Comparing Apples and Dells: Only You Can Make a Fair Comparison

In addition to Low End Mac, there are a few other technology sites that I read on a regular basis, and one of my favorites is Gene Steinberg's Mac Night Owl. The site is a pretty standard blog, posted daily, and with a comment engine that invites and receives active discussion about most of the entries. Mr. Steinberg himself actively participates in the comments as well, giving readers the rare opportunity to have a discussion with the author.

For the most part, Mr. Steinberg's articles are well-researched, well thought through, and well written. They are, of course, Mac-biased, but I would expect nothing less on a Mac website.

Last week Mr. Steinberg posted two entries: Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them discusses a recent CNET comparison review of the upgraded Mac mini. Mr. Steinberg goes on to compare the mini to a Dell PC, adding options to the Dell to make it comparable to the mini and then showing that the PC is no longer cheaper than the Mac.

The second entry, Mac and PC Price Comparisons Revisited is a direct response to the comments in the first article, specifically my argument that adding features to give feature parity is not a valid comparison.

So how far do we go in determining which of two competing products is the better value? Mr. Steinberg added a FireWire card ($40), upgraded from Windows Vista Home Basic to Vista Ultimate ($200), and deleted the modem, speakers, keyboard, and mouse that come with the Dell. The Dell was $100 more than the mini.

The question is, is that a fair comparison? Can there ever be a fair comparison?

Apples and Oranges

Let's take another apples to oranges comparison, literally. I want a piece of fruit and have a dollar in my pocket. At the grocer, I can get a large delicious apple for 60 cents or a nice juicy orange for 40 cents, the same price ratio we start with between the entry level Mac mini ($600) and the bottom configuration for the Dell ($400).

The apple is far more user friendly, because you can eat it right away without peeling it first. The orange requires user intervention in the peeling process. The mini is also more user-friendly from the box, not requiring any additional software to protect itself and allowing the user to get right to work, while the PC user should get good antivirus and anti-spyware software. Since my favorite PC defensive products (AVG) are free, I won't add to the price of my orange, just its inconvenience.

Next comes security. The apple contains all of its seeds in a central core unit, and there has yet to be found any seeds in "the wild" of the apple's meat. You can eat an apple with complete peace of mind that no stray seed (malware) will interfere. On an orange, however, seeds can be almost anywhere, and you never know which slices will have them and which will not. Even on supposedly seedless oranges you can still get the occasional surprise. This is malware again - if you're careful, you'll have no trouble and spit all of the seeds out. If you're careless, you might get something stuck between your teeth.

What the above apple to orange comparison doesn't go into, of course, is flavor, which in computer terms can be the user's needs. If my need is to provide a small snack, then either fruit will suffice. If I prefer the taste of apple, I can still eat an orange, and vice versa. Of course, nobody who is in the mood for an orange will add up the extra expenses of peeling and seeds and decide that an apple represents a better value; they will just eat an orange.

Macs and Dells

This comparison was flawed before it ever began.

Back to the Dell and the Mac mini. This comparison was flawed before it ever began. First of all, the Dell is a build-to-order machine that's offered in many configurations and with many options. Compare this to the mini, which is basically offered in two configurations and with very few options. A better comparison would be with a retail PC that comes with few choice and is preconfigured for a given price (like the mini) such as you would find at Best Buy or CompUSA.

The mini is simply too different to shop against a Dell.

My biggest issue was the add-ons and deletions. The mini is simply too different to shop against a Dell. Okay, it cost X amount of dollars to upgrade the Dell from the AMD to the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, but do we need to? What if the AMD processor was 90% as fast, and the user wanted this computer for Web browsing, email, and word processing - does 10% more processor speed, which is only one element of a computer's performance, matter? Should the buyer looking at the two systems add the price of the faster processor when he or she doesn't want or need it?

Likewise, the mini has a laptop hard drive compared to a much larger and faster desktop hard drive in the Dell. The mini doesn't support such a drive at all, so does that mean that we ignore the performance differences in drives, even though it will likely make a far bigger difference in overall performance than the processor will? What about PCI slots, which the mini completely lacks - how much money should we add to the cost of the mini to compensate for the Dell's PCI slots and bigger, faster hard drive?

Finally, a digital life software package (he didn't specify which) and an upgrade from Vista Home Basic to Vista Ultimate were added to the price of the PC. Is this fair? Yes, OS X comes with the ability to work on a domain and has Front Row included, but does that mean that our hypothetical buyer will need to connect to a domain (which requires Vista Business or Ultimate)? Does that mean that our hypothetical buyer needs or wants a media center application (which requires Vista Home Premium or Ultimate)? What about the digital life applications? Google's Picassa is free and well-liked. Vista itself has a pretty decent photo editor for people who need such a thing. Should I add a music-creation program to the PC's cost to compete with GarageBand, even if I have no interest in creating music?

Clearly there is no right answer.

No Single Answer

Is the Mac mini a better value than the Dell?

Is it a better computer?

Only the individual buyer can answer that question. My position is and remains that products can only be comparison shopped in relation to the intended buyer, not on a strict price-for-feature basis. Important features must be added to a machine that lacks them, but the cost of unneeded and unwanted features should not be added to the machine that lacks them; rather their presence should be ignored on the machine that includes them.