Cost
After my first article on Macs and OS X, there were several readers who just down right bashed Macs for pricing and OS X without solid reasoning or legitimate hands on experience of Macs. So this is a follow-up. Lets get straight to the point. Toms Hardware isnt about being a "PC fanboy." Its about finding the best hardware revealing up and coming tech and debunking predetermined notions. That begs the question especially here: whats so special about a Mac anyway? Heres the short answer: nothing really just some very elegant aluminum chassis designs. The key is the operating system. Even still lets settle this issue about price.In a recent comment someone came up with an analogy that a Mac is not really a BMW, but rather a Hyundai dressed up in a nice exterior. One problem: Hyundais dont have nice European car exteriors. And to generalize it this way shows the lack of willing to understand the core of the Mac: its operating system. Because thats really what it is about. But for the sake of these first few pages lets leave Mac OS X out of the picture for now. Lets just see where Apple comes in on hardware. In terms of hardware theres nothing really special about a Mac aside from elegant designs, be it a Mac Pro or MacBook Pro that makes it incredibly more worthwhile than the PC equivalent. And theres no doubt that you can get an equally equipped PC or build one yourself for less money. In fact I mentioned this in my previous article although some people seemed to have completely missed the page where I complained about Apples outrageous prices altogether. However building a PC to do the same is not the point because you can always buy a cheaper car to get you from A to B. Instead, let s see what you can get for $2000, from Apple and from others. For $2000, do you really get much less?Lets take a quick look at some of Apples competition and their pricing structure compared to Apples. We went to Dells website and picked out what Dell indicated was a serious gaming laptop. We also took the XPS model that was priced the same as the baseline MacBook Pro. Let s take a look at the results.