In our last episode, I noted how a friend of
mine was considering, with my approval, purchasing an Acer Aspire 15.6"
laptop with a 1.6 GHz dual-core AMD E-350 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a
500 GB hard drive for the come-hither price of Can$329.95.
Last Tuesday morning, accompanied by my wife, she, made the 70 mile
trek to the nearest Future Shop outlet in
search of the discounted Acer. My wife isn't much of a techie, but she
crammed a bit as to what to ask and look for.
However, as it turned out, they ran into a sales representative of
the sort that doesn't improve the profession's reputation, who
succeeded in persuading our friend to opt for an
HP Pavilion G6 with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i3 CPU, 6 GB of RAM,
and a 750 GB hard drive for Can$479. Not a shabby specification, but at
a price more than 45% higher than the Acer for more power and capacity
than that user really needs or will use.
Overkill
Had I been there, I would have advised here against buying the HP
unit - and not because there is anything technically horrifying about
it. It's probably a decent machine in the context of cheap PC laptops,
except that it wasn't exceptionally cheap to buy, and subjectively it
has to be of the most boring, characterless notebooks ever made - a
design that epitomizes blandness.
I'm not doggedly anti-PC hardware, and indeed I'm rather taken with
some PC laptops - for example, some of the new PC ultrabooks, and the
Ferrari and Lamborghini styled models from Acer and Asus respectively.
Those two brands also have been doing well in user reliability surveys
lately, with Acer even scoring higher than Apple in one I saw last
year. In my estimation, Acer notebooks in general have some of the
panache that is missing in typical offerings from HP and Dell.
So for a laptop with a Core i processor and higher RAM and storage
capacity, I would have pointed our friend toward a higher-end Acer and
not an HP rig. However, I hope the HP Pavilion (what a strange name to
apply to a laptop) serves my friend well, and frankly, she doesn't care
much about panache.
Underwhelming Hardware
Anyway, when I filed my column, which also contained some musings
about defecting to a PC for my own next system upgrade due to economics
and my underwhelmedness with the direction Apple seems to be taking Mac
OS X with Version 10.7 and
beyond, Dan Knight forwarded a comment. Dan noted that the AMD Fusion
CPU powering the $329 Acer Aspire I had initially suggested to my
friend is way slower than an Intel Core i3, perhaps in the ballpark of
Core 2 Duo, so she would be getting far less processing power than with
the 15" MacBook Pro - or even the 11" MacBook Air. Cheap and
tempting, he agreed, but he contends that performance would pale by
comparison with what I'm used to with my 3-year-old 2.0 GHz MacBook,
let alone a new MacBook Pro or Air.
Dan recalled with regret buying a 15" Acer Aspire some years back to
fix design problems on Low End Mac that impacted Windows users (see
Making Low End Mac's Design Work with
Internet Explorer 6 from 2005). He cited shortcomings like
that machine's Celeron processor, the vampire video graphics processor,
half the hard drive being tied up as a recovery partition, horrible
battery life, and a terribly reflective glossy display. He concedes
that the Acer worked to let him fix Low End Mac's design problem, but
he says he was never happy with that notebook using either Windows XP
or Linux.
Okay, a couple of things. First, Celeron silicon, depressing as it
was, is not on the table in our present context. The AMD E-350 is a
dual-core processor, and the Acer it powers comes with a discrete
graphics processor unit - a configuration many folks consider superior
to the Intel Core i3's HD integrated graphics. My MacBook has Nvidia
GeForce integrated graphics, as does the current Core i3 processor, and
I like my MacBook's glossy display.
But It Can Run OS X!
And the AMD E-350W CPU may not be a complete dog. Reader Rick writes
to say after reading The Siren Call of PC
Laptop Prices, he wanted to let me know that a couple of months ago
he had really wanted to get a MacBook Air for his wife and kids to
replace an older G4 Mac
mini that wasn't cutting it any more with many of the websites that
they frequent.
"Unfortunately," says Rick, "my budget did not allow for $1000+
MacBook. Kind of on a whim I took a chance and bought an HP Compaq CQ57
laptop from NewEgg.com for
$299 with free shipping. Like your Acer, it has the same AMD E-350
processor and quite impressive specs for the price. My family really
prefers using OS X, so just as an experiment I googled 'E-350
Hackintosh' and this link came up: Mac OS X on AMD E350 -
TUTORIAL"
"Wow," continues Rick, "this kid got it all working on his AMD E-350
so I gave it a try myself. I never thought this would be possible on an
AMD CPU, but there it was. Within 30 minutes, I had [OS X 10.6] Snow Leopard
running on my $299 laptop. I feel that low cost hardware together with
ability to run OS X is way louder than a 'Siren Call,' I just
wanted you to know it's possible."
Thanks, Rick, I agree. That's more than interesting information.
Looking Forward
And as I mentioned in the previous column, Windows 8 is promising to
be considerably stiffer competition for OS X than current
Windows 7 is, although even Win 7 is a decent OS and vastly
better than Windows XP, which I agree with Dan Knight was truly
awful.
As above noted, some of the new PC Ultrabooks unveiled at CES also
look enticing, offering faster Core i processors, more RAM, higher
capacity SSDs, and larger displays in thin and light form factor
machines with 13" or even 14" displays for the same money or cheaper
than Apple's entry level 11.6" MacBook Air.
While I'm using my iPad more and more for production (this article,
for example), it still frustrates the heck out of me in many respects,
so while I've been roped in by the easy portability and virtually
instant wake-up, I'm thinking that maybe a MacBook Air might prove the
charm.
Or perhaps an Ultrabook?
With Apple essentially obliging me to adapt to a whole new OS
paradigm, workflow habits, and some key applications due to terminating
Rosetta emulation support for PowerPC software, there's a case - albeit
with lots of qualifications - for possibly considering Windows 8
as an alternative to iOS-ified, non-backwards compatible Lion and
whatever comes after it.
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We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
