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Buying A Mac; Have The “Rules” Really Changed?

Last week, Macworld editors Jonathan Seff and Jason Snell posted a feature on changing trends in Mac system purchasing entitled "The new rules for buying a Mac."

J. and J. note that:

"Like many customs, these rules were once based on a foundation of facts and reason. But in the past few years, many longstanding Mac truths have been upended. All Macs run on multiple-core Intel processors now. iMacs are no longer hobbled by crippling feature limitations. And speedy external peripherals have drastically lessened the need for add-on cards."

For example, they cite the Old Rule: "I’m a power user; therefore, I need a Mac Pro," observing that "For years, Apple’s high-end Power Mac desktop systems were a great - and perhaps the only - choice for a wide variety of Mac users. Many Macworld editors, for example, would never have considered anything less when buying a new Mac. Power Macs had the fastest processor speeds and internal architectures, not to mention space for lots of RAM, hard drives, and expansion cards."

The Macworld guys conclude that the new reality is that for most non-power-users (the proverbial "rest of us" in Macspeak) running the usual applications, the high-end iMac and MacBook Pro models are plenty fast enough (the 3.06 GHz build-to-order iMac even beat the Mac Pro in some of Macworld's lab tests), and that these days "even Adobe Photoshop, a heavy-duty program that conventional wisdom has long argued should be run only on a high-end system, works acceptably well on just about any Mac (unless you’re editing gigantic files)."

Actually, there never were any hard-and-fast rules governing system choices, but there were some fairly widely accepted and critically-unexamined assumptions, such as the above-note one that that for a serious workstation you needed a desktop computer, and that notebooks were best relegated to an auxiliary role for road warrioring duty while away from your "real" work computer, and so forth.

Some of us have been living outside those arbitrary envelopes for a long time. I switched to using a laptop and as my workhorse computer way back in 1996, and have been advocating in this column since it was launched in 1998 that for most users, the laptop was, is, and continues to be "the logical Mac."

The world has been coming around to my way of thinking on this. Laptop Macs began outselling desktop systems back in 2001 or 2002, and are now the the undisputed anchors of Apple's system fleet.

What the Macworld folks are getting at, and I agree, is that in the MacIntel era, the spectrum of performance distinction between low-end and high-end, notebook and desktop, has shrunk dramatically from its traditional spread, and that even the cheapest Mac these days should have ample processing power and video support to satisfy the needs of all but high-end power users and hard-core gamers.

And while I remain a consummate laptop aficionado (there's no substitute for the freedom and convenience afforded by on-board battery power), I willingly concede that the iMac, never more than in its latest Core 2 Duo Penryn iteration, has been and remains the value leader among Macintosh computers for those content to live tethered to and dependent upon wall current, with a illustrative comparison being what you get with an $1,199 entry-level iMac (2.4 GHz CPU with a 1066 MHz front-side bus, 250 GB hard drive, ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT graphics processor with 128MB of dedicated video memory, 20-inch display), compared with a $1,099 entry-level MacBook (2.1 GHz CPU with 800 MHz front-side bus, 120 GB hard drive, Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics annexing up to 144 megabytes of system RAM, 13.1-inch display).

At the other end of the spectrum, there can be few power - users even who would outstripped the capabilities of a 24-inch 3.06 GHz iMac. For all but a very few, the only really objective reason for going with a Mac Pro tower of these days is if you can actually make use of its extensive expansion potential l or absolutely do need all the quad or octo core power you can get. If your power requirements are more modest, save some $$ and get yourself an iMac or a MacBook Pro.

Speaking of which, in a narrower, notebook-only context, something of a similar high-end/low-end dynamic applies, although there's arguably a stronger case for going with a MacBook Pro over a MacBook than there is for choosing a Mac Pro tower over an iMac. The reason for that is, the MacBook Pro really does offer several distinct advantages over the top-of- the-line MacBook, notably larger, higher-resolution displays in the customer's choice of matte or glossy viewing surface, 2.5 or 2.6 GHz Penryn processors instead of the MacBook's 2.4 GHz, real NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor units with dedicated video RAM up to 512 MB, better (IMHO) keyboards with backlighting, an ExpressCard 34 expansion slot, and a strikingly handsome aluminum case instead of the Macbook's more prosaic polycarbonate, although the latter is available in black and is possibly more rugged.

Unfortunately, the premium you pay for that extra power and richer feature set is a stiff one - five hundred dollars minimum between the top end MacBook and the entry-level MacBook pro, both of which are 2.42 GHz units.

And what of the two odd-men-out, so to speak, of the current Mac lineup - the Mac mini and the MacBook Air?

There is a case to be made for the mini as a value-leader if one already has a good monitor, keyboard, and pointing device to connect to it. On the other hand, while you can get a perfectly satisfactory keyboard and mouse for under fifty dollars total (not Apple-branded hardware of course), by the time you add the price of a decent monitor to the cost of the Mac mini CPU unit, you're going to be in the same price ballpark as the base iMac and MacBook, and the mini shares both the MacBook's shortcomings of a smaller, slower hard drive, the integrated video kludge, and slower front-side bus, along with the iMac's dependence on wall current.

As for the MacBook Air, it's arguably the poorest value in terms of performance, features, and capability against dollars spent in the entire Mac lineup, unless of course its 3 pound weight and sliver-thin form factor are valuable to you for practical or aesthetic reasons.

The only "rule" that should apply is to choose whatever Mac best suits your particular needs, tastes, and budget, which will vary substantially from user to user. Happily, there are no "wrong" choices per se when buying a Mac.

However, I would encourage anyone shopping for a new Mac system, and who has never considered a notebook computer, to give that alternative some serious consideration, also noting that the more subtle and experiential advantages of portable computing may not be completely appreciated without actually using a notebook for a while for real world tasks.



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cmoore@macopinion.com

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