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Not exactly...
Posted by Justin VanAbrahams (more from Justin VanAbrahams) on Thu, 5 Jul 2012 10:13:32
In Reply to: Definitely a Mac, vvk, Thu, 5 Jul 2012 09:49:32
Resale value on Macs may be insane, but so are upfront prices. Spending $1200 on a Mac that gets you performance equivalent to a $500 PC means you have $700 sitting around in the Mac doing nothing until you decide to sell it. Even if the PC depreciates at 10x the rate of the Mac, and three years later you're left with a $900 Mac or a $0 PC, what have you actually lost? $200? Was the $200 victory at the end worth having the extra money tied up in the Mac for that time?

Apple makes *great* hardware, of that there can be no doubt. But speaking as a guy who shops both Macs and PCs frequently, money is *never* the reason to choose a Mac. You will *always* lose out financially on Mac hardware.

You can buy a new run of the mill PC every 18 months for five years and still win out financially over the cost of a similarly-performing MacBook Pro... except in 18 months when the MBP is starting to feel slow, you get a brand new PC. I have been running this simulation on new Mac models since 2007, and it's still true. In fact, the $ argument shifts slightly more towards the PC every year.

Since Apple switched to Intel CPUs and started releasing more frequent OSX updates, resale value on older models has been plummeting. There used to be a time when a three year old Mac was worth a large percentage of a new one, but that isn't generally the case anymore. The depreciation rate on Macs has been increasing for 2-3 years now. With Apple releasing new hardware semi-annually to keep pace with Intel's product release cycle, old Macs are not enjoying the long service lives they used to. I suspect with Apple's cat out of the bag in terms of susceptibility to viruses, software updates will also come more frequently, and older versions of OSX will become less and less desirable - if not completely unsafe - thus driving resale down even further.

Choose a Mac because you like the software or because you like to have the Apple logo or because you like the UI. Those are all good reasons. There is no universe I've visited where it's a defensible financial decision.

posted by 12.195.130...
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