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is buying an apple more expensive than a dell?

With the release today of the updated MacBook I was discussing the cost of the new computers with someone. They said they thought the MacBook is overpriced and that they could buy a comprable Dell for $600. I decided to go to Dell’s website and to build a comparable machine to see the price.

I started with the inspiron 13 option. There is a comparable chip and speed (Intel core 2 duo at 2 GHz) but the front side bus is slower. I think I’m going to have to go with an XPS configuration to get a closer match for the FSB and on chip memory specs.

I picked an XPS M1330 core 2 duo. It still has a slow FSB but a slightly bigger cache, which is a little more competitive with the MacBook. In order to compare apples to Apples (i kill myself!) i’m selecting a 2.4 GHz chip. The Apple has a 1066 MHz bus speed compared to the Dell’s 800 MHz, but we will just have to live with that 200 MHz difference.

Vista home premium will be the OS on the Dell, vs. OS X 10.5. I selected the slim and light LCD and webcam to compare with the Macbook LCD and iSight. As far as RAM goes I’m selecting 4 gigs for both the Apple and the Dell. One new difference is that the Dell RAM runs at 667 MHz, which is slower than the system bus. This means the RAM will be slowing down the rest of the computer, which doesn’t make much sense to me. For storage we go for 250gig SATA hard drive which spins at 5400 rpms on both machines. On the video side I selected the 128 Mb Nvidia 8400m to compete with the 9400m on the Apple. Everything else was stock (no modem, stock battery).

The final tally:

Dell

Starting Price $1,886
Instant Savings $352

Apple:

$1749

Going by the raw price Apple wins, but with the magical instant savings the Dell is $215 cheaper. I do not know how consistent the instant savings is, or if it is permanent so your mileage may vary. The Apple has a faster bus speed which most people would want, and the super magical multi touch track pad. Additionally you cannot take your Dell to a Dell store to get serviced, as can be done with the Apple at an Apple store. Aside from that, the computers are fairly similar.  I can’t see the physical dimensions of the Dell to accurately compare that aspect of things. I can say though that the Dell doesn’t look nearly as sexy as the Apple.

I will admit I am an Apple fanboy, but I would prefer to spend a little more $ for a computer that will better components. Part of that is due to the quality of the hardware that I have seen from Apple in my previous purchases, and another part of that is due to my dislike of Windows Vista and my appreciation of OS X.

This concludes my entirely unscientific and totally biased report

Tags: Apple

son of pwnage 2.1

I’ve been using the updated software and I noticed a few things. All around the software seems more responsive. There are less stutters when switching apps and when apps are initializing. The keyboard also seems snappier and more responsive. Snapture still doesn’t work. One annoying thing I’ve noticed is that now if apps are hanging the phone is more likely to spontaneously reboot. I don’t know how bad that is though, since before it would just freeze the phone for a while. Genius is cool, and the backup that happens when you sync is much faster now. From a purely aesthetic perspective I also like the new Edge icon. I still want Dan Marks to build his golf app that tracks the course and overlays a map of the course, I need to play at Sedgley Woods to test it.

Tags: Apple, Iphone

pwnage 2.1

One day after Apple released the 2.1 version of its iphone software, the awesome iphone dev team released the Pwnage Tool version 2.1. Sunday evening I downloaded the new update over bittorrent and installed it. I opted for the expert mode install because I am l337 and I don’t like the stock boot and restore mode images the tool installs. I also opted to not install Installer, since I hardly use it and the software seems to crash. Cydia is great for me, and I haven’t seen any Installer only apps that I was in dire need of using. I opted to pre-install Winterboard and a couple additional repositories since I would have to get them sooner or later anyway.

It probably took around 20 minutes for my lowly 12 inch powerbook to build the updated IPSW bundle, and then it was off to the races. I did a backup of the phone, then I forced the phone into restore mode to restore using the pwned IPSW. I find for some reason that iTunes doesn’t like to connect to my phone after doing the software restore, so I unplugged the phone while it did the baseband check after the upgrade. I restarted iTunes as the phone restarted, and then I plugged in the phone to restore from my previous backup.

I haven’t evaluated all the claims made in the release notes of the fix but the phone seems more responsive. They keyboard sucks a lot less than it has with the other 2.x releases. The only bad thing I’ve encountered is that Snapture won’t load. I tried using BossPrefs to fix the user permissions since that has done the trick before, but I was not so lucky this time. I’m going to see if I can manually clean out all the files and do a fresh install to see if that will remedy anything.

I saw yesterday that there is a new app to create an installation list of your Cydia apps so you don’t have to manually install them all after renewing the software. I should have used it, since it’s becoming a bit of a drag to manually install all the awesome software each time you upgrade the iPhone’s software.

All in all the upgrade process was easy, I’m still waiting for an update that stops Java from making my work computer totally unuseable for 5 minutes while it loads.

Tags: Apple, Iphone, Powerbook