What does a Macintosh computer have in common with a BMW car or a Hermes Birkin handbag?
If you said exceptional trend-setting design and a high price to go with it, you're half right.
There is one other thing: like BMWs and Hermes handbags, Macs have superior resale value.
I bought a Mac Mini when they first came out in early 2004. It was the $499 base model – 1.25 GHz G4 processor, 256MB RAM, and a 40GB hard drive. I bought it for one reason: to learn the OS X interface so I could do market research on Mac software. For that purpose it worked well enough, but it was much too sluggish to use as a general purpose computer.
Sometime later I paid $20 for 1GB of RAM and installed it. The sluggish Mini became a smooth, responsive PC that could easily handle day-to-day computing tasks – even photo editing. Its tiny form factor and near-silent operation made it ideal for my home office.
I was quite happy with the Mac Mini and still am, but in the summer of 2009 I started using Microsoft Windows 7. I run it on a home-made desktop with a 2.4 GHz Athlon II. Windows 7 really is much better than Vista or even XP – it's about as good as Mac OS X. I ended up using the PC more and the Mac less, partly because the PC lets me use Outlook 2007 with my hosted Exchange account. Outlook is beastly software, and I'd love to try Snow Leopard's Exchange compatibility, but Snow Leopard won't run on G4 Macs.
So the Mini was surplus. Checking eBay, I was amazed to learn that Minis like mine went for up to two hundred dollars. Not wanting to go through the anxieties and unknowns of an eBay sale, I listed my Mini on Craig's List for $200 and sold it in a few days for $175. I threw in a keyboard and mouse, but they had no value to me and I don't think they influenced the price the buyer paid. So including the cost of the memory, but ignoring the keyboard and mouse, the actual cost of my Mini was $344 – darn cheap for a desktop computer in 2004, and even today. The selling experience was quick and congenial.
Why do Macs have resale value? Part of it is that there are only a few models. Buyers know exactly what they are getting. This, more than anything else, reduces the friction associated with a transaction.
Part of it is industrial design. No one ever lost style points for using a Mac.
And part of it is something else. Macintosh computers appeal to interesting people. At least, the two people who wanted to buy my Mini were more than commonly interesting. One is an educator who uses Macs in community-oriented educational events and programs. He was too far away, and didn't want to make the trip to San Francisco. No problem. The actual buyer was a German programmer for Pixar who plays with Amiga software in his spare time. It turns out there's an Amiga port for the G4 Mini, and he wanted to run Amiga OS on a Mini (and now he does: he emailed me later to let me know it had worked).
Not only did I get a third of the cost of my Mac Mini back; I had two encounters with interesting people I would not have met otherwise. That's a pretty compelling case for buying another Mac.
