Wildstrom’s Advice for College Freshmen: Go Mac

In this BusinessWeek article by Stephen Wildstrom, he recommends incoming college freshmen buy a Mac rather than a Windows system. He talks about how the Mac OS is a superior platform and that by the time Vista catches up, Apple will have released a new version. Then he talks about hardware options and pricing…

Ah, now he’s stumbled upon one of the key reasons why Apple has always been doomed to a sliver of market share. The cheapest MacBook you can buy retails for $1,099?! Yikes! My daughter is heading off to Purdue this fall (my alma mater, btw) and I just bought her a laptop. I paid all of $699 for a loaded Acer system, including a full Gig of RAM a 100-Gig drive, etc. (Wildstrom mentions how you definitely don’t want to settle for 512Meg of RAM in the Mac systems either, but that’s apparently an upgrade to the already high-priced systems.)

Apple has a cool interface and there are certainly plenty of great applications for their platform. Now that they’ve switched to Intel chips and offer the Boot Camp software to run Windows applications it’s tempting to consider a switch…but anytime I see those high prices I remember why I keep buying new Windows systems every couple of years.