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January 17, 2008
Why My Next Machine (Still) Won't Be a Mac
My desktop machine has been acting flaky lately. I suspect it's the power supply - and on that theory I bought a replacement, and took the opportunity to get a better (quieter) case while I was at it.
My power supply theory could turn out to be wrong, in which case the symptoms suggest some core component is failing - probably the on-board SATA controller.
So I started pricing out upgrades, and wondering if this is the upgrade when I either buy a "brand name" machine, or ditch the desktop machine and go notebook all the way.
It looks like I could upgrade to a reasonable machine (dual or quad core, 4GB ram, mid-range current generation graphics card) for about $700 in components.
I took a few minutes to look at Apple's current hardware line. It's pretty quickly obvious why I won't be buying a Mac, and why gaming on the Mac is dancing with weights around it's ankles.
The Mac Mini looks nice, 'till you realize it's got possibly the worst graphics solution possible. Not only is it an integrated chipset, which precludes any gaming, but it's only got a single single-link DVI out, which precludes multi-monitor.
The big-stompy tower machine is great, if you've got three-thousand dollars burning a hole in your pocket. Next.
In the desktop category that leaves the iMac. The biggest problem with the iMacs are that they artificially couple the life-cycle of a display device (which tends to last across multiple generations) with the life-cycle of the rest of the machine. And while there's a mini-DVI out (so multi-monitor is possible) and the built-in graphics card is better than built in, it's not going to stay relevant for long.
Oh, and it's still in the $1500 range - $600 of which (judging by the stand-alone pricing at the apple store) is the 20" display they're forcing you to buy.
The $1300 MacBook is a nice form factor, and not a horrible price/performance trade-off, except when it comes to the integrated graphics again.
That leaves the MacBook pro. It's a nice machine - and the graphics solution is modern and likely to do ok for a generation or so. I've lived with a G4-generation PowerBook, so I know the form-factor, and it's a bit bigger than I'd really like, but tolerable. And touches like the light-sensing keyboard are great. But it's $2500, which is more than I'm willing to spend on dead-end hardware.
So, after all that, I'm hoping that the new case/powersupply solves my problem, 'cause if it doesn't, I'm not sure what I'm going to do...
I guess I'll just spend a bit of money on parts and continue on the "franken-computer" path...
Posted by dberger at January 17, 2008 10:53 AM
Comments
Yea, yea, yea...
Putting on my Canonical Hat, I'd say buy a Thinkpad T-series and put Ubuntu 7.10 on it.
Personally, I *love* my 20" iMac. It looks great, all that crap under my desk is gone, no more Windows to deal with ( except for when I have to dual-boot into XP to run Steam/TF2 that is ), no anti-virus BS, and it just plain works! It's also the first computer I've ever bought where I pulled it out of the box, turned it on, and was using it almost immediately! For gaming, I have a console ( again except for TF2 ), however I know how you feel about that device too, so I won't bring it up here.
I have a 15" Macbook Pro with Ubuntu running under VMWare Fusion, and I also dual-boot into Ubuntu occasionally to work on NetworkManaqer. Yea, it's expensive, but it's fast, and it just works. Something which couldn't be said of my previous Windows boxes...
p.s. Did I tell you that my former boss is Chief Architect of all things mobile at M$ these days???
Posted by: /tony at January 18, 2008 10:24 AM
Pricing a dell with a Intel Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.4GHz,1066FSB) and a 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO and 3GB of memory comes in at about $1100. Adding in the easily googled $200 coupon for Dell that can be found via google, and that comes to $900. For $200 more you can get a 256 MB nVidia card, and for $250 a 512 MB nVidia. If you go with the inspiron line you can get a $300 coupon for any desktop over $1000, which puts you back at your $700 mark, but with a warranty and such. Bear in mind unless you're running Vista 64 bit or a linux 64 bit distro, you're not going to gain any benefit from 4 GB as apparently you can only address 3.3 GB on the 32 bit OS's.
Posted by: Brad at January 18, 2008 5:24 PM
I bought my Macbook Pro two years ago (then the Pro tower last Christmas, two iPhones in July, and two Minis in the last three months - soon I expect to replace the last PC in the house, Donna's, with a Mac). Your needs, and what you're willing to pay to satisfy them, will differ from everyone else's, but I've been *very* happy with the stability, elegance, and flexibility of the Macs. The comment I've made about the iPhones, that the features they do wrong (or don't do at all) are outweighed by how superbly they do everything else, applies to the Macs too - especially with the ability to run other OSes via VM or natively via Boot Camp for gaming. I spent years (decades) building a series of beige boxes to keep up with Windows' ever-increasing requirements, and have gotten to the point where I'm just not interested in screwing around with the hardware (and even when I was, price was not in my top five concerns).
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/explaining-the-macintosh-surge/
Posted by: Hendel at January 19, 2008 11:04 AM