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Are Macs Getting Too Cheap?
A boilerplate truism from the PC orbit is that Macs are overpriced, but recently I’ve been given to wonder if in fact the opposite does not obtain. Are Macs now priced below the level where their traditional anvil-like reliability is being compromised? The price increase of $100 across the G4 iMac line this week is an indicator of how close to the bone Apple is pricing its consumer products lately. It since its introduction in 1984, the Mac has been premium-priced, and for most of the ensuing 18 years, it has been a premium-quality product as well, although not always commensurate with the price of admission. I remember the first time I had a Mac Plus apart, marveling at how little there really was to it relative to what it cost. In 1986, a Mac Plus with an 8 MHz 68,000 chip; no internal hard drive; and a whopping 1 MB of RAM sold for a staggering $2,600. Almost as bad was the Mac IIx of 1988, a 16 MHz 030 machine that sold for $9,300, and the much-loved 1989 Mackintosh IIci, a 25 MHz 68030 machine that went out the door for $8,800, also sans monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and the 25 MHz ‘040 1992 Quadra 900 at $8,500. Perhaps even more outrageous was the otherwise admirable Mac SE-30 of 1989, a 16 MHz 030 machine that did have a hard drive and more expansion options than the Mac Plus, but which sold for a now almost unbelievable $6,500 for a machine with a 9”, one bit, black-and-white display. On the portable front, the most expensive PowerBook ever was the 5300ce of 1995 at $6,500, a machine that differed in only four aspects from its $2,200 base 5300 stablemate: a 10.4” 800 x 600 TFT color display versus a 9.5” passive matrix grayscale 640 x 480 unit; 17 MHz more processor clock speed; 24 MB more standard RAM; and a 600 MB larger hard drive. Otherwise the two PowerBooks were identical Nearly as pricey was the PowerBook 3400/240, at $6,400 when it was introduced in 1997, but at least the 3400 offered both performance (it was the fastest laptop in the world at the time), and ruggedness more in line with its inflated cost. The original PowerBook G3 (e essentially a G3 motherboard with upgraded video on a 3400 case) was also pretty steep at $5,700, but again, you got the fastest laptop in the world at the time, and by an even wider margin than the 3400. The last of the grossly overpriced high-end PowerBooks was the 1998 G3 Series Wall Street 292 MHz at $5,600. Apple radically revamped its PowerBook pricing strategy with the introduction of the Lombard G3 booked a 1999, pegging the high end unit at a much more modest $3,500 -- a thousand dollars cheaper than the entry-level PowerBook 3400/180 had been two years earlier. That price structure essentially held for the next two and three-quarters years, subsequent to which it has been cut even more with the introduction of the latest generation Titanium G4 PowerBooks. And then of course there is the iBook family, which has been offered at price points substantially lower than even low end PowerBook prices since day one. Shifting focus back to the desktop categories, the iMac rewrote the book on MacIntosh pricing, eventually becoming the first sub-$1,000 Mac in history, and the price/value/performance equation has been substantially enhanced again with the release of the new G4, LCD iMacs this year, which are still an incredible bargain in historical context, even with the $100 price hike Apple announced at MacWorld Expo Tokyo this week to compensate for sharply increased RAM and flat panel display costs at the OEM level. And naturally, everyone, including me, has greeted Mac price reductions gladly, and some are even clamoring for lower Mac prices yet. However, one should always be careful what one wishes for, because one might get it. Ultimately, there is no free lunch. Which brings me to the central point of this essay, which is, as the title asks, have Macs gotten too cheap for their (our) own good? Macs used to be paragons of toughness and reliability. Not to say that where there were never any problems -- those dodgy video power supplies in the early, compact Macs are a case in point. However, my old it 1987 Mac Plus still works well, as does my 1993 LC 520, which my wife has taken over as her email and word-processing machines These older Macs give you the impression that they’re just going to go on forever. Even my 1996 PowerBook 5300 -- a machine with probably the poorest reputation of any Mac, save for the 5000 Series all-in-one desktop machines -- has provided almost trouble-free service for nearly six years -- the last 3 + as my daughter’s school computer. The only hardware failure has been the trackpad but it, which was replaced for free under Apple’s REA Service extension program on the 5300 and PowerBook 190. My early 1999 PowerBook WallStreet 233 MHz has been magnificently reliable in more than three years of heavy, intensive use, and it remains my production workhorse while I experiment with learning OS X on my 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook I got last fall, another machine (purchased used) that seems happily unproblematical so far at least.Κ My G4 Cube for the short time I owned it, manifested no problems. Unfortunately, the impression that I’m forming of Apple’s more recent offerings is not nearly as positive. My main personal focus of interest is portables, and the TiBook, spectacular as it is, seems to be especially finicky and troublesome beast. I have no scientific or statistical analysis of Titanium PowerBook service reliability, but I hear of an awful lot of TiBooks being sent back to Texas for service and repair One of the Ti’s worst week points seems to be its screen hinges, and the area of Apple’s portable Engineering where it has evidently been cutting too many quarters since the 1998 WallStreet. There are rumblings of a class action suit over pandemic WallStreet hinge failures, but the number of anecdotal reports of hinge trouble with the much younger TiBook far exceeds that of the earlier machine at the equivalent stage of its service life. Check out this article by power page’s Peter Kirn about hinge self-distracting on his personal TiBook (it was repaired under warranty by Apple). It I had serious misgivings about the Ti from the beginning with respect to its ultra-thin form factor. I love the aesthetics, but it only stands to reason that when you pack more performance and functionality into a physically smaller package with tighter clearances and less ventilation, something has to give. I suspect that one of the reasons why the 3400 and the G3 PowerBooks have proved so tough (notwithstanding those WallStreet hinges) is that they are relatively large as laptops go. The original iBook was a hulk too, and the current, dual-USB models are less jammypacked then the Ti, but manufacturer Alpha-Top’s portable engineering doesn’t seem to be quite as inspired and robust as we’re used to from Apple. It (an aside, the recent PowerBooks and iBooks are not the first Apple laptops whose engineering and manufacture has been farmed out; the 1997 PowerBook 2400 was designed and built by IBM Japan). What the iBook does have going for it compared with the TiBook is the inherent toughness of its polycarbonate plastic case. While titanium is an amazingly strong engineering material, the TiBook’s case is very thin sheet metal, and indeed some of the hinge failures have been caused by metal fatigue or metal tearing from trauma, rather than the hinge mechanism itself breaking. For a particularly harrowing account of flaky reliability with recent Macs, you can check out a http://www.macnet2.com/opinion/oped/index.shtml recent essay by John Manzione, Publisher of MacNETv2. Manzione notes that:
By last October John’s PowerBook G4 had racked up it’s fourth visit to Apple’s Texas depot repairs and I John was understandably fed up. “Four major repairs on a computer the entire world lauded as the best in the world were, at best, ridiculous,” he says, but his travails were far from over. To skim the high (low?) lights, John was able to convince Apple Executive Relations that I should receive a replacement PowerBook, which duly arrived. Happy ending? Uh-uh. After spending half a day installing software, John noticed the PowerBook was getting unusually warm, than hot, then it started smoking and the LCD screen started flickering. After more conversation with Executive Relations and Apple Repair it was concluded that John’s brand new replacement PowerBook G4 didn’t have a working fan, and it was probably irreparably damaged (an aside; this story does nothing to lessen my skepticism about the suitability of the torrid G4 chip as a portable computer CPU). Executive Relations sent John another new PowerBook, the newer model, his third. However, he still wasn’t out of the woods. First, it turned out that the (Apple supplied) RAM upgrade was incompatible, although it seemed to work fine. Then the PowerBook refused to boot from John’s Norton CD, or any other CD except the Apple Hardware Diagnostic CD. He called Executive Relations again and they said they would get back to him about another replacement or a fast repair. That was in mid-October, John is still waiting, and living with the defective TiBook. But his troubles weren’t over. The iBook John got for Christmas has a problem with keys on the keyboard kept popping off.He learned to keep an eye out for loose keys that were about to pop out and to type by lightly tapping the keys. Then in January the CD-ROM drive drawer decided not to stay closed. He called Apple and told them about the keyboard and drive and they sent a shipping box. A week later the iBook was returned, and while Apple had fixed the drive, they hadn’t touched the keyboard. John let it slide. Then there’s John’s 2002 Quicksilver Dual GHz Tower which began to have serious issues. John wrote about his troubles with the Power Mac, and the day the column was published he received a call from Executive Relations in Cupertino, who insisted they would replace John’s Tower. And that’s great for him, but not every Mac owner is a journalist with a Website soapbox to complain publicly about their troubles. As John observes, “There are literally hundreds of people suffering from the same problem I am and Apple hasn’t called them to set up a replacement so why did I deserve this special treatment?...
Now, let me reiterate here that, as noted above, my experience with my Apple hardware over the years has been excellent. The three new PowerBooks my son has owned since 1997 have been likewise problem-free. So have we been as fortunate as John seems to have been unlucky (at least lately)? Well perhaps we have been lucky. John says that:
John summarizes his thoughts on this troubling issue as follows: But: There’s not much there that I would argue with. So, what do you think? Has Apple cut too many corners trying to keep Mac prices within shouting distance of the cheapo PCs? Have you had more problems with your late model Mac than you expected to? What sort of service experience have you had with Apple? Was John Manzione’s rotten experience with his three recent Macs an anomaly? Let me know.
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