How cheap is cheap enough?

1. CNet has out done itself yet again with another ill-informed op-ed piece where the author couldn’t think of anything to say, so he reverted to the family favourites. He seems to have a problem with Apple, and the fact that they have an excellent marketing department and are very well polished. He finds the the idea of syncing music to a slide show of baby photos “foreign and impersonal”. Then he thought a US$499 Mac sans monitor, keyboard and mouse to be overly expensive, and I quote:

…consumers pay for the style of Mac Mini. The $599 model comes with a 1.42GHz PowerPC processor, 256MB of memory, an 80GB drive and a DVD/CD-RW drive. A similarly configured Gateway 3250 (2.66GHz Pentium 4, 80GB drive, 256MB memory, same drive) costs $499; $100 less with a rebate.

Oh no, but there’s more:

But the Gateway also comes with some important extras–namely a keyboard, a mouse and a 17-inch screen. The Mac Mini has none of this. Cool industrial design with an artsy interface or a monitor? It depends what you’re looking for.

2. Indeed. Are you looking for a quiet, beautiful and out-of-the-box functional computer, or a badly built unreliable time sink piece of shit that is a US$399 Gateway? Would you prefer to sit next to a hurricane wrestling with the new worm/virus/spyware etc that creeps into your system (’cause at US$399 you won’t be getting a virus checker), or to sit next to something that just works? Come to think of it, that’s probably why Mr Kanellos produced such a shoddy piece of writing — he couldn’t hear himself think next to that cheap Gateway PC.

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