD [$1,323/USD after a $100 instant savings] vs. the same spec MB @ $1,299/USD. That's $24 more for the DELL. I didn't even bother to get into what comes with OS X vs. Vista, but I guess the iLife package is worth an additional $100/USD if you add that to the XPS unit...

So, tell me, how do I get the same exact XPS system, as the MB, for less?

CLAP CLAP...I WIN!
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I agree in some aspects that Apple matches PC vendors spec to spec...It's just that the PC vendors also have lower end products that sell for 699 and below. I can't speak for the world, but if I can have a normally functioning computer for $600, why not save money and get it?

It sometimes drives me crazy when people say NO to apple reducing its prices. I think they could be smarter with the Mac Mini, they can easily drop the price to say 399/499, and actually compete in the low end department.
 
FF_productions said:
I agree in some aspects that Apple matches PC vendors spec to spec...It's just that the PC vendors also have lower end products that sell for 699 and below. I can't speak for the world, but if I can have a normally functioning computer for $600, why not save money and get it?

It sometimes drives me crazy when people say NO to apple reducing its prices. I think they could be smarter with the Mac Mini, they can easily drop the price to say 399/499, and actually compete in the low end department.
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Same here. I'd love an MB for $700 - $800 new. My argument was the comparison that the same spec'd Windows Laptop is cheaper than an MB or MBP. I know I can get a cheaper DELL/HP notebook, but if you compare a 13" to 13", with same specs, etc. they're usually close in price, and in many cases the Mac is cheaper...
 
It's competitive on price, for what it offers. Just because you can't afford it, doesn't mean it's suddenly not competitive.
E.g. Just because I can't afford an Atom road car or a kit car, doesn't automatically make the car competitively priced.

Apple does offer consumer computers - you're after a cheap laptop for 700CDN. Why not check out the refurbs? Cutting edge costs. Always has done. With the upcoming refresh of several lines potentially in September, why not wait and get a current version in September that'll be being discounted?
 
maccompaq said:
I keep hearing that people want a quad core processor, but what can it do? It is just for bragging rights. Professionals that use high end software will buy the Mac Pro for all the cores and memory.
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Some hobbiests do use the horsepower too.

I'm currently running a G5 PowerMac. Probably 75% of the time, the amount of horsepower I have right now is fine ... but consider the following for why I'm planning on upgrading to a dual Xeon quad-core within the next year:


Not all my photo collection is digital, so one of my longer term projects is to digitize my 35mm and medium format images...or at least the "best of". Because this effort takes a lot of touch labor (including sorting through images to decide what to scan), my philosophy is that if I'm going to make the effort, I'm not going to cut corners. So I favor scanning at higher resolutions so that I have the maximum of original data saved. I'll then down-sample for the application desired (print, email, web, etc).


For one early scan (of a Kodachrome slide), I actually kept track of things. Here's the statistics:

Scanned size: 17433 x 11551 (yes, that's a 2000+ MegaPixel image); 1.2GB Photoshop file (48 bit color depth)


After scanning & saving, I quit and restarted Photoshop to prevent any performance gain from buffering. It took 1:20 (one minute, twenty seconds) just to read it in from the hard drive (G5 used SATA-I).

Performing an "Auto-Level" ...a CPU intensive task...took nearly 7 minutes.

Down-sampling it to 6MP (3018 x 2000) took 1:35.

Reworking the original to "merely" a 120MB Photoshop file (8717 x 5778; = 50 MegaPixels equivalent), it then took :05 to load, :02 to AutoLevel, ~:01 to do a 180 degree rotate, ~:01 to run a sharpen filter. Even though these have a noticable pause, I consider this to be pragmatically fast enough performance, as the hardware won't generally going to impede the workflow. Obviously, even smaller (4, 6, 8, 12 MegaPixel) images can only have better response times which will perceptually approach "instant" much of the time.

My conclusion was that I considered my hardware to have been aequate both for the day (2005) as well as for the reasonably foreseeable future, which at the time I believed to mean "until digital cameras approach 50 MP", but today, I'm experimenting with HDR (High Dynamic Range) and taking multiple different exposures and stacking & combining them into a single image. Even with only a half dozen 8MP images (debateable equivalency, despite 6 * 8 = 48), the current Mac bogs down reeeeal fast. Since I'm areadly running 3.5GB RAM, it is time for more horsepower...lots more.


Photoshop has been able to utilize 2 core processors for some time, but nothing higher until the next re-write.
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And thus, why I haven't already jumped to upgrade my PowerMac to a Mac Pro...while waiting for Photoshop software to mature up, I can also gain a 'free' Mac Pro hardware bump; all I have to do is to extend my procrastination of digitizing my film :D


-hh
 
I just have to add the input of...

As an owner of a $700 Inspiron, I'd say the Macbook is a much better deal. My Macbook works so much better almost a year after owning it than the Inspiron did a month after owning it. Now, it's practically unusable. Right now the margins might be pretty high, but, I think once a refresh hits, you'll see really close competition again. Hell, my Macbook was cheaper than any identical computer from Dell at the time I bought it in 2007.

Only other thing I'd like to point out is that someone mentioned iMacs not having quad-core processors...while they probably could/should, you should compare iMacs to all-in-ones from other companies, as you'll see the differences are not so substantial, and actually the iMac is quite fair.
 
tmelvin said:
Same here. I'd love an MB for $700 - $800 new. My argument was the comparison that the same spec'd Windows Laptop is cheaper than an MB or MBP. I know I can get a cheaper DELL/HP notebook, but if you compare a 13" to 13", with same specs, etc. they're usually close in price, and in many cases the Mac is cheaper...
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Exactly. I know in some cases, spec for spec Apple is sometimes the same, or even less than the competition, however that's not my point. What the other guys are now giving standard, Apple is still charging for. 1 GB of Ram and a CD-RW drive in a $1200 laptop is just plain dumb.

If they took the current Macbook, threw a Pentium Dual-core in there and reduced the price a couple hundred dollars, they'd see a HUGE boot in both sales and profits.

Why do they force everyone to get a high end processor? It's not like they'd have to sacrifice quality to make a cheaper laptop.
 
Dustman said:
Exactly. I know in some cases, spec for spec Apple is sometimes the same, or even less than the competition, however that's not my point. What the other guys are now giving standard, Apple is still charging for. 1 GB of Ram and a CD-RW drive in a $1200 laptop is just plain dumb.

If they took the current Macbook, threw a Pentium Dual-core in there and reduced the price a couple hundred dollars, they'd see a HUGE boot in both sales and profits.

Why do they force everyone to get a high end processor? It's not like they'd have to sacrifice quality to make a cheaper laptop.
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That is an excellent idea. Not everyone needs a core2Duo. Apple would see a huge increase in sales, and a nice increase in profit.
 
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