See, I have my criticisms of Apple. But “overpriced,” for their basic hardware (i.e. don’t get RAM and hard drive upgrades through them) is not one of them. They are actually quite competitively priced these days, spec-for-spec. I think the overpriced reputation has been undeserved for the last few years.
Yep, it takes courage to buck trends and set parameters as to what your product will or won’t do when you know fully well that you’re going to get lots of criticism for it from certain quarters. No Flash on the iPad would be an example.
Apple sells a particular narrative, and they’re very good at it. Part of that requires controlling the end user experience very tightly.
Although I would say that judging a particular device you’ve never used is nothing but thinking with your emotions. Same goes for avoiding a brand entirely due to who the CEO is. Apple makes some genuinely good products, and some genuinely bad ones, and there is definitely the potential for issues with any of them. IMHO, avoiding a product simply because it was made by Apple is no less ignorant than buying a product simply because it was made by Apple; either way you’re making a purchasing decision based on emotions.
One of my laptops right now is running an Ubuntu variant (Jolicloud). I also have an Android phone, a Kindle and a wristwatch that winds itself and needs no batteries.
I don’t actively avoid Apple products, but the ones I have handled have left me cold. My wife has an iPod Touch that she loves - I can’t stand the thing. It is a fine piece of technology that doesn’t suit my personality at all.
Oh, so quashing competition is courageous?
Trends are to Apple what prophylactics are to hookers.
Courage, my ass.
The absurd cost and difficulty of upgrades is one of the many reasons I call Apple products overpriced.
From MP3 players, to phones, to laptops, to desktop computers, to tablets, to fucking upgrades: I totally disagree. You can get comparable performance for less in all categories if you shop around.
More like not giving Herpes II a chance to get established in a new world.
Adobe’s been screwing over computer users since way back in the early ATM (Adobe type Manager) days. They just market one ‘essential’ but shittily designed problem maker after another.
You need a video to show you how to remove four Philips screws, swap out a standard battery (with no wires, solder, or even clips), then put the screws back in? I thought better of you than that.
I don’t have any Apple hardware to swap batteries in–though I assuredly could do so if I chose–so I don’t have a horse in the hardware race. I consider Jobs’ demonstrated desire to control content a far more annoying behavior than his efforts at hardware lock-in. Since I simply have no interest in the products they sell, it hasn’t affected me directly yet; I just disapprove in principle.
Perhaps in some categories, but for the specific question of laptops and/or desktops, they’re pretty close to straight-up competitive with Dell and HP the last few times I checked–and I wouldn’t have been able to say that two years ago.
Fine. We’ll disagree here on the definition of “comparable performance,” I guess. Apples are no longer overpriced for me, not by a longshot. Maybe if you’re in the market for a low-end laptop. But I have no use for such machines. When it comes to high-end laptops, when I first took the Apple plunge is when I specced out an Apple to a Dell. It turned out the Apple was cheaper for me. This comparison is pretty much where I was at when I shifted from PC to Apple. That’s the math I was doing, plus I far preferred OS X to the Windows OS at the time (I think it was still XP, which I did like as an operating system. No complaints about XP from me.)
ETA: Those prices are today’s prices, I think. The MBP was not $1100 in 2004. Nor was the comparable Dell.
Among other things, this is what gravitated me towards Apple. The laptop purchase was the first step. Then, when I needed the desktop upgrade, I got another Apple. And then another Apple laptop. Etc. I don’t think Apples are at all overpriced.
The proper response to a competitor’s poor software is to create superior software, not prevent their software from being usable on your platform at all.
Also, not everyone agrees that Adobe’s software is poor. It’s a subjective call.
I agree with pulykamell that Dells are overpriced. I’d buy an Apple over a Dell, too! That’s a no-brainer.
But if all you’ve done is compare Dells to Apples, then you haven’t shopped around.
Two sides of the same coin really. I think Jobs is a pathological control freak and it extends to everything he does. But I don’t think he’s a plague on humanity. He singlehandedly dragged the RIAA into the digital music market. And his iPhone really has changed the way people think about smart phones and portable computers. He’s a visionary and his narcissistic personality is forceful enough that he can make his visions happen. But the important thing is not his visionary products themselves - it’s the way they pushes the rest of the industry to evolve that makes him indispensable, imo. We’d all be a lot worse off without him, even people who never use Apple products.
OTOH, anyone who ever though Apple was less evil than Microsoft was kidding themselves.
True. Apple’s only been screwing over the Chinese factory slave labor they use to assemble their products. Which I guess some people would refer to as courageous.
One man’s “courage” is another’s pigheadedness (Which BTW is not necessarily an evil thing; personally I have detested Flash homepages for years. But ye gods, like **Knorf said, where’s the Flash-killer graphic interactivity app then?).
I’m with Merneith ** and others in that Jobs causes others to take action to fulfill what he does not deliver (e.g.: Android)
OK, then go for this price comparison.
I did the research, and my conclusion–as long as you were buying the base Apple model and upgrading memory and hard drives yourself–the Apple was on par with the Windows system, and quite often cheaper for the exact same or comparable specifications. It doesn’t really matter, as I was willing to pay up a $300-$500 premium for the Apple, but I was happy to find out this was not the case.
The lack of Flash is one reason I will not buy an iPad. Until that support comes, that significantly cripples the iPad to me. I want to buy it, but its lack of support seals the deal for me. (Although now I see there’s something called Frash you can put on a jailbroken iPad to make Flash work.) Flash is not evil. Fuck, even my homepage makes judicious, minimalist usage of Flash code. I don’t understand why people hate Flash so much. I could understand with some of the more processor-intensive Flash sites out there, but for simple clean animations and the like, why the hell not?
Man, that is such bullshit.
I guess you don’t buy any products made in China (or Korea or Vietnam or Thailand…).
I don’t suppose you’ve stopped to think what those workers would be doing without Apple, have you?
I spent several months in Taiwan doing engineering at an electronics factory, and I can tell you that the line jobs were highly coveted, and the workers were pretty damn lucky to have those jobs. Mainland China probably isn’t in exactly the same situation, but I’m confident that the people doing those assembly jobs would rather do that than say pick rice (or burn your electronic waste for the metals).
To the watch/clock section at a large department store, the store where you bought it (like Fossil) or a jeweler.
Well, remember that Jobs has said that Flash is the number one reason why Macs crash. Given that, I would regard his anti-Flash stance as being pragmatic rather than pigheaded.
At the same time, a computer which can run no software never crashes (heh, slippery slope argument) and a stunningly large proportion of the web runs on Flash these days.
I think Jobs has misjudged the usability-vs-reliability calculus for today, but I also think having Apples’ weight behind HTML5 will allow it to supplant Flash more readily. Time will tell.