Have a sip, it's only $1,000 a cup!
I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a few days:
If Sir Alec Guinness were here, he might put it “The force, of advertising, can have a stong influence on the weak of mind”.
At the beginning of the summer, when Psystar started shipping their “Open Computer”, I actually did consider buying one, because they do have better hardware than Apple offers, at a much lower markup price.
But the more I looked into it, the less I liked the deal, not because I have any moral reservations about what they do, they were mainly the facts that you still can’t get *some* updates from Apple themselves and because the fan controls were not working when booted into OS X, and the noise levels in one review easily drowned out a passing fire engine.
So what is going on now?
Apple filed a lawsuit against Psystar (I wanted to link to the original article, but it is mysteriously not responding), they allege the usual load of Bologna that big companies with one cash cow do when they’re under the gun, copyright infringement and violation of their EULA.
Psystar’s position, and the one I agree with, is that Apple is an abusive monopoly which is betraying their customer’s trust in locking OS X to an incredibly overpriced piece of hardware.
By the way, if you even begin reading this line, you owe me $300. ;)
Of course this all comes down to who can last longer in court, naturally you would think it to be Apple, yet Psystar is openly defying them by continuing to sell the Open Computer, and has hired a team of prominent anti-trust lawyers. (Has someone slipped Psystar some money?)
By the way, if you wish to side with Apple, please stop using your PC immediately, you and the company that sold it are in violation of IBM’s intellectual property.
The PC itself is a clone of IBM’s PC, and IBM eventually sold off their PC division to Lenovo because it was no longer profitable enough to them since you can walk into the gas station and get a halfway decent Gateway and a bag of chips and still not go over $500.
Apple’s bread and butter is bundling OS X with expensive hardware that only they can produce.
But if you still doubt me, let’s look at what you get with Psystar vs. a real Mac:
In the left corner, the $599 Mac Mini:
1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo
1 GB DDR2 667 RAM
80 gig 5200 RPM hard disk
a DVD ROM/CD RW drive (no DVD burning for you!)
Oh look, an Intel GMA 950 that can’t even play games, and you can’t upgrade it!
Extreme Tech reviewed the GMA 950 in 2005 and found that at 640 x 480, with all quality settings on ultra low, it managed 16 frames a second in DOOM 3.
A $600 PC in 2004 could run DOOM 3 at twice the speed of a $600 Mac in 2008!
(I have a GMA 3100 on my board, but I have never used it, a $50 card would beat the crap out of it, and a $100 or $200 card would murder it)
So here we’ve already determined that Apple is selling you a system that was low end, 3 years ago, but also managing to sell it for $600.
In the right corner, the $554.99 base model Open Computer:
Pentium Dual Core E2180 @ 2 Ghz (It’s Conroe, so it’s 170 Mhz faster than the Mini’s CPU, and 1 MB of L2 less, should balance out)
2 GB of DDR2 800 (You start off with twice the RAM, it’s faster, and you still have two available slots that the Mini doesn’t, and can actually get the case open without a paint scraper, yes, PAINT SCRAPER)
Nvidia Geforce 7200GS with 256 MB of dedicated GDDR2 (About 7-8 times faster than the GMA 950)
Dual Layer 20x DVD+/-RW (Yay!)
250 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive
Winner: The Open Computer, it’s about fifty bucks cheaper and about 5 times the computer
The Mac Mini boils down to an overpriced toy, it has cheap hardware and Apple uses the rest of the “Mac Tax” to hide where their profit is coming from.
About 2 years ago, I made an offer on a Mac, a used G4 1.5 Ghz with 512 megs of RAM if I remember right, I offered the guy $300 for it and offered to come pick it up the next day, he acted shocked insulted.
Even though I probably offered him at least $100 more than the thing was worth, he told me that if I gave him $700 for it he would end the auction, it turns out that he had it listed on ebay and craigslist at once (both of these are a violation of ebay auction policy).
I ended up reporting him for abuse and his ebay sellers account was revoked, but the part that really shocked me was why anyone would pay that much for a 6 year old computer.
When I go to sell my car, remind me to tell them it’s a vintage Macintosh and that it’s based on UNIX, I’ll be able to retire at the ripe old age of 24.
This is what advertising does people, it convinces us things are worth more than they are, you can still go to ebay and see incredibly ancient Macs selling for more than PC’s that are 5-6 times faster and brand new.
Our cruisers can't repel marketing bullshit of that magnitude!
I’ve never fully understood what the full deal behind the Mac craze was anyway:
It seems more to be a status symbol to me than practical in many cases, I’ve seen very few people that actually needed a Mac, most of the one’s I’ve known in my life (well, all four), two were spoiled children using the thing as a toy, one was my uncle using it for CAD (It does do that well, but decent CAD software is in the $3,000-$4,000 ballpark anyway), and the other one works at a newspaper office and appears to use it mainly for Microsoft Word.
Yeah, it’s UNIX certified, I’ve heard some people rip that straight from Apple’s marketing page.
The funny thing about that is, that most of them can’t tell you what UNIX, POSIX, C, source code, or a compiler are.
“DTrace is a low-level debugging and profiling facility for detailed monitoring of virtually any aspect of an application.”
Will be heard by most users as:
“The inverse tachyon beam has caused a feedback loop in the primary routing systems for the EPS conduits, but with a controlled burst from the deflector aray, we may be able to cause a tetrion cascade of positively charged verdian particles.”
And if you want to rock and roll with the 95% of video games that will never be ported and cost double if they are, which no Mac under $1,000 can handle anyway, you’ll have to buy a copy of Vista.
Or try your hand at Darwine or Cider, (Wine and Cedega for Mac) which leaves you in the same boat as Linux users, who got Linux for free and their choice of fairly priced commodity hardware.
Not that I don’t enjoy playing $19.99 Windows games for $49.95 on the Mac.
(I would sell my soul for Angelina Jolie, however!)
So to wrap it up:
I doubt anyone really wants a Mac, they either want OS X and/or a status symbol.
People are trying to run OS X on the PC because they realize that Apple price gouges, they want OS X, and that in keeping OS X locked up, Apple has made it a forbidden fruit. :P
I don’t hate OS X, Apple, or the Mac, I have some stong opinions against some of the things they are doing, and how people are seemingly programmed to side with Apple.
Apple is clearly being belligerent, anti-competitive, abusive of it’s customers, and is cheating the public coffers and flagrantly abusing the court system to try to secure it’s monopoly.
When Microsoft does this behavior, they get smacked down by the DOJ or the EC, but when Apple engages in predatory behavior that creates a conflict of interest with their customers, we cheer them on?
Not me!
Apple is doing everything you would expect them to do, it’s cheaper to just sue competitors into the ground than to make your product capable of competing on it’s own merits.
