Educated Guesswork: March 2004 Archives
In two consecutive posts, Eric manages to praise Apple’s “make it work first time” design engineering and gripe about the performance of his iBook.
Now, I have an iBook as well, and occasionally I find myself staring down the barrel of the Spinning Beachball of Doom, generally accompanied by a whole lot of disk thrashing. I knew at the time that I bought a low-end consumer model and now I realize I should have stuffed more RAM in it to stave off all the swapping. (In /var/vm I have two 64 Mb swapfiles, one 128 Mb swapfile, and two 256 Mb swapfiles: some more RAM wouldn’t hurt.) Do I regret the purchase? Not really.
Being as how I’m an unemployed stay-at-home dad and housekeeper, this little gem was a good fit, but for a consultant and power-user like Eric, I would have suggested a PowerBook for, well, power. If, as he suggests in the second of the two posts, his time is worth more than $40 an hour, why buy the cheaper laptop?
This is a question I have wondered about and asked over and over again: if you spend several hours day with a tool and you make a living with it, buy the best one for the job. Not the most expensive or the newest, but the one that delivers the best value for the money. The low-end iBook represents about 25 hours at $40, about 3 days of billable work. Let’s look at some others:
* The fully loaded 12 inch PowerBook is $1,799 or 45 hours, just over a week’s worth.
* The 15 incher is a good deal more: $2,599 (65 hours).
Everyone has to make their own choices, I realize: I just wish I knew what some of them were based on. If you’re not going to be happy with the purchase, don’t make it: not spending enough and hating it is worth than spending too much.