Specification Obsession: Is a Souped-up Computer Worth It?
People like the security of numbers because they provide a way to avoid all the nuances of argumentation and get straight to objective reality. Gas is a great example of this; with gas you get an octane rating. You might not have any idea what (R+M)/2 actually means but you are certain that higher is better because gas stations charge more for the gas with the higher octane number.
Computers are similar to gas, the better specced machines carry a premium. The question is, do you really need to pay the premium. The short answer is: of course not. The longer answer is: no, really, of course not. The premium users pay for the latest and greatest is essentially wasted money. In the olden days, the argument made a little more sense. Go for as much computer as you could possibly afford, chip revisions were measured in years instead of quarters, hard drives space increased much slowly and feature sets were fairly static. In other words, the difference in the price of a top of the line computer and a “value” model could be justified by the functional lifetime of the machine, a compelling argument.
Was that argument ever correct? To get a firmer grasp on this notion let us compare two classic Macs: the Mac Classic and the SE/30. Both computers are compatible with Mac OS 6-7.5 and both share the same form factor. But, as far as real world usefulness goes, the SE/30 is the clear winner. The Mac Classic was obsolete for real world tasks starting about 1993 and even earlier than that programs were introduced requiring a processor more powerful than the Classic’s anemic Motorola 68000. The SE/30, conversely, was powered by a (no surprise) Motorola 68030 and remained a capable machine until the late nineties. The price difference between the two machines? A staggering $3,400. So, for a mere three and a half grand, you could squeeze a few more years of use out of the Mac SE/30. On the other hand you could have bought the Classic in 1990 and used the $3400 to buy a PowerMac 6100 with much better specs than either of the compact Macs and have $1,600 left to blow on cocaine or something.
Let us attempt to put recreate the exercise with a more modern machine. Consider, if you will, the PowerBook circa 2003. The top of the line machine ran at a blazing 1.25 GHz shipped with 512 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive and cost $2,599. The base model puttered along at a decidedly pedestrian 1 GHz, had 256 MB of preinstalled RAM, offered a paltry 60 GB hard drive and managed to command $1,999.
So, what did the 600 smackers get those who went with the top of the line model? The lifetime of the computer certainly hasn’t been extended, which is no surprise. All the original clamshell iBooks are unable to run Tiger but the iBooks of a single generation later are officially supported because they have FireWire. In terms of lifetime of the computer, those who shelled out the extra $600 got nothing. Of course, the lifetime of the computer ignores the harder to quantify comfort of using the machine. Certainly, the money spent on the faster processor does provide some benefit as does the larger hard drive space. Conversely, not many people would seriously argue that a difference of .25 GHz provides a markedly different computing experience.
Dollars speak louder than abstractions about the computer’s responsiveness. What about resale value of the two machines, does the extra 6 pack of c-notes pay off if you sell the machine? The answer, according to EveryMac.com, is no. The el cheapo PowerBook has a range estimated from $1,100 to $1,250. The top-o-the line model? A disappointing range of $1,200-$1,400. Remember to add $600 to the price fetched for the low end Mac (if you keep money in a jar) $656 if your savings account features compound interest and a whopping $4,000 if you bought Apple stock with the saved $600 way back in 2003.
Of course, there are exceptions. If you’re a hardcore gamer the top of the line MacBook Pro is a better option than the base model (an example inspired by Aaron Wright’s excellent Ask Apple Matters work). Games are a constant test of processing power. If you make money off the computer and every second means cash, you’d be silly to save a few bucks only to give it back in lost productivity. In just about every other imaginable instance the only other reason to opt for the highest end of the Apple line would be a sincere desire to help Apple maximize profits.
Here one is reminded of a joke of undetermined origin. An overweight guy walks into a health club and asks about the fees. The manager patiently explains the monthly cost and the invaluable benefits to body and soul. Mentally calculating the cost to run the health club at full capacity the client realizes that a monthly profit would be impossible. He queries the manager about the sorry state of cash flow and, in a rare moment of candor, the manager reveals that, indeed, if everyone took advantage of their membership the health club would be in a sorry state indeed, but most people don’t come, so the club does all right. Pressing further the prospective client asks what the health club calls the people who buy a membership and then never use it. Those people, the manager assures the applicant, are called “profit.”
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“Gas is a great example of this; with gas you get an octane rating. You might not have any idea what (R+M)/2 actually means but you are certain that higher is better because gas stations charge more for the gas with the higher octane number.”
Just for some explanation, there is good reason, in some cases, to buy the higher octane fuel. The necessity of the higher octane is governed mainly by the compression ratio and the timing of the engine. In general, higher compression ratio engines need higher octane gas, as do engines that have had the timing advanced.
Contrary to popular belief, there is NO DIFFERENCE in the energy content of gasoline of different octane ratings. Higher octane fuels are simple more resistant to detonation because they burn more slowly and smoothly.
The reason this is significant is that in a high compression engine, a low octane fuel could potentially detonate from the higher pressure alone. This can cause engine knock which can do serious damage to the engine. That is why you see high octane requirements mainly on performance or higher end cars. Their engines have higher compression ratios and/or advanced timing, therefore, have more problems with early detonation.
Having said that, due to those very properties, todays engines will produce slightly more power with higher octane. Once again, this has nothing to do with any difference in energy content. The engine computer will adjust the timing to allow for the difference in detonation, and the vehicle can produce more power.
Also, most cars will get better mileage on higher octane fuel, but probably not enough to pay for the difference.
Bottom line, in modern cars, you can use the lower octane fuel than is required or recommended, but you will pay a power and mileage penalty.
To me, the better analogy with computers is to say that buying a higher horsepower car will not make it last any longer. Similarly, buying a “fast” computer will not necessarily extend its life either. Any car can get you around, but you may need, or want, more power or towing capacity, which would both require more powerful engines.
With computers, if you need email and internet capability only, the most basic machine will serve you well for a few years. However, if you need to edit video or photos or process huge amounts of data, then you may need a more powerful model.
Of course, you can just buy what you want.
Thanks Texas…now I know what causes those noises in the hood.
As for speccing a computer when the time comes to upgrade, the old mantra “spend as much as you can afford” still is valid. Set a budget ahead of time and do not bottom-feed when you get to the store.
Consider your computer habits and compare those to the main features. If its your profession then boost the standard list of amenities to suit your line of work.
Other than those, the old MHz or GHz unit of measurement no longer holds in this day and age. Multicore designs obsoleted ratcheting up the core speed. The new unit of computer gee-whiz now is bandwidth at a given power consumption. This is casually termed Throughput-per-Watt.
To explain, on a given PC hardware, if the whole unit consumes 100W to transfer 1000Gbit then the unit would be rated 10GbW. This unit is more preferable to usage in portables when it is off the main electrical outlet (on batteries). The higher the number, the more efficient that unit is to crunch numbers and other things computers like to do.
Still, many people are stuck with using CPU core speed as indication of performance. That’s also fine but I do recommend consider the whole hardware spec list and bounce it off your expectations.
With computers, if you need email and internet capability only, the most basic machine will serve you well for a few years. Get a Celeton then…
Just to clarify, by “most basic” I mean a machine that is still reasonably able to do simple tasks quickly. I would NOT recommend the $299 Dell.
I would, however, recommend a Mac mini or a MacBook.
If you’re a hardcore gamer the top of the line MacBook Pro is a better option than the base model
If you’re a hardcore gamer, why are you buying a Mac at all?
the only other reason to opt for the highest end of the Apple line would be a sincere desire to help Apple maximize profits.
This actually applies to a frightening number of Mac users.
I do agree that for some people it really does not matter if the machine is a tad bit faster(not the case for MOST mac users), but if you plan on keeping the machine for a long time why wouldn’t you want to get the fastest non-upgradeable parts at the time of the purchase? My moto is always get what you can’t upgrade down the road…even if it means getting less ram or harddrive space at first. Good article, but I just don’t agree with it.
why wouldn’t you want to get the fastest non-upgradeable parts at the time of the purchase?
It’s an argument of diminishing returns. Yes, 2.16 ghz is faster than 2.0 ghz, but even if you’re in the market for the fastest of the fast, is it worth $600 for what will be a diminutive difference in just a year or two?
Regardless of your philosophy on purchasing at the high, middle, or low end (and I advise my clients not to pay the premium for top models), Chris is wrong in the analogies he used:
A 2.16Ghz Macbook Pro has an 8% clock advantage over the 2Ghz model, which is likely to produce perhaps a 4% speedup, all else being equal. But that SE/30 (which cost me less than $3400 in 1989, so it could not have been a $3400 difference!) offered both twice the clock speed AND twice the datapath of the 68000-based SE or Classic. In practice it was at least 3x as fast. That opened up a whole category of applications that weren’t feasible before, basically anything that ran on the Mac II, which was equivalent to the research workstations of the day.
The same situation existed when the 8500/9500 replaced the first PPC machines. A next-generation processor gets you longevity as a small bonus—the only good reason to buy it is for the new types of work it will make feasible or profitable
After all, if your work isn’t changing, why get a new computer at all?
I finally moved to Mac earlier this year. Running the IT for offices full of PCs and a studio full of Macs - I insisted I dump my PC which crashed 3 times a day and made the bosses by me a Mac. That was a dual 2.3 G5 with 2 gig of RAM and it does… well… okay. It rarely crashes, but it’s never that fast.
I do a lot of multitasking, so when I finally bought my home Mac in Feb, taking advantage of my wife’s student discount, I was under no illusion: buy the best you can at the time. There’s so little can be upgraded in the G5 Power Macs… so I went way above what I needed: Quad G5, 4.5Gb RAM, 20” Cinema Display and the Geforce 7800GT.
Result? I have never, never, made this machine stumble. I have been ripping a DVD under one user login, fast-switched to another and run a full virus scan and then fast-switched to a third user and run emulation of a SNES while having Virtual PC in the background and, ooh, approcimately 8 million Camino windows open.
If I’d gone a step down and bought the final 2.3 Dual Power Mac, right now I’d be enviously eyeing the Mac Pro. But right now, the Mac Pro at it’s fastest doesn’t come close to mine for the work I do. Some professional photo retouchers created a realistic workflow test, which Bare Feats have posted. BF admit their test is not a real world kind of workflow, while the new one is… and the G5 runs almost double the speed of the Pro.
It’s not even a fair comparison, since the top-end Pro would cost me about a half-grand more than the Quad G5!
Photoshop CS3 will not be out for the best part of a year. The Macromedia suite? Who knows? But the fact is that my Mac will be 18 months old by then, and still good enough.
The moral of the story? Buy the machine that you need. Buy the best you can afford, ignore the future upgrades. The day my Mac needs replacing is the day I can’t run the software to do my job. And with space for another 11.5 Gb of RAM, I’m guessing I’ve got a few years till that happens.
Running the IT for offices full of PCs and a studio full of Macs - I insisted I dump my PC which crashed 3 times a day and made the bosses by me a Mac.
You ran an IT dept and your PC crashed 3 times a day? Are you sure you were qualifed for what you were doing?
You ran an IT dept and your PC crashed 3 times a day? Are you sure you were qualifed for what you were doing?
Wow, first post here and I get a sarky comment off Beeblebrox. Thanks! It’s always been my goal in life to be flamed by someone who names themselves after a character in a Science fiction radio play!
Seriously though, the directors I work for are a little tight with cash. I had to really push to get them to spend anything! They ahd just spent 15 grand on the studio though….
You ran an IT dept but couldn’t keep your own machine from crashing 3 times a day. That’s not a flame (believe me, you’d know the difference), it’s simply restating what you said. Seriously, you don’t see the problem here?
Either a) you have no idea what you’re doing,
b) the computer had hardware or unfixable problems that you misguidedly blame on PCs at large, or
c) PCs inherently crash 3 times a day.
Since c) is demonstrably false, then it’s either a) or b). I’m surprised you could get an IT job either way.
Of course, there’s also the possibility that you’re making this up, or at the very least exaggerating. But that’s not exactly a point in your favor.
Pretending your PC workstation crashing 3x daily is one sure way to get a Power Mac G5, though. Evilcat is one sly IT cat to me…
All right, time to close this conversation forever. I hope you’re having fun, Beeblebrox, and I’d love to get into a fight, but don’t want to be banned from here.
You may be aware that some people, when they get a job, are replacing a predecessor. Well, that was me. The guy before me didn’t push his equipment half as far as me. The nature of the web work being done leaped from flat HTML to extremely complex Flash work in a few months (this way 2004, after all). The cobbled-together PC he had been using (I found one item on the hard drive which was nearly four years old when I was getting ready to replace it) was fine for him. Not for me.
Till then, the firm had never spent more than a grand on a PC. All the money went into the studio onto their Macs. I finally turned that around and got them to buy their most expensive Mac yet… for me!
I wish I was exaggerating. The PC was crashing three times a day towards the end of its life. The newer office machines were more powerful, and we were getting them for £350-£500 from Dell. So I threw my toys out of my pram, and made them finally take the web side of the business seriously, and spend some money on it.
I also had no desire to waste all my time maintaining and upgrading and fixing a PC… been doing that since my first Amstrad 286, 16 years ago, and I’ve had enough of that. I just want to get my job done, so Mac was the way to go.
End of story.
And the moral is still to buy the best you can afford.