Costs

During any discussion after any article regarding Mac versus Windows, this is the first topic of discussion. Let's see if it holds water.

On the Desktop:

The Low End:

I do feel that to make this a fair comparison, the Dell system should be upgraded to Windows XP Professional, this adds $60 to the price of the system, bringing the price to $909 ($759 on sale)

From a hardware perspective, the Dell clearly wins on many fronts, it's got a more powerful processor, it's got more disk, and a DVD drive. It is also more expandable, as it is a tower case. The Apple really only wins in the compact footprint, easy to plug-in categories. Not a big win.

The Middle Ground:

Again, add $60 to the Dell for XP Professional, but that's not an issue, this is clearly a Windows point, though I will mention that from a personal experience item, I'd much prefer to see a Dual 1.3 or 1.5 x86 machine than a single P4 at 2.5, for roughly the same price. The raw performance numbers for single thread tasks aren't as high, but with dual processors, processor lag, and system latency drops off dramatically.

The High End:

Yes, still add that $60 for Professional, but this is again a clear Windows win.

On the Road:

The Low End:

The upgrade to Windows XP Professional is $79 on this model. This is a PIII, not a P4, so the processor speed is still faster than than the iBook, it's not as large a gap as it appears, the iBook disk is a little larger, the screen a little smaller. Depending upon your needs these two balance very well against each other. As a laptop user, I would give this to the iBook on battery life, but being as I'm trying to refrain from a bias, I'm giving this to the Windows side on price.

The Middle Ground:

As always, bump to XP Professional for $79. The price here is a clear Dell win, however, the lack of a DVD drive in this class of machine is another issue, that upgrade is a $20 upgrade, and brings the features of the machines much closer. Again, going on price, this is a Dell win.

The High End:

Again, adding XP Professional for $79, this is where to comparisons get interesting. In the interests of making this a little more equal, let's adjust the options on this Dell to match the Apple specs, 512M ram drops $200, switching to DVD-R/CD-RW adds $200, and a 60G disk brings it up $130, to a total (including the XP Upgrade) to $3,214. Again going purely on price, Windows again.

Based purely on price, the Windows platform wins at all levels, or does it? The thing none of the previous things take into account is how often the machines will be replaced. An Apple only has to last on average 10% longer than any of these Windows machines to have made up those hardware costs. In my experience this is the case. Most Apple Macinstosh machines stay in service longer than thier counterparts.

The other things that these comparisons don't address either are the features that aren't readily compared. At the middle and high end in the laptop ranges, Apple features both built-in wireless networking, and gigabit ethernet. The former is a $70-120 bonus. The later is a $250 PC Card. The other gotcha here is the quality of some of the Apple parts over the counterpart Dell (Toshiba, HP, Compaq, Gateway) parts. LCD screen quality is difficult to measure quantitatively, but in my own experience with both the iBook/PowerBook screens and the Dell and Toshiba screens, the Apples have a lower reslution, but a much higher image quality, while the Dell and Toshiba have great resolutions, but the image quality is such, that it doesn't matter. Despite these mitigating factors, I give the overall edge to the Windows world based upon the differences in bus / processor speed. This is a very slight edge though. In the end, I personal find myself replacing my windows hardware about every 11 months, while my Apple machines tend to go closer to 18, thus my personal costs are lower overall on the Apple.

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