I’m actually quite liking this theme. Wish I adjust font size and line spacing, but alas, I’m not going to pay wp.com for the privilege of adjusting CSS. How lame. Anyways.
It’s computer buying season again. Hurray! (though it causes me lots of stress) I’ve lived with my Mac mini for a year, and this time I’m itching for a PC again. What’s changed in terms of use cases? Not much, except for a bit of SC2 now. The mac mini can play it, but only on low settings, and it’s even a bit jerky then. I also do my usual web/photo/occasional video editing. The mac software is pretty good for that, but I’m missing the perf.
So it seems my main options are: put a SSD and 8 gigs into this mini, or build a PC. The former makes this machine live quite a bit longer for photo/video stuff, but not at all for SC2. I considered buying the newer mini, but that ends up really just being a $800 GPU upgrade. So that really leaves building a PC, and thus I have to convince myself not to get a Mac Pro.
I’ve done a lot spec’ing and it basically comes out consistently that I’d be paying a $1000 premium for a Mac, compared to a PC with roughly equivalent specs (SSD, 16GB, quad core, good GPU). So is the mac worth it? well I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to answer that question. So I thought of an approach. I’ll list out all the “benefits” of the Mac (as well as some non-benefits) and price each of them, asking myself each time: how much would I pay if I could get this benefit on my PC. Below is everything I could think of:

• Physical hardware design: 100$
• General desktop integration and quality (media browser, font rendering): 100$
• Unix integration: 0$ (cygwin is basically the same)
• iMovie: $50
• Color management: 0$ (this is basically negated by my investment in a hardware calibrated monitor)
• Silence: $100 (this is not impossible with a PC)
• Having a consistent work/home env: $100
• iphone/ipad integration: $10 (the only thing I really use is the google contacts synching)
• “centralized” support: $50
• Time saved from picking parts and testing: $100 (even with a mac, i spend lots of time looking at non-OEM parts to save money)
• Reduced virus threats: $0 (I don’t get windows viruses either)
• General workingness: $100

And then I need to discount some cons:

• Upgrade difficulty: -$50
• Subpar graphics perf (both for games and general desktop): -$50
• Flash works better on windows: $0
• Fixed versions of unix pieces: $0 (cygwin is better about this, but it has other issues, so it’s basically a wash)
• Missing software: -$50 (paint.net equiv. dvdfab equiv. eac equiv.)

So let’s see, that’s basically 1000 – (700 – 150) = 450. So my conclusion seems to be that Mac desktops aren’t really worth it for me, assuming I’m not missing anything from this list. Does that seem about right?
$450 isn’t so big in the grand scheme of things, but it is more than half of a new GH2..