Tue Mar 25, 2008 3:04 pm
I think at this point, specs become somewhat irrelevant. They use basically the same hardware (although, the tester should have used the new PB with 512MB of RAM on the video card), the real differences become a matter of taste. If you prefer the Mac hardware and OS, buy the Mac, it's the only place you can get it. If you want Windows, you can use either a Mac or a PC. If you don't need an aluminum case or the Mac OS, then buy a PC. It's really all a matter of taste.
A couple of things stuck out to me and I don't want to make too big a deal of it, but a couple of his statements struck me as sort of odd. He was saying that a performance difference of about 1% showed "inferior" performance on one set of tests. That was probably just a poor choice of terms, but when you hit a gap of 1% at these performance levels, you are talking margin of error and reproducability.
He also makes the comment "As for the price factor, the MacBook Pro is expensive just because an Apple computer can’t be cheap". The statement itself is just factually incorrect for a couple of reasons. Primarily in that if you take an option to option approach, Macs are very competitive and even come out ahead in some areas. The other thing is that Apple doesn't target the low end of the market. At all. Period. That's like saying that Cadillac just doesn't make a low cost small car. Well duh, that's not their market segment. It's an old argument, but it's true. You will not be able to buy a sub $500 laptop from Apple, even though other manufacturers may sell them. It's just not a market they want to compete in.
