Its not that you don't need to account for inflation, you don't WANT too.
No, its literally that we don’t have to. We don’t actually care about going back in time and using 2009 dollars to buy a new 2009 Mac Pro. We care about how competitive a 2009 Mac Pro is today with a 2013 nMP at today’s prices. The choice we are faced with now uses 2015 dollars, wether we buy a current machine or not. See, I’m not particularly interested in comparing the 2009 Mac Pro in 2009 to the 2013 nMP in 2015. I suppose we could do that, but what is the point. This isn’t 2009. I care about computing solutions in 2015 and beyond.
I suppose you assume everyone is going to buy from a used market. Not so.
Everyone can do what ever they want. I’m not assuming anything. I’m pointing out that a correct price to performance analysis of the two products would be done at today’s prices for both machines. If you automatically don’t want a used machine, then the 2009 Mac Pro, regardless of this type of analysis, is disqualified. You can have good reasons or bad ones for doing that, and that’s entirely up to you, but it doesn’t change the proper way in which to do a price/performance analysis.
Some may buy a 2009 Mac Pro and think they are getting all Apple genuine parts. Instead of a cheaper flashed PC card or some such. Its sort of like buying a used car. Buyer beware.
Of course. And that’s why you can pick up a base model for what, $700-$800 bucks? And if you’re smart, you’d probably want to budget in a fair amount of money to maintain and upgrade the machine, maybe even more than the $800 you paid for it.
Generally even in a used market a used 2013 will still cost a lot more then a 2009 Mac Pro depending on whats included. Newer technology, plus inflation, will cost you more new or used.
Yeah, the list price of the 2013 model new is effected by the changing value of money if we pretend you could sell the same thing in 2009. But see, in computers, there actually isn’t inflation. New hardware, while better, is on average cheaper than old hardware:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CUSR0000SEEE01 or
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SEEE01?output_view=pct_3mths. Computing has long been a sector of the economy that actually has deflation. This is just one of the reasons why it makes zero sense use 2009 dollars and apply the inflation rate as measured as an average across the entire market (which would still be very small and not really change things much anyway, since the average inflation rate since 2009 is just 1.45%, and would add less than 10% cost even if we did this silly thing you’re suggesting, but I digress). We are talking specifically about computers, we might as well use the inflation rate that applies to them and not things like houses, energy, food, etc. But that assumes somehow we have some sort of magic that could take us back to 2009, buy the old Mac Pro then, not use it for 6 years, then decide if we want the 2013 nMP or to start using that 2009 cMP, and if we don’t want that 2009 MP we’d have to then go back in time and return said 2009 cMP. Seriously, this desire to use inflation makes less than zero sense.
But of course, you guys won't do a like for like comparison anyway. That would not fit the agenda.
Ah yes, your concluding remark is to attack our motive. How cute. I don’t particularly have any agenda here, other than giving myself a small break from work and letting myself think about something else for a while.
