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Another Look at the 10.6 Value Equation

July 2nd, 2008

Since I wrote my first article suggesting whether Apple should just give away Snow Leopard or make it a low-cost upgrade, many of you have written some cogent comments on the subject. You see value in what Apple is doing to improve Mac OS X, even if there aren’t a lot of surface changes or enhancements.

Indeed, I’m sure Apple is probably spending as much in developing 10.6 as they’d routinely invest in a standard feature upgrade, and some of its new capabilities may be far more meaningful in the areas where it counts, and that’s being able to get your work done faster, with greater stability.

Besides, with Mac OS X taking up more and more gigabytes of storage space, it would be real nice to save some of that and use it for other purposes. If you have a MacBook Air, for example, you have to watch what you’re doing as the hard drive can fill up real fast. In fact, one of the reasons my son didn’t consider one as a graduation gift was the storage constraint. His original notebook, a PowerBook G4, suffered through 80GB and he had to work hard to archive old files on a fairly frequent basis.

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The Illusion of the Cheap Mac

May 20th, 2008

It’s very clear that the words Mac and cheap don’t align very well. Although you can buy a fair number of notebooks for hundreds less, the cheapest MacBook remains $1,099. A refurbished model, or one bought through Apple’s educational channels, can save you a modest sum, but that’s the best you can do if you prefer a Mac.

The same holds true for desktops. The Mac mini, at $599 and $799, is a forgotten stepchild that seldom receives updates, and never gets any real promotion. The symbol of the Apple computer in the Mac versus PC ad is the iMac, which starts at $1,199.

In contrast, there are entry-level PC desktops that sell for less than $200, as I’ll explain in more detail later in this article.

When you combine these factors, you can well believe the long-standing claim by some ill-informed tech and business pundits that Macs are overpriced compared to the competition, but that’s because they’re too lazy to look below the surface and do a modicum of research.

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