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A New Kind Of Heist: Six Apps For Free

Those crazy MacHeisters are at it again, and this time the deal is even harder to resist.
The first ever MacHeist Nano won’t cost you a penny. You can download, without charge, fully licensed copies of ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, and Hordes of Orcs. If 500,000 people take part (which I think is a pretty safe [...]

Getting More iPhone Home Screens – And Keeping Them

A couple of weeks back, I wrote Temporarily Get More iPhone Home Screens Via Cunning Bug Exploit, but had heard staying away from the iTunes Applications tab within my iPhone was probably a Very Good Idea. Reader Larry Pressnell noted that since the most recent iTunes update, his extra screens have been accessible in iTunes.
Since [...]

Cult of Mac Favorite: MobileStacks Is the Best Reason To Jailbreak. Period.

I really like Stacks on my Mac. Stacks makes it fast and easy to find files, folders and apps right from the Dock. It makes managing a Mac pretty slick with all sorts of little UI tricks. That’s why I recently gave MobileStack a go on my jailbroken iPhone.
I must say that it lives up to the [...]

Gallery: Behind the Scenes From Two Classic Apple TV Ads

Is this Steve Jobs driving a tank in a classic Apple TV spot from the late 1990s? That was the rumor at the time: Jobs was making cameos in Apple commercials.
Ken Segall, the TBWA ad man responsible for naming the iMac and Think Different, reveals the truth after the jump. He also shares some rare [...]

Mac Trounces PC in Pop Mechanics Head-to-Head

7:21 am, April 16th, 2008, Leander Kahney

macvpc.jpg

A PC-versus-Mac shootout by Popular Mechanics scores the Mac way ahead in both price and performance. PopMech compared desktops and laptops, and not only did the Macs run rings around their Windows counterparts, they were cheaper to boot. The conclusion:

Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. The Asus M51sr costs the same as a MacBook, while the Gateway One actually costs $300 more than an iMac. That means for the price of the Gateway you could buy an iMac, boost its hard drive to match the Gateway’s, purchase a copy of Vista to boot—and still save $100.

My, how times have changed. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was the opposite: PCs were cheaper and faster.

Somehow though, I don’t think conventional wisdom will change. Macs will always be regarded as premium computers — thanks to their fab design and quality fit and finish — even if that’s not actually true.

Posted by Leander Kahney in iPod | Comment on this article

About the author

Leander Kahney

Leander Kahney is senior editor of Cult of Mac, editor of two books about technology culture, Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, and has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Observer in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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6 comments

    I guess I’m in trouble… I love Mac’s, but I also love Coke! (Pepsi??!! Ewww!)

    Now I don’t know what to do! :O

    YodaMac, on April 16th, 2008 at 8:25 am

    Who gives a shit whether you’re surfing the internet on a mac or pc… aren’t there better things to identify with? To identify with a corporate brand??? I don’t know, I guess it’s hard to explain just how ridiculous that is.

    Lee, on April 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am

    I think the reason Macs will always seam like premium, expensive computers is simply because Apple doesn’t offer a cheap-ass god-awful pile of hardware that runs OS X. I bet your typical non-techy consumer’s eyes would glaze over if you told them to compare the tech specks of their $300 Dell to the cheapest mac they could buy.

    Or maybe not.

    Church of Apple, on April 16th, 2008 at 9:41 am

    BTW, for those of you who followed Apple back in the 80’s here’s a bit of sweet of nostalgia for you; it seems we have finally come full circle:

    http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/04/16/ibm_launches_internal_pilot_program_to_test_migration_to_macs.html

    Church of Apple, on April 16th, 2008 at 10:01 am

    I agree with CoA in that Apple may have less interest in changing the conventional wisdom than one might think. They’ve been so successful with an image as an upscale consumer brand that they probably won’t want to change that anytime soon.

    Doug S., on April 16th, 2008 at 10:20 am

    I wonder why they chose a Gateway and an Asus…the former is pretty well known to be junk, right? And the latter is pretty well known to be pretty much unknown…it just seems to kill the credibility a bit.

    nathan, on April 16th, 2008 at 11:10 am