To Mac cool and back in a generation
Back in 1984, my Dad bought me and my brothers a Mac. We were the cool kids on the block in Ithaca, NY because our Mac was no ordinary Mac but rather a “Fat Mac” in fact as it had a full 512k of RAM – not the lowly 128K that the unlucky had to deal with. That began my love affair with the Mac – a love affair that continued until late 1995 give or take a few months.
I first browsed the web on a Mac on Mosaic followed shortly thereafter by Netscape; that’s assuming you don’t count Lynx on Unix/Solaris in 1993. But by late 1995 I had interned at Microsoft (summer 1995) and the Mac OS had become unstable enough to be somewhat unusable – Steve Jobs was still a few years away from coming back to Apple to save it. In the interim, Windows had gone from the absolutely terrible Win 3.1 to the usable Windows 95. I was the fortunate recipient of an inexpensive – but good – laptop running Windows 95 and I’ve been on Windows ever since. With the release of the iPod I once again became a customer of Apple’s and I was reminded of how cool their hardware could be, how expensive it was, and how it was typically unreliable. I’ve had enough iPod’s fail on me to become somewhat convinced that the Apple folks build obsolescence into their hardware and I’ve seen my brother Eytan’s iPhone battery die around 2pm while on a business trip often enough to quietly laugh at how silly he is to not have a good ole Blackberry like me (even if my Bold does run it’s battery dry in about 24 hours).
All of this had me feeling a bit old and uncool so one day not too long ago, I walked over to the cool looking Apple store during lunch; the Apple store at 14th street and 9th Ave is walking distance from the office. I had in mind that if I did not upgrade our entire company to Mac’s, I’d at least make myself nearly as cool as some of the young hip people who I work with and get myself a Mac laptop.
And then at the store it dawned on me. Forget about being cool – I’m not nearly rich enough to be a Mac person. If I wanted our photo editors (they are the ones who select the photos that end up in our hotel reviews like this one of the Hotel Renew, Oahu, Hawaii) to be on a Mac, it would cost me nearly two times as much for similar hardware as it would on Windows 7 (a great OS BTW – more on that later). Here’s the math. It’s not a perfect comparison but for our needs, the computers would be more than equivalent. The Mac would cost me more than $2,000 more.
Mac Pro Tower
- Mac OS (a given)
- 2.66Ghz Intel Xeon quad core
- 8GB of RAM (DDR3 1066)
- RAID card
- 1 640GB SATA
- 4×15k RPM 300GB SAS drives (bought aftermarket and installed myself)
- Nvidia GE Force GT120
- Total Price: ~4,700 from Apple Store (SAS drives but elsewhere)
Cost of parts for a windows 7 equivalent
- OS: Windows 7 64bit- $134 (currently at this price from newegg)
- Case – $80
- 12GB DDR3 1600 RAM – $260
- Power Supply: $75
- Video card: EVGA GE Force 9800GT 1GB – 135
- LSI RAID card – $200
- 4×300GB 15K RPM SAS drives – $1,280
- Motherboard: $130
- Misc cables and parts
- CPU: Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem Quad Core – $280
- Total price: ~$2,600
Sticking with Windows 7 and commodity hardware
So much for that partial mid-life crisis. I’ll be sticking to Lenovo laptops (x200 and x301 – preferably with SSD drives), Windows 7, and when we need desktops, machines we build ourselves from commodity parts; at our scale, it can make sense to build our own machines vs buying from Dell but you have to have someone who is willing to sacrifice what little spare time they have to make this happen. The advantage of building your own is you get exactly what you want at a price you’ll be hard pressed to get from Dell (truer as the machines get higher end) and you won’t get any of Dell’s terrible “value added” bloatware preinstalled on the machine when it arrives. When we buy Lenovo laptops, we don’t even bother with the pre-installed OS. We just reinstall the OS from scratch.
