[This post was taken from the Mac forum’s Mac vs PC cost of ownership thread. - Ed.]

I’ve purposely got as much of my workflow as possible (which ends up being pretty much all of it) on older (i.e. cheaper to replace) machines.

Two weeks ago, my primary OS 9 machine’s (a 500mhz Pismo) display died (after a year-and-a-half or so of “pink screen” syndrome). Ended up being a minor inconvenience– I had two more identically-configured Pismos (1gb RAM, 20gb HD–got them for next to nothing on eBay) waiting to go. Since there was nothing else wrong with the original laptop (other than the dead LCD), I connected it to a backup Pismo (via Target Disk Mode) and, after setting it as my startup disk, used Retrospect to duplicate it to the new HD (other than having to re-enter serial#s for Extensis’ QX-Tools and Conflict Catcher, I was back in the exact same environment without a hitch). I also had multiple backups of the HD on disk and tape as well (I’m admittedly paranoid when it comes to backing up).

Although I’ve been using my OS X machine (a 1ghz Titanium PowerBook–the last Apple laptop that can boot into both 9 and X) for some work-related Photoshop stuff and scanning, page layout (my main bread and butter gig) has been pretty much all done on the Pismo in QuarkXPress 3.3 and 4.1 (in real OS 9–I don’t do Classic). PDFs are distilled in Acrobat 5.0 (also on the Pismo).

And then I tried QuarkXPress.

While I’ve become reasonably fluent with InDesign, I actually prefer the XPress way of doing things (and being able to flawlessly open legacy files that date back to 1990 or thereabouts is a big plus–yeah, I know, InDesign can “open” XPress files, but I’ve been less-than-impressed with how well it actually does it). Version 7 of XPress (even on my lowly 1ghz PowerBook) runs reasonably well (I’ve had no stability problems in my testing, and it’s more than fast enough for what I’m doing). The new features are, imo, killer (although I’m not too crazy about the humungously-sized PDFs it exports–makes it necessary to run them through Distiller, which brings the size down considerably). It’s always something …

So, Quark vs. Adobe aside (yawn), first thing I had to do (before actually committing the OS X PowerBook to real work) was get an identical machine for a backup.

And last week, I did just that.

After figuring in the value of the second battery, the installed AirPort card and the other (admittedly, not worth much to me) included accessories, I’m absolutely amazed at what the final cost of this laptop was to me.

I think one of the things I like best about new technology is how it affects the cost of older (but, in my case anyway, still perfectly serviceable) technology.