Are Macs a ripoff ?

I sit here typing this on a 4+ year old Dell Precision while my trusty 3+ year old IBM Thinkpad stands by waiting for me to hit the road. The Dell has never needed a repair while the Thinkpad has been to the shop once. I like the Thinkpad so much, I even went for the extended warranty when the original 3 year warranty expired.

I’ve been jealous of the really sweet MacBook Pros that I’ve seen other mozillian’s packing and was planning on upgrading both my workstation and laptop to some really killer Macs sometime in the first half of next year. However, I am having second thoughts after seeing the kind of experience others are having.

Norm Walsh has been having problems recently that raised my concerns a bit.
Dave Winer has also been experiencing his share of the pain, but his experience with the Apple Store has left me flabbergasted.

What other choices for a really fast workstation and laptop do I have? For what its worth, I’m running Fedora on both my workstation and laptop and don’t want Windows on either machine. Suggestions very much appreciated.

3 thoughts on “Are Macs a ripoff ?”

  1. If you want to make a comment, make sure that you read and answer the challenge response question below the comment textarea!

    thanks,
    bc

  2. Some people like MACs and some people like Windows based system. Personally, I would put my ASUS Series G2 with Intel Core 2 Quad Processor, and 4 gigs of RAM up against a MAC any day of the week.

    People are always saying that MACs don’t break or get viruses as much as PCs. I own Geeks-In-Route which provides computer repair services in 47 states, and I get calls about MACs all the time.

    The reason people don’t think MACs break down as much, is that there are three times more PCs out there, and three times more opportunities for them to break. Also, the people creating the viruses are obviously going to try to create a virus that will infect as many people as possible, so who do you think they are going to target, The people who make up 25% of the computer owners, or the people who make up 75% of the computer owners.

    Lastly, as considerably less people work on MACs as PCs, it is much more expensive to fix them.

    Just my thoughts.

  3. My wife is a professional graphics designer and consequently addicted to Mac computers. Over the years we’ve purchased quite a number including three Mac Mini’s and a Mac PowerPC. I’ve done work on all of them. I’ve been a PC user since about 1983. In my opinion PC are cheaper and last longer than Mac computers. I also think that today the difference between operating systems is becoming less and less and that eventually it will get to the point that the only difference between the Mac and the PC (aside from the inflated Mac price) will be that funny command key that Macs have on their keyboards.
    Recently the power supply on my wife’s Mini fried and it would appear that it damaged the computer when it died as well. Over the years I’ve had several power supplies die on PC’s but not once has it damaged the computer. Usually after spending $35.00 at the local electronics shop the machine is back in business.
    Dollar for dollar you can get a lot more computer for your money with a PC than you will ever get with a Mac and with all the cool software out there like Firefox, Openoffice, Thunderbird, etc. you don’t have to stay in M$ pocket either.

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