You know, it’s not always, but apple does sell things that are price-competitive with similarly performing competing products.
Some iterations of the Mac Mini have been hard to beat with a tiny PC with similar performance.
The M1 MacBooks had some surprisingly cheap options for the relatively premium laptops they were.
Samsung’s Ultra phones tend to cost more or less the same as the Apple Pro Max phones.
The main difference is sometimes just that Apple doesn’t make low-end or low-mid-range, or sometimes not even anything below “relatively high-end”, products in a particular category.
Can confirm on the MacBook side. My girlfriend got a m series macbook and it’s better than anything in it’s price range. That device is so snappy while having a battery life that’s incomparable to anything with windows
The trash can Mac pro was pretty compelling value at release (for a little while at least)
Samsung offers a lot more models so they tend to have a higher high end and a lower low end than Apple.
Well, that button probably dates from the late 80s or early 90s, when Apple was comparing Macs to branded IBM PS/2s and such that were sold to schools and enterprises.
And they weren’t wrong, at the time. Those PS/2s were fuckin’ expensive.
There’s a reason why no-one bought IBM PS/2s. They were horrible value for money.
The real competition at the time was the thousands of other brands selling PCs. By that time IBM was plummeting in sales and other companies were selling most of the PCs. That’s where 95% of the market was.
Certainly, but Apple was comparing itself to other computer companies with international reach, not to the white box PCs coming out of the Floppy Wizard store in the strip center.
A lot of larger companies like Compaq etc. were making “respectable” PCs by then and selling them in big quantities in direct competition to IBM.
apple was never cheaper than their competition, and when IBM got into PCs they were also not even comparable in quality anymore. Reality is that even in the early days apples was also more expensive and they relied on a dedicated fan base to sell their trash, to be fair they sorta earned their reputation in the super early PC space with actually good products but when IBM came in, it had better PCs at lower prices and apple was basically riding on pure brand power. Then they had a few good hits with the ipad and later the iphone (tho the ipad was not as significant at the time as people seem to think it was looking back) and now they have been entirely eclipsed when it comes to phones and are once again reliant on hype and brand recognition.
It is not a unique history by any means but i feel it is especially egregious considering just how shit apple products are and how expensive they are.
So, I lived through that time, and I supported computers professionally during that time. I started working at a university help desk in 1989.
It’s easy to go back and look at Apple products and white-box PCs of the era (or quasi-legit clones like Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc) and say, “oh, on specs, the Apples were MASSIVELY overpriced – you can get a much better deal with the PC”.
The problem was that PCs were nowhere near on par, functionally, with Macintosh.
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Networking. We were running building-wide Appletalk networks – with TCP/IP gateways – over existing phone wires YEARS before anybody figured out how to get coax or 10base-T installed. We were playing NETWORK GAMES (Bolo, anyone) on Mac in the late 80s.
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And when they did… what do you do with networking in DOS? Unless you ran a completely canned network OS (remember Banyan, Novell, etc. ad infinitum?) and canned apps specifically designed to work with it, you were SOL. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were a joke compared to System 7.
I configured PCs and Macs for the freshman class in 1995. For the Mac? You plug the ethernet port in and the OS does the rest. For the PC… find a DOS-compatible packet driver that works with your network card, get it running, then run Trumpet Winsock in Windows 3.1, then… then… it was a goddamned nightmare. We had to have special clinics just to get people’s PCs up and running with a web browser, and even then, there were about 10% of machines we just had to say “nope”. Can’t find a working driver, can’t get anything working right. Your IRQs are busted? Who fuckin’ knows. I ran the “Ethernet Clinic” until the late 90s, when Windows 98 finally properly integrated the TCP/IP layer in the OS.
- Useful software on the Mac had a pretty consistent look & feel. On the PC? Even in Windows 3.1, it was all over the map. You might have a Windows native program, you might have a DOS program that launches in a console window, you might have a completely different graphical interface embedded in the software (Delphi apps, anyone?). Games were using DOS into the mid 90s because getting anything working right in Windows 3.1 was a total fuckin crap shoot.
Windows 95 started to fix things, finally. And Windows XP would finally bring an OS with stability comparable to Mac (arguably WIndows 2000 as well, but it was never really offered on non-corporate PCs).
The short version is: that $3000 Mac could do a lot more than that $1800 PC, even if the specs said that the CPU was faster on the PC.
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My Apple IIC was the stuff back in the 80s.
It was also the last Apple product I owned.
The interaction between Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and Woz (Seth Rogen) pretty much sums up the Apple ][ era.
They meant that it costs less for apple, not the customer
I had an Apple ][+ in 1982 and an Apple ][c in 1984.
Cost less is a relative term depending on application.
They were cheaper than full business model IBM computers (who hadn’t much entered into the home computer market) but significantly more expensive than other home offerings such as commodore or (shudder) radio shack.
This post was maybe true 5 years ago, but PC laptops have really started to suck. My macbook air was only $300 and it’s way better than my work’s $1k+ Dell laptop in terms of performance and battery life.
That pin can be found for $30 or $35 on on ebay here and here, where it is described as being from the 80s and as an “employee pin”.
I was thinking that this might have been something aimed specifically at technology buyers in US schools in the 80s or 90s, to whom Apple offered substantial institutional discounts in a (relatively successful) effort to dominate that sector. However searching the phrase “does more costs less” i found this TV spot advertising the Quadra 605 which at $1000 was the cheapest computer Apple sold when it was introduced in October 1993 (and allegedly cheaper than something else they refer to as “PC Leading Brand” 😂). That system was sold under the LC and Performa brands up to 1996, but it was only sold as a Quadra until October 1994, so, to answer OP’s question: that slogan was in use at least sometime in that year.
A study from 2022 found that deploying Macs in the enterprise has a lower TCO than Windows. Mainly because they have to buy less extra software and they don’t need as many IT staff to support them. Also, employees with Macs are more productive and do better on their performance reviews.
I don’t see this mentioned there, but that Apple has largely ignored enterprise works out as a strength; other companies wrote and open sourced pretty good tools. That can result in tools that better meet your needs, and generally will result in a lower TCO.
And since Macs are just UNIX machines under the hood, a lot of those open-source things are already built-in or can be added without much trouble.
Yes and by contrast Microsoft has been enshittifying the hell out of Windows in order to extract more and more money out of the corporations they have contracts with. They force everyone to use Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Office 365 so that they achieve total lock-in and ratchet up the cost of the support contracts.
Microsoft is basically following the same playbook IBM pioneered in the enterprise: use a slick sales team to get your hooks into into the CEO, CIO, and other senior VPs in charge of IT in order to force all their crap onto the company by top-down fiat rather than bottom-up informed decision making.
Original iPod: Clunky, ugly, not the most storage.
But using jt will remind you of playing with nipples.
That aged like milk lol
Do the words “IBM PC-Compatible” mean anything to you?
Just Capitalism Problems
“The more you buy the more you save” - NVIDIA
Seems like they both went to the same school
It doesn’t even do anything more especially for the price. Just make an AMD rig that blows it outta the water ez.
Luxury brand is what happened.
(First it was colored plastic.)
They costed less back when the competition was the IBM PC, which cost as much as a car back in the 80s. Hasn’t been true for decades now.
