one more thing

he seems to have missed the fact that probably 75% of home PC users end up buying a new copy of Office with every new computer anyway. This is usually because their copy came bundled with there old PC and they have no way to install it other than the old PC's restore CD. Or the consumer just cant stand the thought of fighting with MS over getting its permission to install on a new PC.

I guess we should call that a MS tax.

....hmmm you now they also already have a copy of windows but there still getting charged for a new one .... wonder why they didn't just get a white box with no OS?

Bah!

I think the public "hyperbole" twixt Apple and Microsoft started with the numbnuts adverts around 1996 in which people decried the complexity of "doing stuff" on PCs. In one, Apple's marketers would have us believe that to configure a printer on a post windows 95 machine one had to - get this- take the case off and install a cicuit board. To cry foul now smacks of cry-babyism.

Macs *are* expensive, sometimes needlessly so. Try getting parts for one and find out for yourself. They are no more easy to use for most people than a PC. There are sound technical reasons for buying a mac, just as there are for not touching one with a barge pole.

And to deny that Apple market their stuff as better on stylistic grounds is perhaps the worst lie of the lot. Apple themselves have gone to great lengths to promote both the design of their kit (which has, at times, gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in the "form over function" stakes) and in the comparison with PCs on such a basis from the word "go".

The cool, artistic guy in casual arty clothes claims to be a Mac. The dumpy guy with goofy glasses and an ill-fitting off-the-peg suit claims to be the PC. Remind me: who was responsible for this series of ads in which not one shred of actual comparison of the systems in question was done in preference to an appeal to the coolness factor and some old saws about blue screens?

Yeah. Evil Microsoft have committed a foul here, but the game has been dirty for years.

@ Derek Blonigen

your Macs crash that often and you're a certified technician? You might want to take that course again. Maybe when you hit 16.

Hello?

Apple macs ARE PC's, albeit more expensive ones - that is all.

You cant compare them apples for apples :-)

You can run linux on both, windows on both, osx on both (as per the reg article posted a few months back) so whats the problem?

Buy what you want! Whats the problem?

Microsoft says they tax their hardware, well, somebody has to do some research and development.. I'm saying this as a pc user..

@ Derek Blonigen

congratulations, you win the prize for invoking the PC/Mac flamewar equivalent of Godwin's Law

clarifications and comments:

1st: to whoever said the Dell had 30% faster RAM, you did not account for the Mac having tripple channel RAM, thereby having greater overall memory bandwidth.

2nd: To whoever asked for a $399 euro machine with good specs from Apple, FIND ME A $399 PC with good specs... All $399 PCS have SHITTY specs. Half of Apple's default included software would suck on such a machine, and on a PC with Vista, any equivolent software would suck more. Besides, is $599 US not pretty close to $399 euros?

3rd: A Mac is not cost effective for daily, generic use. Surfing the web, answering e-mails, scanning and printing photos, Honestly, why are you even looking at Windows? Get Linux if you know how, then it's just an "ignorance" tax. However, if you mess with video, run Virtual machines, play games, then the mac is VERY price competitive.

4th: If a 24" screen isn't big enough for you, don't buy an iMac... If you're comparing like-to-like, you'd have also noted the competitions all-in-ines actually cost more with the same specs (though many others do throw in a $49 TV tuner you can add to one of tme iMacs many USB ports, but honestly, since it can;'t record cable or sattelite TV, what good it it?). Of course, with a Display port, and powerful graphics, an iMac can do what no other all-in-ones can, run a second display, including up to 30". If You need more, buy the low end Mac Pro and a few screens... If you need less than a serious machine, buy a Mini and hook up whatever display you want (it has the same base specs as the base iMac anyway)

5th: No, apple has no mid-range configurable machine. That is not expected to last, but aside from the 1% of PC users who actually will configure a machine, nearly all of which are gamers tied to Windows anyway, who would they be selling to? there's really no market there for apple to capture...

6th: Yes, you could get free AV for PCs. They suck, mostly. Good for stopping viruses, but not user friendly in most cases, and 99% of folks don;t know who to find them, let alone use them. Lets narrow this argument to the 95% of general users and stop playing with what an engineer or PC enthusiast would do. CONSUMERS don't fall into that category. Over 5 years, a PC WILL cost more in software licensing than a Mac.

7th: Apple may take longer to patch, and may have more vulnerabilityies, yes. However, every one of those vulnerabilityies so far has required user action to infect a machine (for instance, going to a pre-configured website). The macs fall fast at events because THE HACKERS ACTUALLY WANT TO WIN THEM!!! There are no mac viruses you can get (that anyone has ever developed even in POC) simply by being connected to the net. Apple is quickly moving to close those holes, and has been on a good release cycle pace for quite some time, and they do farly quickly release critical patches (sometimes in days) and do not wait for a predetermined release date but instead release only on priority. Sure, there are a few viruses out, but if the only way to get one is to go to a custom website, then enter your Keychain password which it tells you over and over to do (every time it prompts you) that you should never be asked for this except when installing an app or purposefully making system changes, and even them some of those viruses only work if the root account is enabled, I'd say that's not a risk... My father recently infected his mac. Someone he knew installed a copied version of iWork 09 on his machine (didn't ask him, just did it as part of maintenance). That installer was infected with a worm. ANY PC would just as easily fall. Get off Apple's back on this one...

8th: The same HDD you buy for your PC works on a Mac. TimeCapsule is not a HDD, it's a NAS device with 802.11n and Gigabit Ethernet, plus a print server and external addditional storage options. It;s not the cheapest one on the market, but plug and play does have some value compared to the linux based equivolents that many have a real hard time setting up (and that Vist'as included Backup, only included in home premium by the way, WILL NOT write to!)

9th: resale value: I recently sold a 4.5 year old 20" iMac (lamp model) for $750 on ebay. This was only a $1400 machine! 1GHz and 768MB RAM, 60GB HDD... Won't even run OS 10.5.... My $2400 gaming rig, less than 18 months only won't fetch that on eBay for Christ's sake! 50% resale after nearly 5 years?!?!?! I'm lucky to get 25% after 1 year with a PC.

10th: support: Dell will support the hardware, but NOT Windows! You have to pay $250 every time you CALL Microsoft... Their default answer: Format it. Apple actually helps you fix the OS when you call (and since it;s Linux based, it's actually easy). 1 single support vendor, not 2 or 3. Crap, Apple even helped my father with an HP printer issue that was clearly a driver issue! They also helped him fix a UPS bug that was causing his machine to not sleep that turned out to be CyberPower's fault.

11: You do NOT need to replace all your PC software. EVERY SINGLE MAC sold on MacMall comes with either VMWare or Parallells FREE. Plus, boot camp is free. Install your currently licensed windows disk (oh, I'm sorry, that OEM version really sucks, huh...), on your Mac and go with it. Also, Mac software is upgraded far less frequently, and skipping versions has less impact. And upgrading the OS? not only easy, but most stuff will still work after you do it. Upgrading to XP SP3 broke more of my apps than upgrading from OS X 10.3 to 10.5... Vista broke 75% of my games, my printer, several business apps, required a doubling of RAM, and more.

12: iLife. You just TRY to find software that does that for free. I can't even find software that does that for $600. This class of video editing, music generation, and photo management, included free? Shit even Adobe's $200 photo suite is not half as cool as iPhoto. Pinacle Studio doesn't hold a candle to iMovie, and what it can do requires a serious PC to run it on, way more than the cost of a mac.

13 (and last for now, though I could easily continue): My PC has a 0.6GHz faster processor, faster RAM base, and faster striped HDDs than my iMac. The iMac boots faster, responds faster, comes out of sleep faster, multitasks better, and in general feels faster. Oh, it also exports video from my camcorder to a produced DVD in HALF the time! Yes the PC can rip a DVD in 5 minutes less time, crunches simulation numbers faster, and can get a better frame rate in games, but I've got a $400 video card in the PC compared to the iMac's default making that PC actually cost more than the iMac. Oh, that PC will also cost me very close to $50 more per year in electric bills....

@Robert M. Stockmann @Tony Chandler

Robert: Think about what you are suggesting. Don't you think that if the NSA mandated a backdoor into Windows, they would also mandate a backdoor into OSX and every other commercial OS? C'mon, THINK, man!

Another way of looking at this ... The source code for my OSes of choice is available to me, and anyone else. It has been eyeballed by a BUNCH of people, world-wide. I think it's pretty safe to say that Linux & BSD have no intentional backdoors in them.

On the other hand, have you ever read Ken Thompson's ACM paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" from 1984? It's a good read, and the concepts haven't changed in the intervening quarter century. See:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Tony: You must be new here. A single paragraph review tacked onto the end of an on-topic comment is hardly a long, off topic rant. Granted, it was off topic, and maybe I should refrain from posting such ... on the other hand, the mod(s) passed it, and who are we to argue with them? Frankly, I was surprised that they allowed my real long off-topic rant on dog breeders in the PETA vs PetShopBoys article ... As for TFL's billing system, they don't make such gauchness visible to the rubes^Wmarks^Wclientele. All I know is my credit card went away, and came back with a chit for me to sign.

Apple gear is a tad more expensive up front, but...

Ah, yes. Think only about total acquisition cost and completely ignore total cost of ownership. That's the way PC manufacturers have duped consumers into spending too much money for years now. I just abandoned Pcs and Windows for once and all a couple fo months back. I bought an iMac with a Duo, 4 GB RAM, a 563 GB hard drive a 24" HD monitor. It works flawlessly, is intuitive and has never once presented me with a BSOD or even a hung application. I've not had to install a single driver; it recognized my cell phone, digital camera, printer, everything as soon as it was plugged into a USB port. And the user experience is so far ahead of Windows that MSFT will never catch up. How much did I pay for this fantastic new computer? $1499. Yes, I could have got a PC full of cheap commodity parts for a fraction of this, but why would I want to? A sub-$1000 PC is going to survive about 18 months, where the Mac will be obsolete before it's worn out. I'm not trying to be cool, but only productive. I don't waste time trying to keep my computer running anymore.

More comments!

To whomever tried to refute the 'Apple charges for service packs' deal:

A numbering scheme does not imply a pricing scheme. People consider releases to be service packs if they include only minor changes from the last release. IE Leopard added 2 'features' to Tiger, a reflective dock (quite extremely irritating) and Time Machine (Who the hell gets excited about backup software?)

Hell the first three releases (10.0 through 10.2) were public betas, since the first one that ewas even slightly useable was 10.3. That's arguable too. 10.4 was nice, then 10.5 released and suddenly my dual 1.25GHz G4, which ran Tiger like a champ, slowed to an unuseable crawl. I mean slower than a 2.0 ghz lowest of the low end Dell running Vista. Not that I think Vista was or is a good idea.

People mostly mean that you have to pay for a new copy of Windows significantly less frequently than OSX. But you typically pay less.

Some other people have pointed out that Macs have a better resale value, but that is an outdated idea. Power PC Macs do have a nice resale value, especially now that they're rare, but since Apple decided that Intel was a better (Just higher profit margin reall) choice than PPC, the prices drop almost as fast as a corresponding Dell or HP, mostly because people can compare the two directly as to clock speed and such.

And Apple's use of 'PC' still pisses me off. Apple computers, with the exception of maybe the Mac Pro are personal computers, and they have more or less the same hardware that any Dell or HP has these days. And when Apple generalizes about the PC blight, they're pretty much never accurate when it comes to my personal computers.

@AC 17:04

"Apple actually helps you fix the OS when you call (and since it;s Linux based, it's actually easy)."

I think you'll find it's not Linux. It's actually a consumerized NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, which itself a bastardized love child of NetBSD and FreeBSD, with a little BSD proper stirred in for spice. The whole thing sits on the Mach kernel.

The fact that Jobs & crew managed to pull it off surprised me. I never really expected a large company to put a general purpose consumer interface on a variation of un*x. I tried to like OSX, but it's too far away from a true un*x for me to get comfy with it. For one thing, after a third of a century I have issues with not having access to the source ... and having to build in the tool chain myself seems kinda lax on Apple's part.

@ Nexox Enigma

I suspect they're using PC in the sense of "IBM PC compatible" just like in the olden days, although it's a rather thin distinction when they stick Bootcamp into the standard Leopard installation.

Still, it's a bit unfair to point the finger solely at Apple in this area, seeing as Microsoft has opted to not only deploy the term in equal measure but also save Apple the bother of saying that a PC is a cheap piece of shit .

Common sense gets more power!!!!

Dells prices can be a bit mad. Infact i bought a duel quad core 2.33 na Dell Precision 7500 for about £1000 less than a mac pro. Why? because i get a choice about what goes in it. It was also a feck lot faster than the spec given in this comparison, despite lower spec cores i had twice as many, more memory, 10k rpm hdds. Buy with common sense then you get a good price. You also need to add promotions and deals which dell have on 24/7.

Also that Mac needs a warrenty pack £250 Office £200 more than than the PC cuz u cant get OEM. Adds up really fast on the Mac.

Comedy :)

If in doubt... Hackintosh. If you're that determined to run the horrible pile of cack that is OSX. :) Nice hardware, shite software. /glares at iPod with its lack of bugfixes

But can Open Office trounce MS Office

This comment is being written on a Mac. The PC workhorse (XP) is over on my desk. The children use Ubuntu. If I'm honest, the Mac is a disappointment. It crashes a lot more than XP even though it's used for fewer hours in a day. I was disappointed the UI hasn't really moved on since the 1990s and it's still has a one app at a time focus and many elements just aren't intuitive in a way that I thought they should be on a Mac (Ubuntu works better than XP or a Mac for a few things). The mac does boot quickly though and has a great power connector and sits comfortably on my lap while I'm typing.

However, to be fair, I don't really care about the OS. The real test is can I replace MS Office with Open Office over the next 6 months without customers noticing. At that point the OS becomes redundant and it will just be the hardware spec that will be important when purchasing.

@Saul Dobney

So, the Mac UI hasn't moved since the '90s? But the Ubuntu's one has, from what you say. Great, the freetards will love you!

Bah

The most amazing thing of all: that I can still view the comment page on this article without getting blocked by the regex in our firewall that detects and counts "objectionalble phrases".

Well done fanbois of all platforms. You kept it clean in spite of the contentious nature of the article and its subject. I salute you all.

Shame no-one chipped in with a GEOS comment though.

:o)

@AA

I don't use OSX either, chum.

@Stevie

"The most amazing thing of all: that I can still view the comment page on this article without getting blocked by the regex in our firewall that detects and counts "objectionalble phrases"."

I can assure you (and your daft system administrator(s) and/or clueless management) that the English language is quite flexible enough to get "objectionable phrases" past any rules that they choose to implement. That kind of filtering is worse than useless in that it takes time to implement, doesn't work, provides a false sense of security, and opens the company up to lawsuit should an employee accidentally see something that they think was missed by the filters.

@Law

Very classy. How old are you, anyway? 14?

Idiot.

@Robert M. Stockmann

"Your right about that,"

Thanks. ::bows:: ... but, uh, err ... that's spelled "you're". HTH.

"but the NSA backdoor stuff has only been reported to be inside Windows."

And yet Apple has admitted to "consulting" with the NSA on the design of OSX's security.

"Bill and Steve want to do some real kick ass PR they should emphasize that NSA backdoors are also in OSX. But they don't. Why would that be?"

My guess is because either there are no NSA backdoors in any commercial OS, -OR- the commercial OS vendors have been told not to talk about it. Security by obscurity isn't exactly the smartest plan of action, but nobody ever said governments (any nation) are the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to general computing security. Me, I run software that I can read the source on, just out of principle. Your mileage may vary.

"You told me to "C'mon, THINK, man!" I did, here's what I know :"

No, that's NOT what you "know". That's what you've read on the Internet. There is a major difference between the two concepts. You can think for yourself, or you can be told what to think. Your choice. My suggestion is to lose the tin-foil brain-bucket, but whatever floats your boat. It's your paranoia^W life.