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Seth Weintraub

Apple versus Google

Steve Ballmer's take on Apple? Just a $500 logo

25 comments

TAGS:Apple, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer
IT TOPICS:Macintosh & Apple, Mobile & Wireless, Personal Technology, Windows & Microsoft

Steve Ballmer isn't stupid, but sometimes his opinions seem to rally his opponents more than they help Microsoft and its partners. He knows his words will get repeated and will flame the Mac vs. PC wars. This time however, they may have backfired. He told a crowd Thursday at the McGraw-Hill Companies' Media Summit New York:

"Apple gained about one point [in global market share], but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction. The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."

Steve Ballmer Salesman

Well, obviously that isn't true. Take the new Dell Adamo for instance. At a retail price of $2000, it competes well with the $1800 MacBook Air. Also, try to put together a gaming rig or workstation with specs like a Mac Pro and you'll get a pretty close comparison in price on the PC side from Sony or Alienware. Same for the base MacBook. It compares fairly well with high end, comparably equipped PC laptops...give or take a hundred bucks.

It is a shame for Microsofties though because he could have said something more coherent. Where Ballmer could have made a legitimate point is that the barrier of entry on a PC is much lower than a Mac. The Mac Mini is the lowest priced Mac at $600. It comes without a keyboard, mouse or monitor. You can now buy a very solid Windows (or better yet Linux?) Netbook for around half of that. To get a MacBook, Apple's best selling laptop, You'll need to spend over $600 more.

While these machines won't run Vista to save their lives, most indications are that they will do well with Windows 7. The fact that they come with Windows XP isn't really a big deal either, you are only going to run a few browsers on there and a few small office and Internet apps. XP works as well as Vista or 7 for these purposes.

So, while saying "our 7 year old software runs on inexpensive new machines that are very useful but not technologically advanced" doesn't sound quite as sexy, it would have been much more honest and relevant. It doesn't get as many blogposts though.

Related Items:

Preston Gralla: Ballmer on the $500 "Apple tax": The man was right
IT Blogwatch: Ballmer pokes Apple fanboi hornets' nest

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What People Are Saying

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Ballmer sells software that

Submitted by Anonymous on March 28, 2009 - 6:41 A.M.

Ballmer sells software that is way overpriced compared to its capabilities and quality. Besides that, Microsoft's approach is quite different depending on who you are. Dell gets a Windows license for 35$ whereas the same for a consumer is 300$. I don't think the box costs that much. I think 35$ for Windows is a fair price for retail and it would compete with Linux even at a price point. Apple apparently charges more for the OS portion. IMHO OS X isn't worth more than Windows. I find both difficult to use, unintuitive, clumsy, and slow. The only are where both are doing well is eye-candy.

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In the Mac vs. PC war,

Submitted by Anonymous on March 26, 2009 - 1:04 A.M.

In the Mac vs. PC war, hardware isn't the most important consideration.

The average consumer doesn't really understand or care about hardware specs, but they do understand usability, reliability, and security, and that is why people switch to Apple.

Consumers may not think of it this way, but they're looking for a better OS. And, well... what more needs to be said?

Windows = late '80s early '90s Chevy
Mac OS X = Mercedes diesel

you get what you pay for suckas!

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ROFL

Submitted by Anonymous on March 24, 2009 - 1:24 P.M.

I cant believe most of the arguements that still come across. The main one being hardware, yes its the same hardware but the drivers that run the hardware make a difference. People assume that Microsoft make drivers, they dont. They only make a driver model. Now Apple make their own drivers and customize their hardware. Whats the difference? Well in an open driver model theres far more diversity and more features can be added shown many times by ATi and nVidia. Apple's Model? Stability and optimisations. What do I want? Both! But that will never happen.

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Gamers would disagree

Submitted by Anonymous on March 23, 2009 - 10:14 A.M.

Let's face it, lots of people game on their PC's. I for one do, and you simply can't run most of the games I run using a Mac. They are PC only. So for me it's a no-brainer. Want to play games, get a PC.

As to the other stuff, I seriously considered buying my wife a Mac for her latest notebook, but we just couldn't justify the price difference. We're not Mac haters, not at all, but we concluded they cost more for equivalent use. I think if you're a techie like myself, and you know how to keep your PC safe, secure, and running well, then you will get more for your money with the "PC" platform. I put PC in quotes because Macs are PC's too, I don't understand why folks think they aren't.

By the way, as to security, check out CompterWorld's latest hacking contest articles. Seems to me the Mac is ALWAYS hacked quickest. If Apple ever gets anywhere near 25% of PC sales you'll start seeing a lot of Mac users scurrying to spend lots of money on security software, just like PC users.

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checkout CrossOver. it has

Submitted by Anonymous on March 26, 2009 - 12:37 A.M.

checkout CrossOver. it has successfully ported PC games - pretty much all the Steam games, like Counter-Strike, Half-Life, etc. (and whole lot of other Windows-only software) - to run natively on the Mac.

Fragging noobs in CS on the new 17" MacBook Pro would be pretty sweet! or, imagine it on the Mac Pro with a 30" Apple Cinema display!!!!!

btw, Ballmer is such a moron

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Go here

Submitted by Anonymous on March 26, 2009 - 1:11 P.M.

Go here http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxgames/ and you'll see that the list of officially supported games is woeful. Heck, they haven't even updated the list since July of last year!

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The people saying the

Submitted by TLH on March 22, 2009 - 4:48 P.M.

The people saying the windows pcs have a negative return on investment or that the apples are worth EVERY cent extra for what you get are brainwashed.

First, hardware. Hardware is hardware. And it costs HUNDREDS less on the PC side. You are NOT getting a deal on apple hardware and there is nothing special and unique about a hard drive or memory that goes into an apple.

On the software side you have a better argument, many people genuinely prefer the mac style and layout and enhanced security. Part of the added security is due to the smaller sample size though. The mac target pool is just smaller, why design a worm to target 5 million when it could target 100 million? Also, mac has far fewer legacy concerns, the smaller base allows them to more readily wipe the slate clean and start anew. In a perfect world this would be the way all OS's were created, but legacy concerns are legitimate. So the software side and OS side is more compelling, but hundreds of dollars compelling?

I say no. Any human being on the positive end of the bell curve will find the PC more than easy to deal with, at a fraction of the cost. Be it windows or linux, freedom, it's a wonderful thing.

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Hrm...

Submitted by Damadar on March 22, 2009 - 3:48 P.M.

Specs on the cheapest Macbook:

2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
120GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Screen: 13inch

Cost: 999.00

Today from HP...

2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
3GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 1x2GB 1x1GB
320GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
512MB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 4530
LightScribe SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-RW with Double Layer Support
Screen: 17.3 inches

Cost: 999.99

Can't really see how that's an honest "Similar Price for Similar Hardware" comparison there. The HP has much better hardware for the price of an iPhone App.

If you want a 17" screen from Apple, you've gotta hand out near $3,000.

Apple:
2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
320GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Glossy Widescreen Display
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M / 9600M GT GPUs

Cost: $2,799.00

If you take that same $2,799.00 to HP...

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad Processor QX9300 (2.53Hz)
6GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm) - For 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M
320GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M - For DDR3 Memory
18.4" diagonal High Definition HP Ultra BrightView Infinity Display (1920x1080p)
Lightscribe Blu-Ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD+/-R/RW Double Layer
Webcam + Fingerprint Reader
Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N Mini-card

Total Price before Taxes: $2,784.99

Ballmer was correct; Windows Machines give you more bang for the buck. Not all of them will, but most of them will.

HP Notebooks referenced: DV7t and HDX18t

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I agree with your post that

Submitted by Anonymous on March 26, 2009 - 2:36 P.M.

I agree with your post that you get more power for the bug on your PC, but I do have to admit that Mac's are very good on the weight issue. Since they build them as they want to the control on that gives them the edge on that.

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I guess it depends on your

Submitted by Anonymous on March 23, 2009 - 1:16 A.M.

I guess it depends on your definition of bang for buck, I personally find the time and energy I had to waste every time I booted my windows xp system to keep it up to date and secure not worth the "Savings" or "Extra Bang",

Seriously though, taking simple market conditions into consideration and you realise that companies like HP can buy more hardware in bulk than apple probably can, so can get a cheaper price for it, hardware companies using windows are also often subsidised by microsoft for installing windows, and the more unethical companies *cough sony* will pre-install craploads of 3rd party apps on the machine to get further subsidies and can reduce the cost further to undercut competition (although in sony's case they tried to charge people 50 dollars to not install the crap in the first place and call it an optimisation process), I got my macbook without any crap installed and a wonderfull suite of utilities called iLife pre-installed which is actually amazingly usefull. One of the reasons I left the PC platform is due to fact that no matter how much I looked after my windowsxp installation, simply installing patches and updating the system eroded its performance over time, my PC was blazing fast with windows XP when released, after creating a slipstream install of sp3 and reinstalling from that the performance was still lower than originally, windows just seems to add bloat over time, with bolted on security and safety mechanisms that should have been there in the first place and still arent entirely effective enough that their having to ditch their brand new operating system to rush in a Windows 7 to finally fix user account management. Does that sound like "More bang for buck" to you?

Also the way PC's are generally made and marketed is through a continuous refreshing of their product line, producing new models all the time in order to try and get to market first with the latest and greatest hardware before the competition, so they will often seem to have better hardware than an apple equivalent most of the time as apple generally takes a steady 6 month - 1 year upgrade approach to its hardware. Part of the reason for this is it allows apple much more control over the amount of hardware drivers they need to provide, which is probably one of the primary reasons behind osx's stability. If you compare hardware at the time of release of a new model of mac you often see apple ahead of other hardware out there at the time, of course PC hardware manufacturers will overtake in the time between updates of the mac line as they have a faster product launch cycle producing beige and black boxes at record speed, varying the contents of those boxes as and when required. Again, I left the PC platform because I felt I was being assaulted by the bombardment of new software updates requiring more power which requires upgrading of the hardware. I dont want to have to buy enough new parts to eventually completely replace my PC every 2 years just to have a useable experience, this effect may not be as pronounced for those who can buy state of the art systems at the time, but for people on a budget like me I have to buy minimum upgrades when and where i could just to keep my computer functioning... it actually made more sense for me to buy an "Expensive" mac because i know it will still be working for years to come without needing an upgrade. Try putting a dollar tag on that.

You can list hardware differences all you want, but people generally use macs because of the costs outside of the hardware, and the time and frustration saved by not having to use windows is priceless. This is all just my opinion, I've made my choice of platform having used both, i've listed my reasons here as well as possible, call me "brainwashed" or a "Mac zealot" if you want, but the general hatred towards people who choose to use a particular type of computer is just sickening

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