Macs are better value than PCs

Torn between a cheap PC and an expensive Mac? Go for a Mac, says Harvey Jones: it's worth it.

After the hard drive on my Dell laptop blew up in January and took the last six months of my unbacked-up life with it, I faced a tough existential question: PC or not PC?

Or rather, PC or Mac?

My techie friend John has been trying to nag, sneer and bully me into buying a Mac for years, but as a notoriously stingy git, I always baulked at the expense. My instinct was to follow Neil Faulkner by splashing a few hundred quid on a cheap laptop, and hope it lasted until Christmas.

Amazingly, I didn’t. My Dell Inspiron laptop looked nice enough, but reduced me to sweary rage on a daily basis, by hanging, crashing, stalling, failing to load web pages, running its noisy fan all afternoon, or refusing to recognise software it had been happily saying hello to for months. Still, what do you expect for £500?

I was told that Dell wasn’t the problem, it was Windows, but who knows? For the good of my health, both had to go. I just hoped Macs were as good as everyone says, ‘cos they ain’t cheap.

Mac price attack

If you’re like me, the first thing you’ll notice about a MacBook isn’t the shiny white must-have box, it’s the price tag. Neil reckoned he could pick up a decent PC for £250. If you visit the Apple online store, you’ll find the cheapest MacBook starts at £816. It’s white, it’s sleek, and it has a “brilliant LED-backlit display” but all that buys is a poky 13.3” screen and a humdrum 2GB memory.

For that price I could buy three 15” screen laptops with 4GB memory and a fistful of sedatives to calm me when they all start crashing at the same time.

If I wanted a 15” screen on my Mac, there was the MacBook Pro, with prices starting at £1,328. That’s five laptops and a cache of horse tranquillisers.

For once, shopping around doesn’t help

I started rummaging around online for cheaper Mac options, but unusually, that didn’t help much. Pricerunner.co.uk offer MacBooks ranging from £812 to £989, but you have to make sure you are comparing like with like.

Pixmania.com sells the Apple MacBook Pro for £812, but it runs the older Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard operating system, now superseded by 10.6 Snow Leopard. Laskys.com sells the MacBook (not the Pro version) with Snow Leopard, but for £834.50.

That actually makes it cheaper to buy direct from Apple (which reverses everything I have learned about shopping around). Plus if you have an Apple store near you, you can enjoy a true 21st-century shopping experience, with polite, cheerful and knowledgeable staff, just like you don’t find at Dixons.

Yet amazingly, I bought my Mac at Dixons, in the departures lounge at Stansted airport, where the basic MacBook 13” retailed for £725 duty free, £90 cheaper than from Apple. And to be fair, the staff were cheerful and polite, although not as knowledgeable. Buying at the airport is worth considering if you’re taking a flight soon (if you disagree, you can tell me your horror stories below), although I had to cram my Mac and accessories into my bag to stop Ryanair charging me £35 for exceeding my hand luggage limit.

If you’re brave, you can buy a second-hand Mac on eBay. I’d rather not take the chance, but anybody who has, please comment below...

And then there’s all the extras...

If you’re switching to a Mac, you might need to buy new software, which is often pricier than a mass-market Windows-based software. So work out what you need and how much it costs.

As a writer, my needs are fairly simple, but I made a mistake by spending £65 (tax-free) on Mac’s own word processing package iWork ’09. All my editors use Office, so I have to convert files before sending. If I could turn back time, I would buy Microsoft Office 2008 Home & Student Edition, which retails from around £90.

As a long-standing RSI sufferer, I have used voice computers for years. I have been using Dragon Dictate since 1995, which runs on Windows. Its NaturallySpeaking Version 10 Standard, which I downloaded recently for £85, is absolutely brilliant. Mac’s version, MacSpeech, costs more than twice as much, but is slightly inferior. So if you are switching from PCs to Macs, make sure you can get (and afford) all your critical software.

You may also have trouble connecting old Windows hardware, such as your printer. I had to ditch my 10-year-old HP Laserjet and spent £200 on a “sleek and attractive” Epson Stylus Photo PX710W, but at least I can now print high-definition photos direct from my camera.

You get what you pay for, and boy, you pay

If you decide to go Mac, prepare to empty your pockets. If I had bought a £400 PC laptop there would have been no extra costs, because I could have continued using my existing software, printer and Dragon, all with a 15” screen and 4GB of memory. Cheap has its charms.

Instead, I spent £725 on a tax-free MacBook, £65 on iWork, £190 on MacSpeech and £200 on a new printer, a total of £1,180. And I ended up with a smaller screen and half the memory.

If I’d paid for a 15” screen, I could have added a whopping £500 to the cost. That is big money. I got around this by digging up an old 17” Dell flatscreen monitor, attaching it to my Mac and bracketing it to the wall.

Given the huge difference in costs, most of you will follow Neil Faulkner and stick to PCs. But for once, I’m glad I coughed up. Unlike my techie mate John, I’m no swooning Mac fanboy. But my shiny new MacBook boots and reboots in moments, has a touchtastic trackpad and keyboard, installs new software and hardware without reducing me to tears, needs no noisy fan and has an operating system that kicks Windows into trash.

The only thing I miss are the Insert Key and Delete Key, absent from my MacBook keyboard. But as my friend John says: “Once you go Mac, you never go back.” I hate to agree with him.

What do you think?

But what about you? Do you agree? Or are you a die-hard PC fan? Tell us what you think using the comments box below!