HP Laptops, MS Vista And Apple MacBooks
The reason that Apple’s MacBooks are more expensive than their Windows counterparts is amazingly simple: they’re worth more.
FutureWare has been a Windows shop from the beginning, although we don’t always use Microsoft’s development tools. And, overall, Windows has helped the software and personal computer industry by providing a reasonably uniform and predictable product line, by providing scale to that accommodates a rich and diverse product mix over an amazingly large infrastructure and installed base.
The growth of PC hardware is easy to trace, taking advantage of the production learning curve, of which Moore’s Law is one consequence that reduces unit cost and increases unit performance. Software doesn’t have any learning curve effect that decreases costs in the same way as hardware. Every point release seems to start over, with little opportunity to exploit history. The doubling of a physical item, any item, requires active human intelligence to create value, but the incremental production cost of software is amazingly close to zero.
Then there’s Microsoft’s Vista, which in many ways is a retrograde; in all other ways it can be charitably called a blunder, in the sense that Talleyrand used to describe Napoleon’s hubris. Vista is probably the best advertising for Apple, something that has occurred to so man people more or less at the same time that attribution for the remark is probably impossible. A slogan like this certainly didn’t come from Madison Avenue or any of the marketing/PR boutiques – it’s just too organic and sensible and obvious, attributes not generally associated with marketing/PR types.
Vista did a lot of collateral damage, not the least being Hewlett-Packard. A well deserved reputation for engineering excellence must have taken a drubbing when it released a laptop line using Vista. We made the mistake of buying an HP Pavilion D9540 laptop, but caught ourselves in time before we bought any more. In our case, the large keyboard and screen size were much more important than the exceedingly poor battery life. But (always one of these) noticing that we couldn’t install VS2005, coupled with the never ending problems of Office 2007 on Vista, demonstrated our being taken in as well.
The Vista laptop was used for email and such when travelling, never coming remotely close to its potential and the reason it was purchased originally. Looking replacing Vista with something that worked, like XP Pro or Linux, was more futile than recognizing the first mistake we made in buying it to begin with. To be sure, we were wary of Vista and much preferred XP Pro, but it wasn’t offered and we had a choice of that or…nothing.
An expensive mistake to be sure, but we’re adults and we can accept the responsibility. The bigger mistake was in not ditching it immediately, rather than spend the time and effort in trying to make it useful. Time being money, and now knowing that we wouldn’t have had to sink it into a dead end had we gone with a MacBook instead, it’s seems to us that Apple has priced its product just about right. And, we probably would have moved into the cloud much faster.
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Tags: apple, hp laptops, macbooks, vista