Besides, gopher, Apple does not compete on price. Anyone who can’t appreciate the differences between a Wintel and a Mac, will never be a good Apple customer. Good computing is not by hardware alone.

The Mac’s major differences with PC’s are build quality, good looks and the Mac OSX operating system. Hence, you can always find a cheaper PC with better specifications. So, what?

Snow Leopard will be raising the bar for Microsoft. What Snow Leopard offers Apple customers is increased speed on the same Intel hardware. Mac applications will be getting ever faster, through out the next year, as developers recompile for 64 bit processing.

Anyway, The fastest running trial of Windows Vista was on Mac Hardware.

Microsoft’s major liability is the Windows Operating System. Windows Seven, despite being faster and more efficient that Vista, is an insecure, stand alone system which needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to withstand the rigors of the internet. Microsoft is afraid to do this because it breaks all their existing applications. If MS does what is needed to secure Windows, then there goes their market share.

Absent that fix, Windows needs to be sandboxed inside a REAL operating system like Linux or Mac OSX, or inside a hardware virtual space such as Intel’s VPRO. Either way, this means a slower, less flexible system than Snow Leopard. It might also push up Wintel’s price.

@ gopher: Sorry, bud, but price is price. You are paying less compared to the previous configurations in every respect. The NVIDIA integrated GPU is also faster than some dedicated chips. Check the benchmarks.

Sounds like you are still working really hard to justify an argument that doesn’t wash. So let’s sum it up: The list price is lower. Maybe there are some features you’d like to see, but Express/34 was, according to Apple, only used by a small percentage of users.

Peace,
Gene

Apple reduced its notebook price? Maybe features, but not really price (except 17″).

The $1199 to $1699 MacBook Pros are really nothing more than a MacBook Aluminum with a Firewire port and an SD slot. But since they offered the Firewire port already on the $999 White MacBook, the SD slot addition is merely a convenience which can be had for $10, which Apple is offering at $200. And how many people are going to be able to use the Firewire 800? Most are going to adapt that to 400, and plus it isn’t a dedicated bus, unlike the old Express card. The MacBook Aluminum basically has had its feature set brought up to the standard of a Pro with the 15″ screen at $1699 and the white’s incorporation of Firewire. It still also only has a shared memory GPU. Finally at $1999 we might say the new MacBook Pro has comparison to the old MacBook Pro, except, there is still no Express/34. No dedicated place to put your SATA or Firewire Express/34 card. Finally the 17″ is a price reduction. But for those who travel a lot, the 17″ doesn’t fit on most Boeing 737 except the 737-700 and 737-800. So what advantage do we have here. Now if Apple brought a full chip GPU at $1199 to the MacBook Pro, then I’d consider it a price reduction.

Alfiejr said:
“What a MS Rip Off!! let’s see if all the MS-loving “pundits” even take notice of how they are being systematically milked. i bet not …”

Ir is worse than that, Alfie. Ed Bott is actually claiming that Apple’s upgrade to Snow Leopard is a rip off. He said in http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1114.

“In fact, according to my analysis of Apple’s own sales figures, 57% of Apple’s customers who bought and paid for new Macs in the past five years are ineligible for those cheap upgrades.”

He faked some statistics to say that most of the Mac user base will be denied the $29 upgrade price, either because they are not on Intel hardware or they are on the Tiger OS. He set up his scam to totally confuse the issue. The poor Windows users remain befuddled.

His bogus charts show Windows users going back to October 2001 upgrading to windows seven. This is dishonest because Window 7, while it runs better than Vista did, still requires better hardware than was available in 2001.

Since PC users junk their computers every two years on average, most of the PC’s in existence are Vista computers downgraded to Windows XP. Those should work well with System 7, but not all will have the hardware necessary to run the Areo advanced compositing graphics system. Hence, they are not really comparable to a Macintosh.

Dittos Neil.

Dave, I live by myself and use 3 Macs of varying vintage and capabilities.

When I buy a Mac OS upgrade I don’t feel ripped off.

One of the items that almost all of these analyses leave out (or consign to footnotes) is that Apple offers Family Pack pricing.
How many families today own only a single computer?
Our family (4 humans + 3 cats) owns 5 Macs (the cats have to share).
When you start to compare OS upgrade costs for 5 computers, I don’t care what your time horizon is, Mac OS X is a lot less.
Then there is the fact that you don’t have to actually buy the Family Pack version. I do, but I am sure that some people don’t. (Activation? Never heard of it.)

I don’t understand why Vista Windows users don’t storm the gate of the Redmond campus and complain loudly. Vista users should get a free upgrade as a Microsoft’s “mea culpa.” Windows 7 is Vista Service Pack 3. This is just “lipstick on a pig” with a much better quality of lipstick.

Windows XP users should get a special pricing offer as an incentive to move to Windows 7. Where are the anti-M$ tax crowd? This is not about which OS is better. It is about a mega-rich corporation in Redmond, Washington taking your hard-earned dollars again and again and again and again. Maybe users of Microsoft’s product are quite contented with this situation as long as HP and Dell make the hardware cheap to compensate.

As a Mac user, we often complain with justification and are very vocal. As a result, we’ve got back FireWire back on the 13-inch MacBook Pro and a fix for the SATA speed downgrade. Thank you, Apple, for making these changes and the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade. Nice to be a Mac user.

In all fairness,
you should mention that the 10.5 -> 10.6 upgrade Apple offers ist the first one since 10.0->10.1 (which was free of charge), while MS did offer reduced upgrades since at least Win 98(?). Now compare their whole pricing structure since 2001 (when Mac OS X and Win XP where launched)and MS doesn’t look THAT greedy anymore, since 10.2 -> 10.5 where each $99 – $129. So bying every iteration of OS X since 10.0 will have you paid something like – $600? And finally, last I checked MS is still issuing critical patches for Win 2000 while Apple stopped doing so for (AFAIK) 10.3 or lower altogether.

All this without opening ye olde can o’ worms of which is the better OS or offered more “bang for the buck” since 2001.

the MS Tax is even worse for those who already paid once before to upgrade XP to Vista. Since Win 7 is really “Vista done right” (and just NT 6.1 compared to Vista’s NT 6.0), those poor suckers will have paid a total of $350 to $500 for what really amounts to a single OS upgrade. What a MS Rip Off!! let’s see if all the MS-loving “pundits” even take notice of how they are being systematically milked. i bet not …