Sons of Macintosh - shaking the Apple family tree
The Jesus Phone is not divine
Report Card, Part Three When the original Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, it carried a $2,495 price tag - roughly $5,250 in 2008 money. Ever since, the debate has raged over whether Macs are more expensive, feature-by-feature and capability-by-capability, than their PC brethren.
And what a meaningless debate it is.
Here at The Reg, we subscribe to two time-honored dictums: "You get what you pay for," and "You pays your money and you makes your choice." By and large, Apple produces solid, reliable hardware, much of it bundled with a broad range of user-friendly software. If you want Apple, you buy Apple and you pay Apple's price. No one's forcing you to.
On January 24, 1984, when Steve Jobs unleashed the Macintosh at an Apple shareholders meeting (click here for video), no one cheered when he announced its un-LISA-like "mainstream price point." They cheered when he pulled it from a carrying case and it said "Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag."
With the inevitable January 24, 2009 just around the corner, we're handing Jobs and crew their 25-year report card. Just because we can. We've already served up Parts One and Two, rating and slating everything from Apple's innovation mojo to its (non-existent) philanthropic efforts. Now, we rate the products themselves. But we won't mention the price of a PC.
Sons of Macintosh
Since Steve Jobs first pulled the original Mac out of its carrying case, there have been just under 300 different Mac models.
Today, there are nine - not counting variations in processor power, graphics subsystems, and the like. The desktop line includes the Mac mini, the 20-inch and 24-inch iMacs, and the Mac Pro. On your lap, there are a pair of MacBooks, plus two different-sized MacBook Pros and the featherweight MacBook Air. Well, "on your lap" might be a wee bit overstated, since Apple's laptops have such toasty bottoms that it's not wise to get them too close to your naughty bits.
Most Macs are, in general, closed systems that aren't meant to be upgraded or customized, despite the fact that an entire third-party ecosystem exists to do just that. Most Mac users, however, don't exploit upgrade possibilities other than RAM - and except for the top-of-the-line Mac Pro and the hard drives of the MacBook and MacBook Pro, Apple doesn't make it easy for them to do so.
That said, if you buy the right Mac, it'll do pretty much what you want it to do right out of the box - unless you're a devoted gamer. Despite the fact that Apple continually tries to assert that it's got game, the truth is that no Mac can carry the jockstrap of a fully hot-rodded Windows box when it comes to PC gaming.
Let's start at the bottom of the desktop line and work our way up.
Mac mini: Ah, pity the poor, neglected runt of the Mac litter. The mini ($599 to $799) is the only Mac to still contain a last-generation 65nm Merom-class processor, and its innards haven't been upgraded since the middle of last year. It's the only Mac, for example, that's still lumbered with 667MHz frontside bus (FSB).
Rumors of the mini's impending death have yet to come true, and so it carries on in its humble duty of being the cheapest - and the cutest - way to run Mac OS X. It's tiny (2- by 6.5- by 6.5-inches), quiet, and unobtrusive. Do remember that you'll need to supply your own mouse, keyboard, and display.
Mac mini: C
Next page: Teeth and Sno Balls
COMMENTS
Just passing through . . .
Apple fully understands that it's just passing through the present on the way to the future. Complaints about Apple and its products are often the result of Apple compromising the present to enable future transitions. To take just one example, Apple keyboards are clearly converging with multitouch panels (even as speech input evolves in the background). Proper old fashioned clacky keyboards are available from third parties, but that's not where the mainstream future lies.
@AC re: Is a MAC worth it?
"But why pay the stupid price for overpriced hardware when the Hackintosh can do the job at a fraction?"
Maintaining a hackintosh requires time and effort and, for those of us whose time is valuable, the amount of time spent messing about with patches etc. actually works out way more than the initial hardware cost.
BTW you'll find (if you do a bit of research) that Mac prices are not very different to those of other brands if you don't add any extras to the machines.
"Is a MAC worth it? Yes just for the OS alone."
But why pay the stupid price for overpriced hardware when the Hackintosh can do the job at a fraction?
I tried to move over a few years ago but as I enjoy gaming to it was a waste of time. The Mac's will stay a minority machine for many more years to come.
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