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Cheap PC Laptops Are, Well, Cheap, But Check The Bottom Line

My First Mac's Chris Kerins posted a column last Friday chronicling how he went shopping for a new laptop for his septuagenarian Mom who uses a PC at work and wasn't really interested in learning a new and different platform for her home computing. Consequently, Chris and his Mom decided that a widescreen PC laptop would represent the best value since she's a light user of computer power and most any current machine would easily exceed her needs in that department, so shopping on price seemed sensible

Chris and his Mom settled on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 355D with 17” Diagonal TruBrite 1440 x 900 ( WXGA+ ) Widescreen Display on sale at Best Buy for $550, discounted from $700. The 355D has a 2 GHz dual-core AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology TL-60 processor, comes with 2 GB of RAM, a SuperDrive and even a card reader - not a bad spec. and even $700 for a 17" notebook sounds unbelievably inexpensive to anyone versed mainly in the context of Apple portables. The cheapest Apple will sell you a 17-incher for is $2,695, or if you're willing to settle for a couple of years old Apple Certified Refurbished model - currently some are available at The Apple Store for $1,899, which is more than three times the price of that discounted new Toshiba at Best Buy. To anyone not cognizant of the superiority of the Mac OS experience, the value equation would appear to be a no-brainer. You could pile on every option available for the Toshiba and still come in at substantially less damage to your wallet than you would buying a refurbished 17" MacBook Pro. However, viewed more analytically, "value" is a quality much more complex than a lowball base retail price for machines with nominally equivalent size displays.

For one thing, as Chris Kerins observes, that Toshiba machine "feels like the McDonalds Happy Meal version of a laptop. All rounded and puffy, you can feel the thin plastic flex between your fingers when you pinch it. The keys sound like Legos." The fact is that for $550, you can only expect so much and you tend to get what you pay for. If you really care about materials and build quality in a laptop, which is a device users have more intimate interaction with than most consumer commodities, and are irritated by the feel of cheapness, then that becomes part of the comprehensive value equation as well, and the higher cost of an Apple laptop begins to make more rational sense. Considering a laptop computer as a tool in the traditional sense is less metaphorical than with just about any other electronic device (smartphones would arguably be another) because of the tactile contact involved.

Then there's the stuff that you don't get included in that low-ball, come-on list price for the PC laptop. While the most basic 17" MacBook Pro Apple sells comes equipped with almost everything but the proverbial kitchen sink, the only optional extras being a high(er) resolution display, faster hard drives, and RAM upgrades and AppleCare protection (which does cost a whopping $349, but is arguably less necessary with a Mac than with a cheapo PC box) .

By the time Chris and his Mom added an extended warranty, virus protection, some productivity software, and software installation to that $550 Toshiba, the price had inflated to $1,148 and with state taxes the total damages came to a grand total of about $1237.00.

Now, you still can't get a MacBook Pro with a 17" display for less than about $1,899 for an Apple Certified Refurbished unit, but for that much you're very close to the price of a mid-range MacBook which of course has a much smaller display but at least doesn't ooze cheap from its proverbial pores. As Chris Kerins says, "The one thing I could tell is the build quality went up with price. Cheap PCs are cheap," and "Damn, PCs are ugly. Have you seen all the crap strewn about on them? Colors, logos, stickers, textures, ports, LEDs, icons… it's like in the early days of multiple fonts. Oooh… I can have seven fonts on this flyer!"

Perhaps a more appropriate comparison would be a 15" MacBook Pro, which has a screen resolution the same as the Toshiba 355D and the original 17" PowerBook (1440 x 900), albeit on a smaller display and is also extremely well-equipped and tricked out right out of the box. New base model 15" MacBook Pros sell for a not-insubstantial $1,999, but Apple Certified Refurbished units are usually available for $1,649 - $1,699, which I would argue can provide much more satisfactory service over what will almost certainly be a longer period of time for a few hundred dollars more than the bottom line price of that Toshiba. Apple Certified Refurbished units have exactly the same one-year warranty as new Apple units, are equally eligible for AppleCare if you're so-inclined, and many buyers (including me) have enjoyed very satisfactory service from ACR units.

Then there's the huge issue of the Mac OS versus Windows Vista and all the functional angularities and malware hassle associated. Personally, the only way I would ever even seriously consider a PC laptop at any price is if Apple licensed the Mac OS for PC use (highly unlikely), or perhaps if recently stated ambitions to bring desktop Linux up to the standard of the Mac OS are ever realized (not holding my breath). Yes, I know that it's possible to make OS X work on a PC, I have friends who are doing that, but I'm not interested in running an illegal installation. For me, the Mac OS alone is worth whatever it costs me to be able to use it in terms of extra capital outlay for hardware.

Still, I have to concede that sometimes it's been tempting, For example in the latest Dell Canada flyer that came last week, there's a VOSTRO 1710 notebook with a 17" display (WXGA+ 1440 x 900; a high resolution display option is available for $150 more), a Core 2 Duo processor (2.0GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 800Mhz FSB), 2 Gigs. of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive for $699 Canadian, and my exposure to Dell laptops owned by friends hasn't left a negative impression with respect to build quality. The 1720 also makes more intelligent use of the necessary case width to accommodate a 17" display than Apple does by incorporating a full keyboard with numeric keypad rather than the fn modifier kludge.

For $200 more you can upgrade the VOSTRO 1710 to 3 Gigs. of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, an 8x dual-layer DVD-burner drive, and the Business rather than the Home Basic version of Windows Vista. an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS graphics processor unit with 256MB of VRAM (instead of the standard Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100) piles another $200 on top of that, but at $1,200 you're only 50 bucks over the price of Apple Canada's entry-level MacBook with a combo drive and a 2.1 GHz processor (although the Dell price includes no productivity software or anti-virus/ security software), and the base price for the 2.4 GHz 15" MacBook Pro in Canada is $2,099.00. I like 17" displays, and I have to admit that if I had no established affinity for the Mac OS, this Dell would be a tempting deal with the 17" MacBook Pro starting at CAN$2,899.00.



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cmoore@macopinion.com

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