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Be careful what you wish for; you may get it. From the very beginning, Mac users have loved their Macs, but complained that they were overpriced. And indeed, back in the early days, they were obscenely overpriced. I remember the first time I opened up a Mac Plus, wonderful little machine that it was. My first impression was: "Is this all there is?" The guts of the Plus seemed pretty prosaic, even crude, considering that it originally sold for $2,600. The 512Ke, which maxed out at its eponymous amount of RAM sold for an even more distressing $3,200, and is just as crude inside. According to David Pogue and Joseph Schorr in MacWorld Mac Secrets Fifth Edition, the nine most expensive Macs of all time were:
Note that those Mac IIs and Quadras did not include a keyboard, mouse, modem, or monitor either, and only a piddling amount of RAM. (Dis)honorable mention also has to go to the MacXL, which was originally called the Apple Lisa, released a full year before the original Mac 128K, and which sold for a cool $10,000. There is controversy over whether The Lisa/MacXL was a "real" Mac, but it could run Mac software, up to System 3.2. Then there was also the original PowerBook G3, which sold for a hefty $5,700 dollars as recently as 1998. It is sobering to ponder what these machines sell for now. I have considered buying a Mac IIfx for one hundred dollars or so just to own the most expensive Mac ever (except perhaps for the MacXL) at 1 percent of its original cost, but I have thought better of it. It's a big, hulking machine, and the '030 processor is just too limiting, being supported only up to Mac OS 7.6.1, and with a 2 gigabyte hard drive support ceiling. That $6,500 PowerBook 5300ce had only four differences from the entry-level $2,200 PowerBook 5300:
However, the 5300ce sold for $4,300 MORE than the 5300, and even considering the much superior display and the higher price of RAM in 1995 that seems like a disproportionate difference in tariff. Or perhaps the plain Jane 5300 was just an exceptional bargain. I thought so, and bought one. Thanks to the low power demand of the passive gray scale screen, it was even faster than the ce (still nothing to get up in the night and write home about, alas), despite the slower processor. Indeed, something of the same dynamic, although not nearly as exaggerated, applies to the Pismos and the new titanium G4 PowerBooks, with the $1,000/$900 spread respectively between the low-end 400 MHz models and the high-end 500 MHz models hardly being justified in terms of cold, hard value by a 20 percent speed boost, a larger hard drive, and more RAM, especially at today's RAM prices. The low-end TiBook is a steal at $2,595, when you consider what you were able to get in a PowerBook in the past the that much money. For instance, that's only $400 more then the original list price of the gray scale PowerBook 5300. And only $100 more then the original 117 MHz 1400cs passive matrix machine with no CD-ROM. The cheapest PowerBook 3400 started out at $4,500, a full thousand dollars more than the current high end titanium PowerBook. The original 233 MHz, no cache, 12.1-inch passive matrix screen MainStreet G3 Series PowerBook sold for $2,300, and the 250 MHz WallStreet with a 13.3 inch active matrix screen was $2,730. Going back even further, the original PowerBook 100 sold for $2,500, the PowerBook 160 sold for $2,430 and the original Duo 210 sold for $2,250. The Duo 280 was almost the same price as low-end TiBook at $2,550. And the gray scale, passive matrix PowerBook 520 sold for $2,270. What initially spurred this train of thought were two things I read this week. One was PC World magazine's latest, semi-annual, reliability and service users' survey, which carried the title subhead: "Are today's PCs too cheap?)" A provocative thought. The other was Steve Jobs comment at Apple's semi-annual meeting for financial analysts, that Apple's goal is to make the "best" products around, even if they aren't necessarily the least expensive. "Innovation costs a little more, but our customers have signaled to us that innovative products are the kind they want to buy," Jobs is quoted saying. "Our goal isn't to be the cheapest in the market, but the best. If this means that [our products] sometimes cost 10-15 percent more, then they will be." And that's just fine with me. The PC World article says that PC prices have fallen by an average of 35 percent over the past three years according to Dataquest, which poses the nagging suspicion that both hardware quality and after-sales support may be suffering as a consequence. To try and quantify this issue objectively, PC World compared findings for their July 2000 and January 2000 surveys with the latest one, and came up with mixed indicators. Scores were lower for home PCs in the latest sampling, but were better for office PCs and notebooks. PC World used to include Macs in their user surveys, and back in the mid-1990s, Apple would typically humble the PC competition in quality, reliability, and owner satisfaction. Macs are no longer included, probably because Apple's market share is now so marginal. Anecdotally, I would deduce that somewhat the same trends identified by PC World for Wintel boxes would apply to Macs as well. While there has been some indication that iMac component reliability has not been up to previous standards, especially with the July 2000 machines, PowerBook quality and reliability seems to be as good as ever. It was interesting to see where the various PC makers slotted in PC World survey. The undisputed king of the hill was Dell, which was the only brand rated "outstanding" in both the home and work PC categories, and tied with IBM for a "good" rating in the notebook category (nobody was outstanding in notebooks). Makes you wonder how the PowerBook would have fared. The article noted that few PC in notebook owners are very happy with the service they're getting. Runners-up with "good" ratings in the to the desktop category were IBM and Micron, with Gateway joining them in the work PC comparison, but falling to "fair" in home PCs. Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Sony all remained mired in the "fair" ratings, with E-Machines alone in rating "poor." The latter, not surprising, finding about the quintessential cheap-o PC box brings us back to my comment about being careful what you wish for. It isn't intelligent to shop for computers by the pound, and I'm glad to hear that Steve Jobs affirming that Apple isn't going to try and compete in the race to $zero (profits) by slugging it out in the bottom end of the market. Customers who shop for a computers solely, or primarily on the basis of price, probably don't have the taste to appreciate the Mac any way. There is some question as to whether Apple hasn't pushed the bottom end of the price envelope bit too far already with the lower end iMacs. A perennial market underdog can't afford to become identified with unreliability and shoddy build quality, which is always a risk when you cut corners in order to be able to price aggressively. The Mac's identity as a premium machine needs to be carefully protected and preserved. By historical standards, if quality and reliability standards remain comparable, any of today's five Mac product families represent tremendous bargains. Sure, you can always find a PC for a few hundred dollars less with more bells and whistles, but these machines always put me in mind of those cheap stereos you find in department and discount stores with obscure of "brand" names, boasting a long list of nominally cool features, but that will inevitably prove to be neither reliable nor to sound very good. If something seems too good to be true, it usually is, and you tend to get what you pay for. On the other hand, nobody wants to go back to the days of $6,500 PowerBook , or $10,000 desktop Macs. I'm delighted that the current Apple of my eye, the TiBook, is available for $2,595. I just hope Apple didn't cut too many corners to achieve that price point. If price reductions can be achieved through a technological advances and economies of scale, that's wonderful, and everyone benefits. However lower prices achieved by compromising quality are a dubious blessing. Let's hope that Macs never become too cheap.
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