Apple Exposed - What You Did NOT Know

It is about time that people knew the truth about Apple Computers in terms of where they stand in today's computer industry. Being that 2009 will likely be a year of economic uncertainly; it defies logic to me that Apple will continue to be able to sell computers for the sort of prices they do; far into the future. I am not outright predicting Apple's demise or anything because I do have a couple solutions that they could probably stand to hear anyway. But it's time that people fully understood what they were buying too. You might be shocked to discover that today's newly Intel-based Macs are internally 100% the same thing as simply buying a PC at half the cost of the Mac. I mean exactly the same hardware configuration generally. Originally Motorola manufactured the Mac CPU. But when they switched to Intel they literally just became another PC maker. Basically, Intel launches a major motherboard chipset; they sell the same chips to every single computer manufacturer purchasing their OEMs. They also sell the chipsets to just about every single one of the motherboard manufacturers like Asus and MSI. It also generally happens that most of these companies; sometimes including Intel and even Apple, go with whatever the "industry standard" for that time period. So generally most people's motherboards end up also having the same or very similar chips for the sound, networking, IDE, SATA, and other components as well. That means essentially that if you walked into a Best Buy and scoped out like 10 computers featuring Intel Core 2 CPU; I'd say 8-9 of nearly every 10 Windows machines internally would be the same computer. So essentially; the largest difference in your selection now only applies to your budget because yes, an $800 computers can be purchased for $400 too. The only difference is one is $400 less a good deal of the time. So how can Apple, in terms of cost justify their product? But yet; upgrading the memory on a Mac Pro Tower from 2gb to 4gb will run you $500 and that's on top of a $2799 base price. Its DDR2800 memory though; and despite whatever Apple tries to charge you; you could go on Newegg.com and buy the same ram for $20 - $40. The only rational explaination for Apple is that they need the components custom designed to accomodate their "pretty" external cases. Well I for one prefer power any day every day; over having a pretty computer that is obslete in a year or dead. I am still holding out hope that thanks to the economic depression we face now in America that many people won't willingly spend double on a Mac even if they don't know that the Compaq down the aisle was the exact same computer for half the price. Truthfully the PC might even include more memory or a larger hard drive too. If you wanted to you could even run Mac Leopard on the Compaq too. So how is Apple really going to keep up sales of their computers when more and more people learn the reality of the deal. There's also a more in the broad array of other reasons that you might not be better off with a REAL Mac as well. Like when that Compaq breaks, you can easily fix whatever the part that broke; and it will most likely have been made for HP computers made at the same time for instance or possibly a couple manufacturers; so you can always find what you need and it is cheap. Wheras with the Mac you'll likely end up paying triple or more; most of the time if you get to that point you have to contemplate spending more on the part than the computer is actualy worth in terms of market value. If you have to go the Apple Store, you risk the loss your computer for a couple days potentially; and if your problem is really bad; the Genius bar will likely not even know how to solve it, or worse yet it will likely happen AFTER your warranty has expired. So, again I wanted to go back to the how can Apple survive? I think that in a really desperate plea, we coud stil see Apple emerge from chaos if they ever decided to release their OS to PC Hardware in general like Windows. The support is already pretty much out there in terms of hardware compatibility. People would still buy Macs. And Microsoft is a very large company who doesn't make computers. Apple would stand a chance of MacOS becoming the preferred OS to buy with a computer. In fact I am hoping this is their intention one day.