I own two Apple Mac machines. One is a very early days PowerMac and the other only a slightly more recent version of the same thing. I still remember vividly the day I bought the first one and the fact that I couldn`t drag myself away from it for days on end. I got myself so deep into debt to buy it that it took more than a couple of years and a lot of freelance work to pay it off, but it was worth every single cent.
The second PowerMac was a demo model bought through a friend and although it got me even deeper into debt, the fact that an Apple Laserwriter was thrown in as well made it an absolute must-have. Today they are both paid off and have probably generated a fair bit of profit through the many DTP jobs I`ve done over the years. One of them is still in daily operation almost eight years after I bought it.
At these prices, a working machine will cost me more than my car.
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
But sadly the time is coming when they will need to be replaced and so I have been looking around at prices of new equipment. What a shock!
Given the kind of prices bandied about by the Apple dealers locally, it is almost impossible to imagine how anyone can afford to use Apple equipment. Perhaps they can`t actually afford the price but make a plan because it is still out and out the best platform when it comes to layout and production work. Forget Windows and Linux, no matter how much software is ported to these platforms, nothing competes with Apple in this space. But at these prices, perhaps Apple is digging itself a hole that will eventually swallow it.
Take for example the price of a new Apple box. Yesterday I was quoted R27 000 for a new box, without a monitor and before the software that I`m going to need to buy, which doesn`t come cheap. QuarkXpress 5, the best of the production tools available, will set you back more than R19 000. If you decide to opt for InDesign, the Adobe competitor to Quark, it will cost around R11 000. Then there is Photoshop and Freehand and the likes.
I`ve realised that getting a new Apple machine with only the essential software is going to cost me almost as much as my car. And getting a new toner cartridge for my Laserwriter is almost impossible. I can only get my hands on one if I`m prepared to cough up a good few thousand rands upfront and then wait three weeks or more for my local contact to locate and ship one out from the US.
With prices like this, I`m almost prepared to compromise and consider doing DTP on a Windows or Linux machine. But then I look at the pictures of the newest Apple products being released at the Paris Expo and I know that I`ll never be happy with anything less than a true Apple DTP platform. Perhaps if I sold my car and pumped up my bicycle wheels? I`m still thinking about it.
Share