penguin said:
Yes the hardware costs more but that is not a bad thing. Apple hardware in general is of a much higher quality than that of an x86 machine. On there X-Serves they return approximately 80% of the drives back to the manufacturer because they don't meet Apple's requirements. Another reason is that the hardware lasts much longer. You can run OS X on a machine that is 7 years old and it will still perform decently. Load XP on an x86 of the same age and you are going to be very unhappy with its performance. Resale is also much higher on Macs than PC's.
1) Apple's QA Sucks. I hate to break it to you, but if you buy something from them, you better buy the Apple Care Protection Plan because you are going to need it. We have had to get 4 motherboards on G3 Towers replaced becuase they went bad. We've had 2 replaced on G4 Towers. I don't recall 1 PC Motherboard going bad. If i had to compare Apple's QA to another large company, it would have to be the mobile division of Dell. We have had the same laptop go back 3 times becuase they have an issue w/ docking. Dell's solution: replace the mother board.
2) Good luck getting OS-X to run on a machine 7 years ago. Here are the minimum
requirements for OS-X. I find it humors that apple doesn't even give you the tech specs, just nice pretty pictures instead.
This was the machine that was introduced 7 years ago. Interestingly enough, its pretty little picture does not show up on the requirements page.
3) Resale doesn't mean crap. While it may be higher, who actually wants to run it. [personal opinion on] Untill OS-X, MacOS was ****. Resale on DoDo bird **** is high, but it is still ****. [personal opinion off]