Expensive Macs? Prices have never looked better

A Macintosh Performa 6200 - NZ$3395 in 1996. Photo / Supplied

It's a bit odd for me sometimes when I hear people complaining about the prices of Apple stuff. As far as I and other long-term users perceive it, the prices have never looked better. You (PC users) feel like we're getting shafted; we (longer-term Mac users) feel like we're getting bargains.

Of course, this is all a devious mind control program run from Cupertino. Start high, get 'em hooked, and ... give them way, way more for the same dollars.

Machiavellian or what?

Being able to get a MacBook for under $1700 still seems a bit surreal to me, and for around 4.5k, a quad-core i7 27-inch iMac looks like fantastic buying for the power - that very quiet hum, all that power, 1GB video card, sleek design, large screen - for $3973.

And one cent.

And I know I could probably get a really attractive 12-core i9 PC with a 37-inch screen with free virus protection for that price, but like I keep saying, we tend to compare Apples with Apples, not apples with raisins.

Although apples and raisins can make good combinations, sometimes.

Anyway, what prompted this was reader David Silvester sending me a list of Mac models and prices circa 1996.

He wrote "I was still using Corel and getting sick of smug pre-press guys, with their fancy-pants Macs full of Adobe, Quark and Macromedia goodness, telling me they couldn't (or wouldn't) work with my files.

"However, not even my enormous student loan entitlement was enough to spring for one of these otherworldly (but still beige) Macs and the software to go with it, so I stuck with Corel and my old 386.

"I graduated a few years later and got a job as in-house designer in 1998 for a small firm owned by a guy who'd been using Macs faithfully since 1984. To be honest, I didn't like them at all until OS X came along and made everything peachy."

The prices are amazing - staggering, even - especially once you factor in what NZ$1000 actually meant in 1995, compared to now.

An all-in-one Performa 5400-160 16/1.6G/8xCD was $3495.

Deciphering that data, that meant a 160MHz (megahertz!) PowerPC processor (that's a bit like the CPU that was in the original PlayStation), 1.6GB hard drive (woa!), and a CD reader writer that worked at 8x speed.

It came with 8MB RAM, and could take a max of 136MB. It had an ADB port for the keyboard, two serial ports, 10BASE-T ethernet, no modem, and audio in and out jacks, plus a built in mic and two speakers.

It also had an 'FPU' - this Floating Point Unit was supposed to help with maths calculations (but it didn't help me much).

Oh, and it still had a floppy drive. These were about to go obsolete on the Mac, followed by the PC ... many years later.

On the options list you could get a 'PC Compatibility Card', whatever that was, and a faster 180MHz CPU and/or a 2.4GB hard drive.

I've downloaded single files bigger than that.

Yes, it was still beige. The built-in 'Multiscan' CRT monitor was 15-inches diagonally (but not in wide-screen format) and the 5400 series shipped with Mac OS 7.5.5 on board. It was the first Mac to ship with the industry-standard (at the time) PCI slot, which meant some PC-style expansion cards could be fitted into it.

But wait - there was a better model. The Directors' Edition had a 180MHz CPU, a 2.4GB hard drive, and the TV tuner card was already in it - for $4095.

I looked all this up with the excellent free MacTracker app (it's for OS X and also iOS), but you might also want to consider the Apple History site.

What would $3495 buy you now in a Mac desktop? Well, you can still get all-in-ones, of course.

One of the 27-inch iMacs comes in for under that, at $3065. It has a dual-core 3.2GHz Intel Core i3 CPU, 4GB RAM built in plus a 1 Terabyte hard drive.

Tick the option for the 3.6GHz i5 and it goes up to $3464 - still under our Performa's price of $3495.

I didn't get prices for laptops (those days they were rather hopefully called 'Macintosh PowerBooks') but there are some prices for 'modular' Macs, which would evolve into funky blue-and-ice plastic towers after Jobs returned and introduced the world-changing (for Apple, anyway) iMac.

There were 11 distinct (marginally) modular Macs offered by Campus Computers in 1996. This was one of the first things Jobs did on his return - ruthlessly cut the lines and options to make Macs mush easier to choose, thank goodness. Because before that, you'd go through all the palaver of choosing a Mac and then find that particular model wasn't available.

I won't go through all the specs of all the models, but the cheapest was the $3395 Performa 6400-200 and the top-of-the line was a 9600-200 MP for $9595.

The low-end one was considered a radical change for Apple - its first consumer-oriented mid-range computer in an 'InstaTower' case. I don't think I ever even saw one of these, to tell you the truth.

This had a 200MHz CPU, came with a modem plus a video port for an external monitor.

The 9600s I definitely did see and use. These formed the backbones of many Kiwi pre-press houses and installations. This was a precursor to the current models in many ways - the insides were designed for access (quite a departure for Apple) and it was very expandable by Apple standards, with six PCI slots.

Now the iMacs take up that 'consumer' ground - in fact, considering you can get a 27-inch i7 iMac now with a 1GB video card for under $5k, the Apple all-in-one has moved well into pro territory.

For Mac towers, the cheapest currently available in New Zealand is a 2.8GHz Quad-Core aluminium tower with an Intel Xeon Nehalem processor thrumming away inside. It has 3GB RAM fitted (whereas most Macs start with 4GB these days), a 1TB hard drive and 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770 video card. That's $4399, although with the top-end iMacs as aforementioned, I don't hear of many people springing for this particular Mac tower, and I don't blame them - and the monitor is extra.

But for still under that $9595 figure for 1996 is a 12-core (2x 2.66GHz 6-core Xeon Westmere CPUs) with 6GB RAM, 1TB hard drive and 1GB video.

By comparison to those older models, which were about to be supplanted by the G3 PowerMacs (which is what the three Lord of the Rings' films were mastered on) us longer-term users are feeling pretty spoiled.

And what of David Silvester? These days he is a freelance designer in Wanganui serving a variety of clients around the country, "including the guy who put me in front of a Mac for the first time all those years ago. My three-year-old MacBook Pro hums along nicely and even my-nine-year old 12-inch G4 Powerbook still works fine - and runs Adobe CS1 without complaining!

"No," says David, "I don't use CorelDraw any more ... and no, I'll never own a Windows machine ever again."

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com