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.
4 Comments
Ford vs. Porsche is not a good argument. Some of the early boxters and early GT2’s were notoriously bad. Ford has bad ones as well, but on a whole, Ford has a smaller percentage of bad cars than Porsche does.
Ok, this is complete utter horse pucky. My wife’s computer that you quote is still a champ. Fast, NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING has ever been done to her computer except her use it. Maybe you’ve let your baby pound on her keyboard too much?
Apple doesn’t make their own hardware, get over it, they buy the same crap everyone else does. Give them some props for putting a pretty bow are around it but that is about it. Sorry, disagree. Yah, you get what you pay for, I paid $1200 for a computer that would cost me $3,000 to buy from Apple. I count my blessings!
-Elder, The
http://deepfriedbytes.com -> listen and learn
The argument is only valid if you bought a business quality laptop, because anything you find in Best Buy is going to be instant crap. I try to explain this to people over and over again, you have to compare Apple products against the business counter parts, because Apple uses quality hardware and so does the business laptops from Lenovo, HP, and Dell. If you drop down to their consumer brand, it is like comparing your Porchse to a 4×4 Snow Mobile. They both will get you places, but any comparison is going to wrong on so many levels.
Well, I’ll certainly concede that with Apple stuff, you get a high level of quality. But that’s b/c there is no bargain market on their stuff. I like my Mac but I (perhaps incorrectly) took it as axiomatic that part of what I paid for was the electronic equivalent of a polo pony on my shirt. I typically don’t bargain shop when it comes to my computers so the only comparison points I have are for the most part, more expensive than the Mac equivalents, but I honestly can’t say I see much of a difference dollar for dollar. But, I have never gotten a junky apple computer, I have had one really bad high dollar Compaq. I think that’s in part b/c all the crap that they loaded on it to market it as the ultimate travelling laptop was non-value added junk - that simply wouldn’t have happened with a Mac.
So while my experience doesn’t mimic yours exactly, I do think you raise a very valid point and that’s that, it’s worth shelling out a little more when it comes to computers b/c the slight difference you pay between a decent computer and a budget job can have profound quality implications… Too often people just trust Geek Squad tools for advice and then get mad after the fact. It’d be nice if you could trust those clowns (for the non-techies out there) but with all the info and rating sites on the net now, 10 minutes of research could go a long way in making sure you get a quality computer. Or you could just buy a Mac - so I’d agree with your overall point
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