An incoherent ramble about Apple's prices.

I've pretty much always been an Apple fan.  I first saw one in 1985 as a schoolboy at a trade fair in Cardiff. I was instantly captivated.  I used them at college 87-89 for writing.  I used them for a few years at work, probably 1995-1998, for writing, accessing a defect database in Filemaker, as a client to some DEC VMS boxes somewhere in a basement.

In 2000, with some Y2K double-time, I got a G4, and have only used other systems when strictly necessary - which is becoming less and less frequent.

The main problem I have with Apple, really, is pricing. The prices of machines and options defy simple logic. That's not how Apple rolls. I guess Apple figures out what it can get away with asking to maximise profit.

Today's announcement of a 128GB iPad is summed up by Richard Gaywood:

The iPad 16 GB costs $499. Then it's +$100 for another 16 GB. Then +$100 for another 32 GB. Then +$100 for the last 64 GB. That's weird.

I got myself unnecessarily worked up recently when considering a new home desktop machine and trying to figure out the best compromise.  The problem is that the best compromise is at least a bit shit, and no compromise is expensive.

The solution was to not buy a new machine at all, but to repurpose my wife's 13" MacBook Pro (broken optical drive, mostly broken display). I put an SSD in where the optical drive was, stuck it in a Henge Dock and hooked it up to a £100 LG 22" IPS 1920x1080 display.  The display can take VGA, DVI and HDMI. I'm using the HDMI for a Raspberry Pi.

The internal drive is 160GB, the SSD is 80GB and there's a 1TB Lacie hooked up for doing iMovie and as a Time Machine (I gave up trying to use the Drobo FS as a Time Machine drive - it's just too slow).

Why didn't I buy a new machine? Because I couldn't configure the one I wanted without paying for stuff I didn't want. Below is the kind of thought process I'm going through while checking the online Apple store…

If you look at the mini, there are two machines. a 2.5GHz i5 dual core at £499 and a 2.3GHz i7 quad core at £679.  . Most of the time, those extra cores are going to be idle, so I opt to save £180. The BTO options on the i5 machine are RAM or RAM. But I'd get that from Crucial anyway. 16GB from Apple is £240; 16GB from Crucial is under £67.19. The RAM is accessible and easy to replace. (Even this amount of tinkering isn't for everyone)

We all know that these days, SSD is where it's at. There's no SSD option for the £499 machine. Replacing the hard drive in a Mac mini is possible, but requires spudgers and tweezers and is not what you want to do with a brand new machine.

So £679 and £67.19 is the starting price. What are my other options?  I can bump from 2.3GHz to 2.6GHz for £80. Not interested. The RAM is already covered … what's left?  I can upgrade to a 1TB 'Fusion' drive for £200 or get a 256GB SSD for £240.  The SSD is expensive (Comparable would be £150 from Crucial), but the extra £90 is probably worth it to avoid the hassle of fitting and voiding the warranty

. I'd like some space though, so I'd opt for the 'Fusion' drive. What this adds is a 128GB SSD that the OS intelligently uses as a sort of cache for commonly accessed filed. The idea is that you get the speed of SSD with the capacity of a spinning disk.  For comparison, a 128GB SSD from Crucial would be £79.19, so there's a bit of a mark up. It's a different form factor though, and perhaps not a fair comparison. It seems likely that this adds at least £100 of profit to Apple.

There's no option for a 2TB or 3TB drive because it's a 2.5" drive.

A machine with a reasonable compromise is an unreasonable £950 (RAM from Crucial).  The machine with the compromises I'd like would be about £770 (Dual code i5, 1TB Fusion, 16GB from Crucial).


On to the iMacs…

The main choice appears to be screen size with two 21.5" models (1920x1080) and two 27"(2560x1440).

21.5"…

The low end one has two options: RAM (£160) and Fusion (£200).  Neither can be upgraded easily by a user. Not getting the Fusion drive seems like madness. I'd get the RAM too. That's £1459 (up from the base price of £1099.

The 'high end' one doesn't really have significant additional options. It just has a slightly better GPU (up to 30%), a faster CPU (2.9GHz vs 2.7GHz) and the option of an even faster CPU (3.1GHz i7).  I'd much prefer to see one 21.5" here with the higher GPU and just a choice of 2.7GHz i5 and 3.1GHZ i7. Where there's some confusion over specs, it probably doesn't really matter, so it'd be better to offer the same.

There's no option for a 3TB drive because it's a 2.5" drive.

27"…

Things don't get much simpler here. Low-end is £1499, high-end is £1699. There are two models that are differentiated by speed of CPU in bold and speed and capacity of GPU, of secondary importance judging by the emphasis on the store's pages. Honestly, I don't give a toss about 3.2GHz i5 vs 2.9GHz i5, so really it's £200 for about a 30% GPU improvement.  Upping the CPU to a 3.4GHZ i7 is only available on the high-end model.

Fortunately, the RAM is user-upgradable on the 27". Increasing to 16GB is £34 (from Crucial versus £160 from Apple). Increasing to 24GB is £67.19 (not an option from Apple), increasing to 32GB is £135 (vs £480).

The user-upgradable RAM in the 27" makes it much more interesting. It means that there's no pressure to get it now.  I'd probably be happy with an 8GB machine with a Fusion drive. That's £1699 (or £1734 if you add the RAM) for a 27" versus £1459 for the 21". That's £275 for the bigger display, a significantly better GPU and an insignificantly faster CPU and room to add loads more memory later).

Or going back to the mini…

It looks like a 27" 2560x1440 display is going to be pretty expensive.

2.3GHz i7, 1TB Fusion, keyboard, mouse/trackpad = £978
16GB Crucial RAM = £67.19
21.5" IPS Monitor = £105

Total = £1151.

One benefit of the mini is that it has separate audio in and out sockets. The iMac has one that's combined.  I guess audio users should be using USB, but my audio-gear is older than that.