Mac vs. PC: How Well Does It Age?

      by Wyatt Walter

Yesterday I took a look at a ridiculous study sponsored by Microsoft which supposedly showed how PCs had a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Macs. The study was completely unfair towards the Mac, but there’s another factor that wasn’t taken into consideration either: how well the computers held their value when they aged. The writer of the study assumed that the PC and the Mac could be useful for 5 years before being replaced. However, do Macs and PCs age just as well?

It only took me a few minutes to think about 5 year-old machines that I and others that I know use. Five years ago, I started college and was issued a Gateway M275 laptop. The laptop is a tablet PC and at the time its retail value was estimated at $1600. The laptop now is somewhat usable, though it leaves quite a bit to be desired. Most of my problems with it are cosmetic, though the hard drive and processor speed is pretty limiting. It runs Windows XP all right, and the lighter Linux distros pretty good.

I also have a friend who owns an iBook G4, which was made around the same era. One can track this via MacTracker, and the value of the machine when it was made in early 2004 was $1099. The laptop runs OS X Tiger, which is a release newer than the OS that it originally shipped with, unlike the PC. The laptop does plenty for what this person needs to be able to do.

While both do fairly well for really basic tasks like e-mail, web browsing, etc., the resale value of these computers is drastically different and a factor in calculating the TCO of the computers. The best price I could find for a used Gateway M275 was on eBay with a “Buy it now” price of $225. For an iBook G4, a used iBook G4 at 800Mhz on Amazon, the same as the 2004 model, at a price of $357. That’s 14% of the original retail value of the PC and 32% the original price of the Mac. That has to be taken with a grain of salt, since I’m comparing only two very specific models, but it does seem to be the trend that older Macs are worth much more at resell time than older PCs. While the cause of the drop in value could very well be a much larger supply of used PCs, the reality is that the value seems to be higher.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Apr 16th, 2009

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