Josh wrote:
You do realize this is exactly how the neighbors sound whenever anyone buys a 3-series instead of a Camry, right? Or more to the point, you can say pretty much the same thing to anyone who buys a Ducati instead of a Suzuki.
Of course, once you factor in resale, there really isn't that much price difference. I paid $1100 for my Macbook Pro 3 years ago, and I can turn around and sell it on Craigslist/Ebay for $5-600 in a heartbeat. Try that with a Windows laptop.
Not the same at all, but nice false analogy.
The difference: They say that because they're not car people. I am a computer person.
Regaridng the resale: with the purchase price being what it is, so what? Even by your (pretty optimistic) #s, that ~50% you're out after reselling it is in the same ballpark as the 50% you could have just paid in the first place and you'd still have a computer. Financially, not a win at all.
Like this:
Let's pretend your mac can be sold for your super-optimistic 50% after a few years and the pc can't be sold at all (or is sellable for such a paltry amount it's not worth the effort). You buy a mac at 1100, I buy a PC at 600 (since my 100% additional markup is a slight exaggeration, I'll shave it a bit in your favor).
time warp... and a few years have passed.
You sell it, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in this direction too and say you get 50% (at three years. So you get $550 back. Mine has little resale value, so I don't sell it.
You're out $550, I'm out $600 but I still have a computer. Yes you can buy another one, but that just compounds the bad math.
I'm not saying don't buy one, I'm saying don't kid yourself about the costs if you do and make sure the limited differences are worth the large premium. in some cases, they very well may be worth it. Your resale example, on the other hand, is a prime case of kidding yourself to justify it.
The OS is somewhat nicer. But how much nicer is greatly exaggerated. You have to go back years before it's that much nicer, though at one point it was dramatically nicer. When that was the case, I steered more than one person towards buying a mac.
Applications are a bit of a wash depending on what you want to do, but general purpose stuff in no ways favors macs, and might favor PCs, but not by enough to really matter.
And the first person to mention anything like "easier" is going to out themselves as a marketing sucker. In general, neither option noticeably easier, and this has been the case fora long, long time. The easier one is the one you're used to.
Like I said, inertia and marketing.