jade said:
OS X is great...but if you are let's say a mid-level designer who spens all day using Adobe software, OS will not make a huge difference on your photoshop/illustrator/in design preformance. Personal preference is the winner here. Using wiindows or OS X will not make a difference in the quality of your output.
The OS will make a huge difference, actually, depending on the harrdware, optimizations, and other factors that the coding can make a big difference in. Remember when the G4 was still spanking higher-clocked systems in Photoshop? That wasn't just because it was a better chip for the job (at the time, at least), but also because Apple was perfectly happy to be sure that the program worked as well as possible within the space afforded it by the OS. To say anything else to show gross negligence, ignornace, or deliberate misrepresentation of the facts.
Would you honestly say that there is no difference between Windows 98 and Windows XP, or either of those two and OS X?
No one bundles office, but at leasty on the PC you get works or word perfect for basic productivity (which we all agree is on the level of Appleworks, but Word perfect is significantly better
WordPerfect tends to cost extra, even if it's $10-30.
in terms of expandability, my hypothetical customer (and many computer users) never really add anything internally in many cases...so it is perhaps a non-issue. FW 800 for many customers is not a necessity, as is gigabit ethernet...so these do not carry the same weight for me....and a huge margin of computer users I am hypothetically seling to
Then you hypothetical customer isn't likely to buy a mac in the first place, since we
]do tend to expand our machines and hold onto them. It could certainly be argued that this trend is because of cost and market pressure, but the simple truth is that for professionals and many home users, expandability
is important. I can't count the number of people I know who have PCs that are in need of one update or another, and typically that comes in the form of a card of some sort. A card is cheaper than a whole new machine, when all you need is Firewire, or USB 2.0, or some other thing that might not be in the box you already have.
Weren't you the one who went on about costs?
WE aren't talking ipods here there is no contest for mp3 players. Digital Camera use is painless with HP software, very iphoto like. The bundled movie editing software is decent, with a slight edge to imovie for ease of use, and a slight edge to microsoft for transitions. Arcsoft showbiz, i haven't used long enough to make a judgement compared to imovie. But the functionality is there and it is easy...so this is not the huge deal breaker you make it out to be..... unless you will only be editing movies all day (and then of course you would use FCP.
Mmmmhmmm... iPhoto-
like, iMove-
like... The fact remains that they're not iLife, and even if they approximate the same functionality, they're still copies of the best suite on the market, created by second-rate programmers in an attempt to keep up with territory Apple mostly pionered in the digital lifestyle field. The final thing here, though, is that you're trying to push your opinion on me, and I'm merely stating what's widely held as a belief among people who have used macs without a pre-existing bias. It may not be a dealbreaker
for you that iLife isn't included, but there's a point in there that no PC, no matter how price-performance attractive it may be, can never make up for - it doesn't run the Mac OS.
What do HP's profit-making abilities have to do with whether or not an AMD 64 machine is a good performer compared with the 1.6 powermac. WE are comparing costs for the end users not company stockholders. At the end of the day in our Walmart-driven society...no one cares how much profit a manufacter makes on each product, as long as the pricing is something they are comfortable with paying.
It has to do with the competitiveness because HP is selling computers that they make basically no money on, and yet you hold them up as what Apple needs to match. It's unrealistic, suicidal, and otherwise ludicrous to say that Apple should even try to keep up with the OEMs that have huge bases of finance that pile on top of the already huge component supply. Simple economies of scale are made all the worse when you competition also has a huge bank account to be buying their cheap computers with, and it only gets more nightmarish when you consider that HP is far from the only one that's selling on basically no margin. They don't need to turn a profit on consumer hardware to stay afloat, but Apples does.
Whether or not the peons who think that Wal-Mart is a good deal, rather than typically being a thinly-veiled excuse for selling substandard pap to undeducated and feckless consumers, the fact remains that you're trumpeting a business model that would annihilate Apple Computers and leave us with no Macintosh at all. Without a hardware margin, there is no money to keep researching new technologies, and I guarantee that the stagnation under Motorola would look like a paradise compared to what would happen if there was no R&D at Apple anymore.
That is how it matters. Do you get it now?
HP is not really trying to master the low end....they really sell to the enterprise market and the consumer space is a recent change for them. They never sold to consumers until the past few years. As long as HP continues to sell well in the enterprise with their higher end servers, workstations and sesktops, as well as their printers, their consumer product line doesn't need to generate mass profits. The same could be said for Apple. Apple aims to sell 60% pro mix overall and makes significantly less money on the consumer lineup. Not really important in terms of computer performance per dollar.
No, the same cannot be said for Apple, because they don't have the volume to cut the margins on the lowend. Dell does, HP does, Sony does... Not Apple. It's a bad situation, if you want to be greedy and demand cheap computers from circumstances that just aren't in favor of it, but hardly hopeless.
AS much as you like to say Apple and HP and other PC OEM's aren't competing in the same space, when it comes down to it they are competing for the same customer. And if these customers find more value per dollar on the PC side, well it makes perfect sense to get one. Among the graphic designers I have chatted with, many are facing an extremely difficult decision. Looking at the hardware on the PC, and the immense improvements in Windows ease of use and hardware performance in the necessary software, it doesn't always make sense to pay the Apple premium for their line of work.
No, they're not. People who believe a $400-600 retail computer isn't going to be built from crappy parts also aren't going to understand enough about machines that they'll be able to survive in the Apple market. They're the ones who will be upset that the animated .exe card sent by their neice doesn't work, or that some $5 bargain-bin PC game at Wal-Mart doesn't play. Also, if your graphics designer friends are so tempted to jump, then they ought to. Computers are tools, and you ought to use the one that gets the job done the best. For me, there has never been a PC that would make it worth switching, because I function so much better in OS X than I ever have in any version of Windows.
But we all need to be realistic here, Apple still needs to make some pretty serious leaps in price and performance to be a true option for a lot of computer users, and stop the Mac users fleeing for windows do to the cost of Apple hardware. Even if Apple makes the stockholders happy, they have a large responsibility to customers as well. In order to increase the rate os OS X adoption and OS X marketshare, Apple needs to keep pace with the competition.
We need to be realistic? Since when have I stopped doing it?
What you need to do is to start realizing that many, many parts in the machines Apple build are higher quality, and also just plain more expensive, than their PC counterparts. As I've said umpteen million times already, there are things Apple must pay a premium for or research and create for themselves, and almost all of those are commodity priced on the other side. When we're using custom-designed ASICs on a new processor, totally new motherboards that are run only for Apple, graphics cards that are run only for Apple... Do you understand at least that much?
Much of this is out of their hands. Without greater support from the hardware manufacturers, there isn't going to be a whole lot of change, and saying 'Apple should just eat the costs and be competitive,' is a recipe for their being no Apple anymore.