Originally Posted by
mludd
The thing about Mac pricing is that it's not quite as extravagant as some people like to tell themselves (and anyone else unlucky enough to be in earshot of them).
For example, when the mid-2010 27" iMac refresh happened it was actually priced very competitively. At the time I was looking to buy a new main workstation and the only way I could get a similar (at-the-time-latest-gen (just released) CI7, 27" IPS monitor etc) setup for less than 90% of the iMac's price was if I bought parts from several different places and pretty much only looked at cycles/bytes per dollar. Any pre-built machines with comparable hardware + 27" IPS monitor came out to approximately the same as the iMac. So, I like OS X, not because I'm retarded, gay or blinded by fanboyism but because it's a modern UNIX operating system that requires very little tweaking or configuration. Yes, I bought that iMac, it still works like a charm and I have no regrets.
Now, had I waited a few months the iMac would still have had the same price while a DIY machine would've been a couple of hundred dollars cheaper but my point is, due to timing issues it was actually a good buy.
A lot of the younger gamers who complain about Macs also seem to make a few mistakes in their reasoning:
1) Their use case is everyone's use case. Not everyone only cares about bytes/cycles per dollar, there are other factors as well, including system integration which is something Macs are still much much better at than your average OEM Wintel machine.
2) That OS X is as locked down as iOS, simply not true in any way, it's definitely more open than Windows (if you are about to reply with some rant about how this statement proves I'm a brainwashed fanboy I'd like you to first investigate properly how much of Windows is open source, now compare this to OS X. Also, don't bring up Quicktime video, that's a long-dead format, Apple's defaults for video and audio these days are MPEG-4 and AAC. Oh yeah, and it's been quite a while since they were able to negotiate away the DRM from the music they sell through the iTunes store. And once again, we're talking about OS X, not iOS).
3) That anyone who owns a Mac is computer illiterate. Just go to any developer conference and look at the laptops used by professional developers there, it's very likely a very high percentage of them are using Macbook Pro laptops running OS X. This obviously isn't because developers are generally more computer illiterate than the average teenage gamer but because a modern UNIX system running on hardware it was specifically tailored to run on is attractive to developers and if you're making $75k/year or more and you buy a new laptop every couple of years then forking out another few hundred dollars for it to better fit what you want makes sense, after all, you're probably going to be using it for hours every day.