The short answer is no, but I should explain myself. I have written several articles on this topic. Each time I believe someone is listening and that maybe, just maybe, I’ll see a smaller number of stories that indulge in myth-making about how expensive Macs really are.

Then I open a copy of, say, Consumer Reports, to cite a notorious example, and it’s “deja vu all over again,” to quote a famous athlete with a penchant for offbeat conversation. Take the May 2005 issue, which includes a short article entitled “Mini and Shuffle: Apple Goes Budget.”

The title is all right, so far as it goes, until the uninformed testing people at CR drop the ball again, claiming that if you had to add a USB keyboard, mouse and monitor, “those essentials and upgrades such as added RAM can hike the Mini’s price past $1,000.”

Well, if I suppose you get a real expensive display. But let’s look at the facts, and I believe CR is really looking for facts, even if it has trouble finding them. The mini is $499, as most of you know. Official Apple keyboards and mice are $29 each, but you can go to the bargain counter at your favorite computer store and get workable alternatives for less than $10 apiece. As to monitors, a Dell 15-inch LCD display, the E175FP, is listed at $194.65. But you can get a 15-inch CRT alternative for just over $100. Memory upgrades? Apple wants $75, and some dealers will include the installation as part of the package. But if you’re handy with a putty knife, and want to save some money, you can get a 512MB Mac mini memory chip for less than $50. But even if you opted for the genuine Apple variety, and went budget LCD, the fully outfitted Mac mini is less than $800.

Understand that the mini’s primary market is to folks who already have most of this stuff and simply want to redeploy them. Folks who are disgusted with their Dell boxes are prime candidates, as the mini works just fine with your existing monitors and input devices. But even if you take the $800 price as a given, it’s still not expensive compared to the PC-based competition. No doubt you’ve seen those ever-irritating TV ads about those cheap Dell PCs, but remember that the company is infamous for bait and switch and constantly changing prices. The system I customize today will probably carry a different price tomorrow.

But let’s use that same Dell LCD as the core of a desktop system designed to, more or less, match a a fully outfitted Mac mini with 512MB of RAM. I started out with that alleged $399 Dell Dimension, and went to work adding the options required to bring it up to the level of the Mac mini, or at least as closely as possible.

First off, I upgraded the system to Windows XP Professional, since the “Home Edition” is somewhat crippled in terms of features. Increasing memory from 256MB to 512MB adds $70 to the price, not so far distant from Apple’s price for a similar upgrade. I added the flat panel display mentioned above. Graphics presented a problem. Like most entry-level PC’s, the Dell comes with integrated graphics, which share the system’s memory and provide perfectly awful performance. The ATI Radeon 9200 chip in the mini isn’t exactly high-end, but it’s a whole lot better than what Dell is offering, and no graphic card upgrade option is listed. You could, of course, buy a separate graphics card, but I’ll set that possibility aside for now.

Now we come to software, and there’s not much to choose from. The basic package includes Corel WordPerfect, an also-ran among Windows word processors, but still pretty close to Word in many respects. I upgraded to WordPerfect Office, which seems to be a closer fit to AppleWorks, thus adding $79 to the purchase price. Finally, I selected a 15-month subscription to the McAfee SecurityCenter, which adds virus and firewall protection and spyware removal capabilities. On a Windows box, where malware is the norm, there’s no choice, and Dell is cheating its customers not to offer package of this sort as standard issue.

You can guess the outcome, but I’ll spell it out. The list price is $1,045, but Dell is offering it to you at the bargain price of $945. That’s a bit much for a $399 PC, but that’s the way it is. And, oh yes, I didn’t attempt to add any digital life software, which might add another $100 to the price, nor did I consider a decent graphics card. And did I mention that even the warranty is extra? I really wonder how many people actually buy one of those things option-free.

Dell must have learned its marketing technique from the auto industry. A neighborhood car store advertises an incredible price on a new vehicle, but when you rush down to grab one, it’s either out of stock, or is bereft of the features you really want. A car salesperson at one of those dealers has the bait and switch routine down pat, and it’s very easy to upsell to a loaded model at a much higher price. I truly believe that, in another life, Michael Dell would have had a car dealership.

It’s too bad that Consumer Reports, a publication that’s supposedly devoted to protecting ordinary people from being ripped off, a publication that takes no advertising and buys every product it tests, has fallen for the myth of the expensive Mac.

I could, of course, do comparisons with other models in the Dell product line. But the site is a mess, and today’s price will vanish tomorrow or an hour from now. I find it almost amazing that we’re talking of the number one PC maker on the planet here. How do people fall for this stuff?

No, I won’t answer that. I’ll let you readers decide for yourselves.

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I really believed it wouldn’t happen, but it did. The 10.3.9 update wasn’t the last for Panther. A strange Java-related bug that apparently slipped through Apple’s quality control process intervened and thus begat the Java Update for Mac OS 10.3.9. Says Apple: “After updating to Mac OS X 10.3.9, some systems may have issues with Java applications and Java-enabled web sites when using Safari. Safari may unexpectedly quit, and standalone Java applications may unexpectedly quit or not launch. This update resolves that issue.” This is, of course, nothing startling, since the problem was reported within hours after the update hit the Software Update preference panels. If the new update, a 1MB file, doesn’t show up for you, and you’re running 10.3.9, go ahead and download your copy from Apple. So can we now close the books on Panther? Well, I suppose there will be some more security updates, but let’s hope that’s it and we can now move on to 10.4 with no regrets.

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Opera is an interesting browser, with features that’ll knock your socks off. It comes as a free version, with a small ad banner on the toolbar, and an add-free edition, if you’re willing to cough $39 money for a single user license.

But past the marketing technique, it is as feature laden as any product of this sort on the planet. Other browser developers have looked to Opera for inspiration in building features that we take for granted today, such as pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. So it’s not surprising that version 8.0, now available in beta form for Mac users, comes replete with interesting features that make it a compelling alternative.

Now since it is a public beta, I’m not expecting perfection. My biggest disappointment, in fact, relates to the development schedule, where the final Windows versions seem to get released somewhat sooner. I’m also disappointed that the new voice command feature is not, at least so far, available for Mac users. Maybe it’ll come in time.

But Opera 8 has some compelling features that are definitely worth a second look, even if the core browsing function is a still a bit ragged on the edges. First and foremost, there’s an important emphasis on security. To help save you from a phishing attack, Opera will not just show the true address of a commerce site, to minimize the possibility of being fooled, but rate just how trustworthy it is, using a scale of from 1 to 3; the last is the strongest data encryption level. That way, even when you visit a legitimate retailer, you’ll see whether it’s safe to place that order. Sure enough, when I went through the motions of placing an order via Amazon, a faint security rating did appear in a padlock next to the site’s name. Unfortunately, the number is too faint to be noticed unless you look real hard for it. By the way, when you click on the number, you’ll invoke a window that delivers the specifics on the site’s security certificate.

Other features absolutely fit into the “why didn’t I think of that?” category. For example, just double click on a word that does not have a link attached. You’ll see a menu that gives you such options as copying the word to the clipboard, initiating a search request on one of several search sites, looking up the word in the dictionary, and translating the word into one of several languages. Now that’s really clever. In Firefox and Safari, you need to first select, then Control- or right-click a word to get just some of these choices.

Another smart feature, Fast Forward, looks for the most likely “next page” link on, for example, a Google search page, so you don’t have to look for it. As you know, some sites are, alas, designed in such a way where that next page jump isn’t terribly easy to find, or requires a little scrolling.

One neat feature, Sessions, resembles Workspaces, a capability that premiered in OmniPage months ago. It lets you save a collection of open pages for later retrieval, such as the next time you launch Opera. All right, so Opera isn’t always first on the block, but you’ll still appreciate its answer to the question of why other browsers insist that you must visit your home page first, and then manually locate all the rest.

Before this turns into a laundry list of features, I’ll just mention a few more. Invoking memories of Netscape, there’s a built-in mail client and a chat feature. There’s also an RSS reader, a fit to width command, convenient drag and drop customization and lots more.

Despite the wealth of features, the Mac version is a download of less than 5MB. Compare that to Netscape if you dare.

Of course, being feature-laden counts for nothing if the whole package doesn’t work properly. Here I can be a little forgiving. This is a public beta, and some work is left to be done. Although Opera 8 for the Mac seems speedy enough, some sites don’t render properly. In fact, compatibility isn’t quite as good as Firefox or Safari, and that’s something that needs to be fixed before the final version. Even the list of show archives on The Tech Night Owl LIVE opening page didn’t look quite right, even though the coding is fairly simple. That’s not a good thing. Fortunately, as with Safari, you can report problem sites to Opera Software, and hope they’ll be fixed some day.

Installation is drag and drop, and on the first startup, Opera automatically loaded my Safari bookmarks. Cool. But I ran into a few glitches when I tried to actually manage the bookmarks. For example, I couldn’t reorder the listings. I’m assume that’s just a bug that’ll be addressed in the final release, which should come in a few weeks.

Performance seemed pretty snappy, but I didn’t attempt to do a direct comparison with the competition. At one time, Opera Software boasted that it had the fastest browser on the planet. I won’t go that far, but you won’t be disappointed. I’ll give it a more intense test when the release is out. In the meantime, I’m very impressed so far, and I’m tempted to make this my default browser.

Note: The April 21st episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE has a brief interview with Opera’s co-founder and CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner. I don’t think I ever pronounced his name correctly, but he was gracious enough not to correct me.

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