When everyone gathered for Thanksgiving, I shared the victory of my college friend buying a Mac Mini instead of a new Windows 7 box. As is normal for our family of technology users, my story brought a yawn.
However, later my son shared with his mom that my eldest daughter was thinking about replacing her aging white half moon iMac with a Windows box. She has been using Windows stuff at work for nine years, but she has always had a Mac at home.
It is always interesting how the information comes back to you, but that is another story. My son also said his sister was considering Windows mainly to save some dollars.
My initial thought was that she might save four or five hundred dollars if she bought a Windows box. It ended up that I was wrong.
Being the shy dad that I am, the next time I got some time with my daughter I asked her what she wanted to do with her new computer when she got it. The response was that she mostly wanted it for email, browsing, and to work with photos.
That was the opening that I had hoped to find. I told her that I used both my HP laptop with Vista and my Macs for photos. My conclusion after comparing them for two years was that Picassa on Windows was the only good low end product, but that it did not match the feature set or ease of use of iPhoto.
On another level, I argued that the integration between iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD is just not there on the Windows machines. I even told her that she could expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars adding program functionality to the PC that was included on the Mac. Based on my experience much of it is not as good as the included Mac software.
I also pointed out that iPhoto can have the same integration with Picassa Web Albums that Picasa does on Windows. I did not want to confuse the issue by mentioning Picassa on the Mac.
I did mention that some good web tools are built into iPhoto and that additional excellent web tools like RapidWeaver are available for the Mac while I have been unable to find something as good or inexpensive in the Windows world.
On top of that I pointed out that at least once a week something hangs up on my Windows Vista machines which I told her I suspected was not that much different than a Windows 7 machine.
Finally I mentioned that she should factor in the yearly costs of Virus protection on Windows.
Still I told her I would look into Mac pricing and compare it to Windows pricing.
I went to the Dell website and put together a system configuration (PDF file) that was based on one of their Studio Slim Desktops. The only challenge that I had was figuring out the monitors, and I eventually just gave up and went with a 22" one.
I never could determine which monitors had LED back-lighting like the iMac.
Anyway the base level iMac with MS Office Student came out to $1328.95.
The Dell box came out to $1156, but according to my son, I probably did not have an equivalent monitor on the Dell.
With the difference at retail being $172.95 and the Dell monitor likely not as good as the Mac's, my daughter has pretty well decided to stick with a Mac.
I closed my investigation email to her with a reminder of how easy it is to migrate from one Mac to another. She said she would check at the Apple Store to see if they had the right kind of Firewire cable.
Once again I am sure you could get a PC that costs under $500, but I seriously doubt that my daughter would be happy with it. She wants something that will last as long as her white half moon iMac did.
That is about it from North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks on this rainy day which will not change my mind about how great a place this is.