Lazycoder

I’m Too Poor To Afford Apple So Stop Telling Me To Buy One Before I Go Postal:

‘we got a much better computer for her than we could have gotten from Apple.’

You can also buy a Ford for much less than a Porsche. Which car is a better quality car?

I bought an HP laptop for my wife when our desktop finally met it’s maker. The screen is nice, it cost as much as my iBook did but it had more RAM, a 64-bit processor (which I can’t use because it only came with 32-bit XP and she won’t let me install a new OS on it but that’s not the laptops fault), and a larger hard drive.

But after a year little things started to show up. The keyboard is cheap and flimsy. You really have to pound the spacebar to get it to register. One of the arrow keys flips up when you put pressure on it (my daughter pulled several of the keys off when she was an infant, chip off the old block.). You have to jiggle USB cables plugged into one of the USB ports. Sometimes you can’t eject the tray-loading DVD drive. I ran Windows update and the trackpad went nuts, the pointer would shoot all over the screen. The hard drive is really starting to thrash a lot, even after defragging. The battery when we bought the laptop would last for about an hour and a half. Now it’s down to 30-40 minutes.

My iBook keyboard is still just as nice to use as it was when I bought it. HFS+ doesn’t really need defragging. The trackpad still works as well as it ever did even after multiple updates from Apple. A new battery lasted for about 3 hours, 2 and a 1/2 if I used the DVD drive. Now it’s down to about an hour. Overall, after having bought and built computers for 25 years, I’m impressed with the quality of Apples hardware.

Now I’m contemplating buying a new computer. I’m running a couple of scenarios through my head. A new Macbook w/VMWare/VirtualBox so I can do Windows development w/o having to participate in driver-update-of-the-week world that is pure Windows. A Dell laptop dedicated to just development, maybe dual-booting Debian and Windows. Or buying a nice desktop system, maybe a Mac-mini, and using Remote Desktop to do development.

My point is not a new one: Apple makes outstanding hardware. You can buy cheaper computers, but you get what you pay for.