For two whole days, the new MacBook Pro has remained clean and pristine, it was time to rough it up a bit. I began the day by carrying the MacBook Pro around, outside and throughout Brooklyn, NY. I had a meeting at a cafe and had to use it for demonstrations, I was also going to be two hours early and figured I could finish some important work. The purpose of a laptop is to be mobile, however laptops this powerful fall under the category of “desktop replacements.” They are traditionally big and bulky and add dents to my spine. Compared to other “desktop replacements” I’ve had, the MacBook Pro is smaller and lighter. Continue Reading »
My debate between purchasing a new MacBook Pro or a new Dell Studio XPS 16 has come to close and I’ve made my final decision. In making my final choices I weighted several factors such as the notion of an Apple Tax and the benefits of Windows familiarity. To my benefit the topic of Mac vs. PC has been recently renewed all over the Internet, some highlights that help in my decision making process were:
You would think with all of this information I had settled on my decision. I did not. As I began to ask more questions, visit more Mac Stores, compare the two systems, I began to realize that this was a decision between accessibility and comfort. One that Windows has lost and Mac has won. After years of using Windows, I’ve grown tired of the platform. I’m sick of .DLL’s, having to consistently worry about virus’s and firewalls, having to worry about registry errors and the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, I love Vista, I think it’s a step in the right direction, but what was the real value of Vista over OSX? What was I really getting? Continue Reading »
I’ve begun the process of purchasing a new laptop, the question is which one? My initial research has lead me to choosing either either the Dell Studio XPS 16 or the MacBook Pro 17”. Windows-based systems tend to be less expensive, but Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc suggests there is a hidden “Apple Tax”, that is in the long term Mac’s are costlier. This suggestion stems from a Microsoft sponsored whitepaper by Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates indicating there is a $3,367 difference of owning a Windows system over five years. There are many issues with the whitepaper (outside of it being sponsored by Microsoft), it reads much like a blog post and includes items that aren’t reflective to either systems (such as the inclusion of Quicken for the Mac only and not the PC, Purchasing Office on the Mac opposed to iLife, and the lack of any Anti-Virus software.)
This notion of an “Apple Tax” does raise an interesting point. When considering the purchase a new system one should look beyond the initial costs to figure out the true value. I wanted to look at the projects costs of purchasing these two laptops over 5 years. Instead of using the metrics in the whitepaper or assumptions of an average user, I wanted to compare both systems based on my needs. I broke these down into two parts, first the initial cost (the system cost and software I would require to accomplish all of the things I want to), and then the maintenance costs over an additional 4 years of each system.
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