Re: ORDERED MY NEW LAPTOP!!!
I actually happen to be someone who doesn't take one side or the other in Mac vs. PC (I'm sure that just means I'm crazy-- blame growing up in a house where both were used), although I did love the OLD old Macs, long before half of the current issues between Macs and PCs existed. I do love my current XP computer, though, and I have no plans to switch over to a Mac any time soon.
> An open platform has been a very, very good thing for PC
> consumers. The chip wars between AMD and Intel (and ATI /
> nVidia) even recently yielded the Core2 Duo and rock-bottom
> AMD prices.
I can agree there, although since Macs are now running on Intel, it does mean they reaped the benefits of the war as well.
> Between their closure of AAC, hoarding of the
> iPhone SDK, and aforementioned hardware isolation, they
> appear to be the same old Apple: a company that wants to
> control everything and only concedes ground due to consumer
> pressure -- not so different from Sony with their AC3 and UMD.
Then again, though, how much different does that sound to a lot of people from how Microsoft is running their side of the platform wars? They had to be split up to avoid a monopoly, after all... << Granted, seeming to act the same way is a very BAD thing for a company who always wants us to feel like they're NOT the same company as their competitor who has always held most of their market.
> I'm not looking
> forward to visiting the Mac store in 6 months (instead of
> NewEgg or Google Product Search,) looking for a software or
> hardware upgrade, and being forced to pay whatever's deemed
> reasonable for the glitzy Santa Monica crowd Apple caters to with its $599 portable phone.
Apple as a gadget producer and Apple as a computer producer seem to have different styles (thankfully), even though they have tried to tie the two together as often as possible (bad business idea, in my opinion). I would NEVER buy an iPhone, and the only reason I own an iPod Shuffle was someone thinking I'd like one for Christmas (I would've wanted one of Creative's Zens instead), but I would consider getting myself a recent Mac. (At the moment, the most recent one in our house is a eight- to ten-year-old PowerMac, which is actually not an official Mac, but my mother is planning to replace her weakening XP laptop with a MacBook Pro and give me the old one, although she will still be dual-booting or emulating XP on the new Mac.)
>I don't trust Apple. I trust myself and an open platform. I'd sooner give less of
> my cash to companies who mark their boundaries and compete
> in a free market rather than those who take an "integrate
> and dominate" approach. (I'm referring explicitly to
> hardware here . . . )
As the poster you're replying to said, at this point buyers DO seem to be getting bang for their buck, at the very least on the laptop end, and as far as I've been following it I think it's doing okay on the desktop end right now as well. Then again, that's just my opinion-- I know that for some people, higher price for better hardware/software doesn't mean anything at all. =) PC hardware can always be cheaper, depending on where you buy your parts, but that also drops probable reliability a bit. Reliability is one of the key selling points Apple has had for years, and having come face-to-face with FOUR motherboard deaths in the last two or three years on my PC (as well as one dead RAM stick and power supply that committed suicide) when my mom's ten-year-old Mac is still somehow purring along with its tiny hard drive without any hardware changes, and three other Macs in the house would work if they booted them (although one of them was used for so many years that the BATTERY actually died)... I think they may have a point there, or at least they have a good record on it. =)
> Still, Mac's lowest laptop offering's around $1k, whereas
> generic PC notebooks go as low as $500. Is that enough of a
> margin for Apple's bottom line? From their current
> offerings, I'd say no.
But I don't think that the $500 PC notebook is likely to have the same level hardware that the $1000 one does, so I'm not too sure that you can compare them quite like that...? I will admit that if you want something inexpensive, PCs are absolutely the (only) way to go, and as I mentioned some people don't care much WHAT they get as long as it's cheap, but you definitely get what you pay for either way. There are also other factors to consider, too; as I mentioned, for example, the reliability on Apple's computers tends to be pretty good, so you're also probably buying something that not only will run for a good long time, but probably won't need to pay for a replacement soon either, and that affects how much of an injury the price is for most people.
> I mean the GUI. I prefer a user interface to be simple,
> unobtrusive, and functional -- I don't want things zipping
> and zooming and wrapping and bouncing around my screen all
> the time. Vista's a huge step in the wrong direction, but XP
> is just about right.
Most of those options you mention hating, as far as I know from my experience with recent Macs in my graphic arts class, can be turned off and/or made to look much more similar to XP (and XP does quite a few similar animations unless you turn them off as well-- one of the first things I fixed when I installed it). It really drove me nuts when someone set the dock on the computer I was using to start tiny and then magnify to the largest possible size, but you can turn off the magnifying completely and set it to whatever size you want. I completely agree that Vista's a huge step in the wrong direction, by any means, albeit for MANY more reasons than any GUI issues. =P
Again, don't get me wrong, I love my XP computer (from which I am posting) and don't plan to switch over to a Mac any time soon, but I don't agree with anyone saying either "PCs suck, should've gotten a Mac" OR "Macs suck, should've gotten a PC." They're just different operating systems for different people, although one seems to have an extremely annoying ad campaign continuing for some reason. Yes, I'm alienated by Apple's ads too, none of you guys are alone. =P
P.S. I also hope I didn't come off as "mac is teh best theirs nuthin bad u cn say tahst tru bout it," since I definitely don't believe it. I mean, heck, they obviously haven't convinced me (or my mom, until this year) enough to go out and pick one up for a long time, so they've gotta be off-track someplace! I do agree with quite a few of the things the PC-only camp have to say about Macs, and disagree completely with the way Apple's trying to market them (as well as their other products right now), but I also think that the fighting can get way too heated from either "side". I do think it's interesting that most people I've ever seen fall almost entirely in one camp or another, though I guess it's usually the same with the platform wars (where I am also at least partially in a neutral position).
P.P.S. Sorry that my response looks worthy of a "tl;dr", but it's an interesting topic, and one that I clearly have things to say about.
<P ID="signature">--
Yes, I'm female, gaming is my hobby, and I'm going into programming. Not taken, either, but seeing as how the law for girls on the internet is "Single, hot, sane: choose two"... well...</P>