[Early Preview] The Mac isn't overpriced

Ask most computer users about a Mac and whether they love it or hate it, they will almost always mention price. While Macs do command a price premium, they aren't overpriced. I know that this will sound like generic Mac user nonsense but if you continue reading, you might understand why I think this way.

The hardware

A pretty common trend among PC gamers back in the intel mac era was building a PC with the same listed specs as a mac to show how overpriced it was. While you can use this to talk about hardware choice, most of these arguments always lacked something. A common one back in the day was the original iMac 5k. Users would match the CPU and the amount of ram but cram it in the cheapest case and grab a generic 1080p monitor to show how it was overpriced. Considering the big upgrade of this generation was its beautiful 5k display, grabbing the cheapest monitor on the market to compare them is pretty disingenuous. This was pretty telling in Linus Tech Tips series "iSwitched" in which he sees that argument and instead tries to price a computer with a higher end case and a similar quality 5k monitor only to find the iMac was slightly cheaper. This gets even worse when you consider that the iMac is still somehow a very unique computer. Many companies tried to do the All-in-one concept back in the late Windows Vista, early Windows 7 days, but none of them succeeded. There aren't very many desktop computers where everything is essentially baked into the display and just requires a single power cable to work. Even older iMacs are marvels of engineering that still look good when you consider there is a desktop of that era in something that thin. The proginator of the modern iMac design, the iMac G5, is barely thicker than a modern gaming laptop and yet packs in a top of the line desktop chip of its era that was known to run quite hot, all while having pretty good performance for its era. Most of apples hardware does a similar balance where you are paying for a relatively unique chassis, good hardware, and good peripherals baked in. Their hardware for instance has always had top of the line displays built in, many of which can still compete with modern monitors. Their speakers also consistently wow reviewers who are shocked that this level of sound is coming from something so thin. When you buy a mac, you are paying for a well rounded good machine. You can always find something faster for the price, or something with a better display, or even something thinner; but you would be hard pressed to find similar machines that do them all at once.

Support

Many windows users like to point to the many late Windows XP machines that can technically be upgraded to Windows 10 as a sign of better support. And then the Linux users embarrasses both by showing linux working on an i486 from the late 80s. Its not very fair to compare them though because each of these are different levels of support. The windows example is my favorite because i would bet none of these users have sat down to try and use these machines. Many of these XP machines don't even have drivers for Vista, let alone 10. This makes these machines run even worse for their age and exhibit all kinds of problems stemming from the much heavier OS and basic driver sets. And the Linux example will technically always win but not to the level they like to show. A 486 with stripped down Linux will boot but it won't do a lot of the things we use computers for now adays. However, it will still run great and do modern stuff with good support on XP era machines and maybe a little older. The Mac however has a pretty decent time frame of getting the latest macOS with lots of new features that make these machines work better despite the age. There are very few cases where the best experience on a mac isn't whatever the latest software it supports is. but the most important part? Even when software support completely stops, these machines will still run great and do things modern windows still can't. I had a late 2006 iMac who's updates stopped at Mac OS X 10.7, and yet the little thing with its original hard drive felt more responsive than some SSD equipped windows machines. As I was using it, I found myself wanting to daily it just for features that still didn't exist in windows which I will get to below.

Software

macOS has always been contentious since it only officially runs on Apple hardware. I won't go into user interface since that's a personal preference but if you like the mac interface, there isn't much like it. MacOS does a lot of things that Windows still struggles with and has the stability of UNIX underneath it. The one that made me really get into MacOS was its spotlight search. Windows 10 introduced a new smart search that seems to still be the target of memes about how badly it works. You can search for a program on your file system and it will instead pull up a Bing search. While Windows 10 was getting memed on for its search, I got my hands on a late 2006 iMac who's last update was in 2012 and found myself blown away by how such an old version of spotlight was so powerful and so much better than windows. This old ass search tool would always find applications first and still had decent smart features like a dictionary, file search, calculator, and even an API so that it can search applications like messages or emails. if you like the idea of web results, that was introduced in OS X 10.10 where spotlight was completely redesigned. I use a modern mac and I can't recall a time where spotlight didn't do what I wanted it to do. This is but one part of the operating system and while I won't go too into depth, there are little things like this littered throughout the operating system that if you use them, you will appreciate having.

Why did I buy a mac?

I wasn't always a mac user. I spent a good amount of time making fun of their high prices and making fun of my uncle who was the only one in the family who bought macs. Eventually, some of those macs got old so he passed them down to me which was kind of the start of my love. We also used Macs in my high school multimedia classes which got me accustomed to the interface. But there is one moment in my life that sticks out as the final moment where I decided to become a mac user.

I have a small photography business that me and some friends started, part of photography is the editing process where you use applications like Lightroom and Photoshop. As the business grew, we went through a few computers. First was just using our own cheap computers from home, then we bought an OK gaming laptop that was on sale, finally we built a custom computer based on how Lightroom ran. This computer was relatively top of the line for its time. It had an intel core i9-9900k with a corsair AIO (I know its not great, I fell for the meme before I knew better), 48gb of ram (we kept upgrading from 16Gb since lightroom would hog it all), an NVME SSD, and an RX 570 graphics card (this wasn't great but at the time, Lightroom didn't have GPU acceleration so it was basically just there to give me a display output). This was the best I had seen Lightroom run at the time. But one week when photos where slow, I saw a video about hackintoshes. While I had always known about them, I never owned hardware that would work. His video has very similar hardware to mine so I decided to check the forum and to my astonishment, I had accidentally selected hardware that was on the compatibility list. Wanting to finally try this, I spent the better part of a day hackintoshing the machine. Once it was mostly working I decided to try and daily it. The result? Lightroom on a hackintosh ran circles around the same computer running Windows. I didn't record the results in a scientific manner but it felt about twice as fast and unfathomably smoother to use. On windows, Lightroom chugged when scrolling a library, now it was buttery smooth by just changing OS.