Larry's Library

The last few days for some reason I’ve been on a mini quest to learn about the Mac. Call me “bi-curious” computer wise I guess!

Anyway I watched a few videos on the Apple site that explained how to do common stuff on a PC and then showed the equivalent on a Mac. So now I am quite knowledgeable on the basic GUI and stuff. I feel like I could now sit in front of a current Mac and go straight into anything I would need. My impressions:

1) GUI -beautiful! That Dock is a work of friggin art!

2) Animations – all the eye candy effects as you open/close/minimize stuff is crazy impressive!

3) The hardware itself is friggin’ BEAUTIFUL. Aluminum. Thin. Nice. Again elegant works of ART.

Then I went to the store side and pretended to buy one. This is where my brief love affair ENDED. That stuff is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over-priced. Of course we have all known this for some time but the price difference doesn’t really hit home until you see it loaded up in the cart staring you in the face. It is in a word – INSURMOUNTABLE.

The cheapest Mac is the Mac Mini at $699.99 for 700 bucks you get:

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
2GB RAM (LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
320GB HD (Gee I didn’t known they still made many that small)
GeForce 320 graphics

The cheapest Mac portable and also something very similar in size to my Netbook is the Mac Air 11 inch at $999.99

* 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
* 2GB memory
* NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics
* 64GB Flash Storage (No HD I guess)

And one odd thing to note – NO ETHERNET PORT. What the hell??????????? The cheapest Netbook has an Ethernet port but not this pricey Mac?? WHY??

Clearly the specs on the Macbook Air 11 inch are far superior to my Acer 10 inch Netbook. But my Acer only cost $248.00 (+32.00 for an additional 1GB of RAM). At 3x the price is the Mac 3x the machine????????

Much better CPU -YES
Same RAM -NO
Better graphics -YES
Faster but WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY less storage (I have 160GB) -NO

So I dunno maybe the 11 incher IS worth $1,000.00 but if you are a middle-lower classed joe can you afford to spend a grand on a tiny portable?

On the desktop side the Apple Tax is much more apparent as the PC walks all over any thing Apple has to offer when you factor in the cost versus performance. So switching to the Mac isn’t something many people can probably afford to do. But I do have to admit the next time I look at portables I will take a hard look at the Air series. That’s probably all I will do but I WILL look.