🚀 go-pugleaf

Reid Conti (oakley@eskimo.com) wrote:

: Macs have always been more expensive and I look at their prices compared 
: to compaq and packard bell, and they are still MUCH more expensive and 
: usually don't include a monitor or keyboard, yet manage to be more 
: expensive than overpriced PCs.

Haven't priced Compaq and Packard-Bell versus equivalent performance Macs 
recently, have you?  A 5200 costs *less* than a P-B of equal speed now... 
And Compaq has pretty much been equal in price to Macs for the last few 
years.  For $2000, you get a faster Mac with better hardware.

:  Now if you got a REAL PC, build it 
: yourself or have a small shop do it for you, it would be much cheaper, a 
: p6 than a 604.  Powermacs are a royal rip-off.  I don't see why mac users 
: can't see that, its right there in the numbers. 

Oh- so you can guarantee that that small shop will be in business in a 
year?  Sorry- from the standard track record of such stores, most of them 
are here and gone in less than half that time.  And as far as building 
your own machine... about one out of a hundred prople have the technical 
skills to do it right, and even the people who *do* know how to do it 
have to deal with a lot of hassle while trying to save a couple of 
hundred bucks.  It's just not worth it.

Oh- and let us know when you find a P6 motherboard in one of your 
shops... as it stands right now, there *isn't* an x86 that's even close 
to the performance of a 604 Mac.

: I won't comment on 
: performance because I have not even read anything on this but give me a 
: break...   Macs are expensive because apple controlled their market and 
: did their advertising until recently and they still do tons of 
: advertising.  

No- Macs are expensive because they had to do reseach and development and 
make a profit besides- something that the brainy folks at Packard-Bell 
and AST forgot to do (both of which were bailed out by foreign investors 
which need a foothold in the US market).


: Whereas if I build a PC up myself, I might pay for the 
: advertising of the harddisk company and the motherboard, processer 
: company (Intel) but that's it. 

...and the time you spend building the thing.  Unless your time is worth 
zero dollars an hour to you (should we tell your boss?)

: It is very clear.  And to think that a 
: packard bell or a compaq with a monitor is cheaper than a slightly lesser 
: mac without keyboard or monitor.. (Sorry, I don't see identical 
: compaq/mac configurations so I say a lesser mac to make it more fair)

Where do you shop?  Have you priced Macs in the last six months or so?  
Compare the price on a Mac 5200 to a P-B Pentium 75... the Mac is faster, 
has better hardware (compare that P-B .39 pitch 13" monitor to the one 
built into the 5200 that gives you *real* 832 by 624 resolution).  And 
the equal Compaq is more expensive than that.

-- 

Chad Irby           /    My greatest fear: that future generations will,
cirby@gate.net     /      for some reason, refer to me as an "optimist."