During past 11 years I bought at least 4 new PCs (in 1995 for $950, in 1999 for $2000, 2001: $2000, 2004: $1800; multiple upgrades: CPU, HDD, RAM, Video) and two notebooks (Sony VAIO 15″, $1800 in 2002 and Compaq 17″ in 2005, $1700). Today I realized , that my current PC (Intel Pentium 4, 2.8GHz, 1G RAM) is way too slow.
I’ve paid MS/Intel campus at least 9 thousand US dollars total, about $820/year (not counting software).
What do I have now? One five years old PC with CDROM issues, one two years old PC which I feel I need to replace soon. One Compaq notebook which my wife cannot use on regular basis because it’s too hard to sync it with her PC (and it has touch pad issues) and one Sony VAIO which I gave away in 2004 (one other PCs I had to sale for a very cheap price and one got issues so it was cheaper to dump it than try to repair).
Wintel is getting old too fast! I’m really thinking of getting myself into Mac religion. People there says that Macs are lasting much longer than PC. For some reason I believe them. So, within next few weeks/months I’m going to do some analysis and, if I find that I can do whatever I do in PC environment using Mac, I’ll go there, I’ll buy an Apple Mac.
So, here is the history:
1. 1995. Intel 386. $950 total.
CPU: Intel 386 + co-processor 387, RAM: 4Mb (extended to 8MB, than to 16Mb - I don’t remember exact cost, it was about $100 per 16Mb), HDD 120Mb (two years later I bought one more HDD, 400Mb for $200), 15″ TVM monitor. Original price for the computer was $750 (I had to work two months overtime to afford it).
Sold it in 1999 for about $100.
2. 1999. AMD K6 with 3D Now technology.
CPU: AMD K6 333MHz, RAM 64Mb, HDD 1Gb (later bought another with 4Gb capacity for about $200), with 17″ CTX monitor. Original price: $1100. It was never sold, I passed it to my younger brother and, after multiple issues with motherboard, CPU and memory, he abandoned it in 2004.
3. 2001. Intel Pentium III, 800MHz. $2000.
CPU: Intel Pentium III, 800MHz, RAM: 256MB (later extended to 512Mb), HDD 20Gb (later I bought one more HDD with 40Gb capacity for $150), monitor Iiyama 20″ (later I had to replace it with Sony LCD 17″ for $500). I had to buy another Sony CDROM in 2004 because the original one (also Sony) started to refuse to read/write CDs, another $150. The new one in 2006 started to give us the same issues. Basically, it doesn’t work.
4. 2004. Intel Pentium IV, 2.8GHz. $1800.
CPU: Intel Pentium VI, 2.8GHz, RAM 512Mb (I’ve expanded it to 1Gb for $100), HDD 60Gb, Sony LCD 17″. I also bought one more HDD with 120Gb for $100 just recently.
5. Notebooks: Sony VAIO (AMD), $1800 and Compaq Presario X6000 (Intel), $1700.
Sony was working terrible. It could just freeze with no reason. Sometimes it could work the whole day (8-10 hours) with no issues, sometimes it was freezing almost every two hours. I couldn’t predict it. Sony support could not help me to identify the issue. After 2 years of such terrible use I decided to give it away.
Compaq is almost OK, except it has issues with touch pad. If you keep it on, after a few minutes it starts to “play games” with mouse pointer and you just cannot control it. Workaround is to use USB mouse and turn the touch pad off.
I was always under impression than PC is much cheaper than Apple Mac. When I saw Mac prices it was kind of obvious. Recently one of my friends (a big Mac fan) made a point that even if comparable Mac is more expensive than a PC, it lasts much longer and has less issues. Add to this much better user experience and you get a better deal.
What do I do with computers?
Well,В I’m not a gamer. My primary use currently is web development (Eclipse + plug-ins), graphics design (Adobe Photoshop), applications development, database design. Among all things only Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is platform dependent; I wonder if Apple has some sort of emulation of Windows environment…
So, I’m thinking very hard: should I buy a Mac and what it will cost me overall?
6 comments ↓
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Do give it an honest chance, the chances you won’t like it are small, very small. There’s nothing on the market that can rival the experience of a mac, nothing. I have never regret spending that little more on my powerbook, because it was all worth it.
Having used PCs in my work and Macs in my leisure, I’d say you may like Macs for personal productivity reasons. They tend to last and will (if properly spec’ed) run the next Mac OS versions. As for retaining its value, now with new Macs coming out more regularly, used Macs depreciate faster than before which may be an opportunity for a bargain.
Buy a Mac, the OS is the best you can get. Period. And if you want gaming, they can dual-boot to windows now. The hardware is almost the same price as equivalent wintel stuff from dell etc, nowadays, because they’re using the same architecture. And on the software side, apart from games, there’s enough software to do what you need. PowerPC Macs did last a very long time (my school had a load of G3 iMacs still going strong after about 8 years), and now they’re into second-gen intel ones they should be better quality than the first-gen.
I’m wonder that PIV 2.8 is slow. May be the Windows is slow?
In my opinion mac is for users who do not interested in computer itself, how does it work, what does it do, what is the file, driver or permission. But who interested in their work. Like writers designers etc.
For IT-person the best choise is some UNIX system (Linux is the most popular).
And I’m sure that Linux can work well on PIV-2.8
The most resourceable part is the GUI, and you are free to use anyone existent, from very simple to one like Windows.
I’m using Solaris10+Java Desktop System+Netbeans. And on my PIV-2.6 it’s slow. Yes, slow. May be it is because Solaris10×86 ported from SPARC system and don’t optimized for Intel’s proccesors (it optimized for AMD Opertron, because Sun builds and sales their servers only on AMD platform yet).
Apple is the best!! PC is bad=)
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