Hey, Lance Armstrong endorses AMD…

Ok, few people who read my site will give a crap about this, it’s a bit on the geeky/techy side for a rant, but I have to get it out of my system.

So the 20” Apple Cinema Displays arrived today and yesterday. No computers yet, though, they’re on the way… so I won’t be using a cinema display till my new machine arrives.

But in talking to Mike (the Mac guy in I.S.) about these power mac G5s, I find out that they will only have 256MB of RAM. WTF?! This old POS I have now has 512 MB and that’s pushing it, considering I run Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10 and Quark often at the same time, in addition to e-mail and stuff. I don’t know that I believe that Mac OS X is THAT memory-efficient. Combine this with the fact that I’ll be running the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, and InDesign CS), and I’m not looking forward to the memory issues I’ll be having. I could use a gig of RAM for Photoshop alone…

So I go to CDW.com to check out prices on these things. $2000 for a machine with 256mb of RAM and a mediocre video card (well, mediocre if you’re me… I’m sure it’ll be fine for 2D applications here at work). The only thing really impressive about this machine is that it will have dual 1.8ghz G5 processors. But with 256megs of RAM? Can you say bottleneck? I might as well have half a processor, bleh.

What it comes down to is that Macs are just too damn expensive. It was a huge deal to get the OS X / Adobe CS / Cinema Display upgrade started here because of the cost involved. And Mike, the Mac guy, who likes Macs and even uses them at home in addition to his PC, had to ask the designers last week and start the debate of “why Mac, why not PC?”. Of course he was outnumbered and they were pretty defensive about their precious Macs—I showed up half way through the debate and of course see both sides of the coin as he does. “Industry Standard” wasn’t even one of their issues. Their issue was primarily with the status value of Mac… you know, like owning a European-made luxury vehicle. It’s the designer’s bling-bling, all about style and status. Sure the G5s no doubt perform very well. But is it worth it? Not many years ago you might not have had a choice because you couldn’t get as much of the same software on PC as you did on Mac. But these days there are relatively few titles that you can’t get on the PC (maybe stuff like Final Cut Pro), and the software we’re moving to here is available on PC.

OS is a non-issue. I can probably crash OS X more than I can get Windows XP to crash. Both are very good. File compatibility between Macs and PCs is better than ever, thanks in part to OS X.

So I’m left to contemplate the inflated prices of Macs…. Granted dual processor setups aren’t cheap, even on the PC… but Apple was selling single processor G5s for only a few hundred dollars cheaper than their cheapest dual setup, so that can’t really be it.

I’ve kinda just blown off the whole price thing because I’m not paying for this thing—work is. But now I’m faced with the reality that, at least initially, this beast will be handicapped by having very little memory, and this because it was a stretch to even get the funds to buy a new machine in the first place. Why Apple, why? They of course didn’t order more than 256MB of RAM because any time you order an Apple, you pay a premium for extra RAM, and they’re already paying $2000 for this machine. So they will probably upgrade the RAM later by buying from another vendor which cheaper prices… but still. I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth.

Another thing that put this into perspective for me—I just built a small form factor computer at home, one that uses performance components and will run circles around this Mac for a fraction of the price. For a fraction of the price I have 4 times as much RAM and faster RAM at that, not to mention more than twice the hard drive space, among other things. The only thing the G5 will have on my home setup is the dual 1.8ghz processors, and I’m not sure how much benefit those will really give me unless I were doing video editing or something. I’m betting that my 2.4ghz Athlon 64 will still be faster.

So I guess that’s what makes me so self-conscious about the price of Macs—the fact that I just custom built a machine that will rip my work machine to shreds in most ways, and cost less. Sure it doesn’t say G5 or Apple or anything… but would you rather have a BMW 5 series and pay an exorbitant amount for the stupid logo on the front of it, or would you rather pay a similar amount for an Acura TL and get a lot more bang for the buck while still having a pretty classy vehicle? The choice is obvious to me (no, not the BMW, heh.)

Addendum:

New iMacs were released this week. Even though the graphics card is weak on the technology side, it doesn’t matter since you’re likely not going to be doing any heavy gaming on this thing. It also comes with only 256MB of RAM… but these things I think represent a great value because normally you’d be $1300 for a 20″ Apple Cinema Display. With this, you get a G5 processor and the whole 9 yards for $600 more– that’s not bad at all. Just throw in some more RAM and you’re good to go. If I didn’t mind the limited upgradability of these things I’d be tempted. You’ve gotta hand it to Apple for innovating in the desktop market. These are probably still out of the average user’s price range, but I still think they represent a better value than the dual processor machines.

Sure you can get something way cheaper from Dell… but then you’re getting just that, something “cheap”, hehe. I have a love-hate relationship with Apple.