>> Well, maybe it's because I work in the wrong field, but I've never 
>> ever seen a real, live Mac except on TV. To me, that seems pretty rare. 
> 
> I only work with one of those people.

Well, as you know, I don't know many humans...




>>
>> So I guess *three* is a slight exaggeration. But only slight...
> 
> That would be a much lower spec machine than the minimac, I would guess. 
> Would the motherboard have anything other than a token graphics card? I 
> bought an Asus mobo for about that price and it can only do VGA, 16-bit 
> colour. The minimac will have a much better graphics card, and ethernet, 
> and firewire.

OK, well I just bought a new motherboard for my grandparent's PC. I 
don't recall the price off the top of my head, but Socket AM2 (i.e., it 
accepts an Athlon64 X2 CPU), supports up to 4 GB RAM, has an onboard 
nVidia GeForce 6200 graphics card, onboard stero sound, onboard gigabit 
Ethernet, 6 USB ports, and I *think* it might even have Firewire. All 

that as far as I could throw it!)

Similarly, a drive that can read and write CD, DVD (+/-) SL/DL in all 

to cost money, but today you can bearly buy a drive that *doesn't* 
support writing every format known to human kind.

The Mini Mac has, what? Well it has a low-end Intel Core 2 Duo processor 
[which never the less is pretty damn expensive], 1 GB RAM, a working 
graphics card, working sound card, gigabit Ethernet, lots of USB, 
firewire, 80 GB HD, and a DVD drive. I can only assume most of the price 
is coming from the expensive Intel CPU and the Mac OS software.

>> I suppose if you wanted to be picky, the OS will cost you 2x that 
>> amount alone, assuming you're getting it from Micro$oft... [And when 
>> you buy a Mac, you're partly paying for a proprietry OS, so I guess 
>> that would be a fairer comparison.]
> 


Well, true.

> Oh, and the mini's optical 
> drive will be a DVD-reader too, at the very least.

That's not expensive any more.


> 
> Okay, bad example through wild guess-work :)

Uh, yeah. ;-)

> But my previous statement 
> still stands. Yes you can buy a top-end Mac for upwards of 2 grand but 
> the same can also be said of a PC.

And my point is that a few years back, I put together a really high-spec 

Apple virtually doesn't *sell* anything that cheap. Their *entry level* 
stuff costs that much.

> I have personally used several PC 
> laptops priced at under 500 quid and several Mac laptops priced at 700 
> quid and up, and I know which I consider better value for money, by 
> quite a long way.

Well, the idea of an Power Mac with 8 all-powerful Xeon cores does 

around. You could almost buy a second-hand *car* for that!

Apply make some damn nice stuff. It's just that it's all extremely 
expensive. I imagine you probably do get what you pay for, but I simply 
don't have that kind of money...

> Please note, I'm not trying to persuade you to buy a Mac - it *is* a lot 
> of money to spend on something you don't know much about. And many 
> people won't like them. And you're a gamer, so you definitely can't 
> replace your PC with one. I'm just saying that it's not the 
> order-of-magnitude difference you seem to be focusing on!


laptop I bought my sister isn't quite to the same spec. But it also cost 

if that's not "an order of magnitude difference", I'm not sure what is...)

> I do get annoyed by their excessively smug marketing, tho.

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20060513

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/12/14/halp-stuck-in-apple-comershal/

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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