Sometimes it pays to step outside the box one inhabits for a
perspective shift.
For example, I've been chewing over whether it makes more sense for
me to buy an Apple Certified Refurbished early 2008 MacBook Pro 2.4
GHz for Can$1,449, which is a decent discount of Can$650 from what
they were selling for new a couple months ago, or to buy an Apple
Certified Refurbished (ACR) 2.4 GHz MacBook for
Can$1,049. Or even go with the black 2.4 GHz MacBook for a hundred
bucks more than that. Or wait until some of the new Unibody machines
hit the refurbished channel. Or wait until Snow Leopard ships....
If you share this affliction, you know how it is. And then I opened
the newspaper this week and there's
Dell Canada advertising Inspiron 1525 notebooks for the
netbook-esque price of $549. That's Canadian $549, and with the
Canabuck having dropped into the mid-to-upper 70 cents range US from
its dizzying, intoxicating historical high of just over US$1.10 a year
or so ago, we're talking a full-fledged Inspiron laptop here for the
equivalent of US$440 at today's exchange rate.
For that astonishingly small amount of cash you get a 15.4"
widescreen display, a Pentium dual-core processor (2.0 GHz/667 MHz
FSB/1 MB cache; for a Core 2 Duo add $100), 2 GB of RAM, a 250
gigabyte hard drive, an 8x dual-layer SuperDrive, wireless, HDMI out,
free shipping, and it comes in your choice of seven attractive colors:
Jet Black, Espresso Brown, Ruby Red, Midnight Blue, Spring Green,
Flamingo Pink, and Sunshine Yellow. Uh, make mine Espresso.
By comparison, the refurbished black MacBook has a 13.3"
display, a Penryn Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 250
gigabyte hard drive, an 8x SuperDrive, wireless, an external display
port that requires an optional adapter, free shipping, and will set you
back $1,149. (If you opt for a white housing and a 160 GB HD, it's
$1,049 for a refurbished unit.)
Too Cheap?
Steve Jobs says you can't build a laptop computer for under US$500
that isn't junk and that Apple doesn't do cheap. So the Inspiron 1525
is definitely cheap, but is it junk? I'll venture that there are some
quality and design compromises by comparison with the MacBook, but are
these egregious enough to justify opting for a machine that costs more
than twice as much and isn't even brand new?
ITManagement's Jason Perlow
says he buys his PC in boxes from discount clubs like Costco, where
quad-core 4 GB DELL and HP desktops with 500 GB hard drives can be
had for $499-$699 as disposable commodities - using them for a while
and then presumably passing them on or even discarding them and buying
another.
That may make bottom line economic sense, but it rubs me the wrong
way in several contexts. For one, it is hideously wasteful and
contributes to the tsunami of electro-trash that is becoming another of
the world's manifold environmental problems.
Apple Quality
Another aspect is that Steve Jobs has a point about cheap computers
and quality. Even my old G3 iBook, which is the
cheapest Mac I ever owned in terms of its original list price, may not
have had the high standard of finish or build and materials quality,
but it doesn't look ugly or cheap or compromised notwithstanding its
mediocre keyboard and less than precision panel join gaps, not to
mention that model's generally spotty reliability record (although
mine, now in my wife's possession, is just a month short of its sixth
anniversary in continuous service having never given any serious
trouble).
So, getting back to my current system upgrade conundrum, I had
initially been leaning toward the early 2008 15" MacBook Pro, then
thought hard about taking advantage of Apple's Black Friday discount
and buying a Unibody MacBook (but in the end couldn't countenance going
FireWire cold turkey), and subsequently been considering a refurbished
2.4 GHz old school MacBook as discussed above, then becoming persuaded
again that the MacBook Pro is the way for me to go.
For one thing, the 15" MBP represents the biggest Apple Certified
Refurbished Discount from its recent list price among last generation
models - 30%. I've become addicted to the 1440 x 900 resolution display
in my 17" PowerBook
- the same resolution as the 15" MacBook Pro. The pro MacBook's display
is also LED backlit, which the plastic MacBook's 13.3" screen isn't. I
don't like to give up on having an expansion slot, and perhaps the
clincher: Snow Leopard is coming and reportedly will be leaning heavily
on graphics processor unit (GPU) power. The MacBook Pro has a pretty
good Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT GPU with 256 MB of dedicated video RAM,
which runs rings around the plastic MacBook's Intel GMA X3100
integrated graphics that leaches 144 MB of system RAM for graphics
support and is by most accounts still slow and mediocre.
It's not hard to deduce that the MacBook Pro should be a decent Snow
Leopard machine, but the pre-Unibody MacBook likely a disappointing
one.
As for waiting for the first refurbished Unibodies, the Revision A
troubles being reported by some early adopters has cooled my jets
substantially on that alternative, but I'm wondering if at this point I
should at least wait and see what happens at Macworld Expo before
pulling the trigger.
Sorry, Dell
And the Inspiron? Notwithstanding urgings from an associate who has
done successful hacked installs of Tiger and Leopard on a variety of
PCs and thinks the Dell laptop would make a great OS X computer,
that's not my style,.
But if Apple ever decided to license the Mac OS for use on PC boxes,
I would find that alternative difficult to resist, which is why I'm
doubtful that Apple will ever license OS X for PCs.
That's my thinking at this point at this point, anyway. Stay tuned.
