I’ve been “considering” buying a new laptop for over a year now, but hadn’t quite yet felt the urge to spend such a sizeable chunk of cash on a shiny new toy.
Then Apple went and updated their Macbook range a few weeks back. The excitement of getting a new laptop has returned.
The two contenders for my money were the Dell M1330 and the Apple Macbook 2.4Ghz. A common complaint I hear/read about Macs is that they are overpriced, and at first glance this seems to be true. But are they really more expensive looking at the whole product, rather than just hardware specs? What does a Macbook have that makes it worth spending the extra money?
I freely admit I was biased before I started; I do really like the look of the new Macbooks. Fortunately, that wasn’t enough for me to just go out and buy one. Also, I’ve had a somewhat bad experience with Apple before. I bought a 3rd generation iPod 20GB about 4 years ago (for £300!) and was rather disappointed when the battery life was reduced to less than an hour after a couple of years.
I started by doing the geek thing - selecting the £1149 Macbook 13″, speccing up the Dell to match as closely as possible, then crunching numbers. On specifications alone, the Dell is a winner. With the Dell, I’d be getting more RAM (3GB over 2GB), larger hard drive (320GB over 250GB), bigger battery (in terms of capacity) and a fingerprint reader. It also has an assortment of ports the Macbook doesn’t - HDMI, memory card reader and VGA (Macbook has a Mini DisplayPort and requires adapters to connect via DVI or VGA, which are £20 each). However, the Macbook does have a slightly better processor (1066mhz FSB ‘Penryn’), the RAM is faster (DDR3 over DDR2) and the graphics are faster (according to this site). Each laptop has a few bits and bobs that the other doesn’t, but even when I got them as close as I could the Dell seemed to come out slightly ahead.
The Dell costs £945.98 and the Macbook a rather hefty £1169. I’d be getting slightly more for far less money. At this point, the Macbook doesn’t really seem worth paying an extra £223.02 for. There must be more to it than that, I thought.
It was when I started looking at the little extras on the Macbook that it began to show it’s worth. I went to an Apple store to try one out and was quite impressed. A few of the things I noticed were that the multi-touch pad gives good feedback and the gestures work nicely, the aluminium laptop body feels very sturdy and, most importantly, the ‘thumbscoop’ works incredibly well. One of the biggest gripes I have with most laptops that they cannot be opened with one hand, either because there is a catch to open or because doing so pulls the entire laptop upwards instead of just lifting the lid. Finally, on a purely subjective note, it is a gorgeous piece of machinery. There aren’t many laptops that can match it on looks.
After mulling it over for a couple of weeks I decided to go with the Macbook, mainly for the reasons above. The specs might not be the best, but I’m still confident it will be money well spent. I’ll surely feel compelled to write another post if it isn’t!
P.S. It’s worth mentioning that both Apple and Dell offer cashback on Quidco at 3% and 4% respectively, making my expensive purchase a little less expensive 