I’m not an Apple fanboy and have even spoken out against blind devotion to the brand in the past, but they’ve actually done a good bit in the last few years to create some more affordable options.
If you want a small, but functional, laptop the introductory MacBook Air is $1000.
A more standard sized and powerful laptop, the introductory MacBook Pro is $1200 for the 13" model. The introductory iMac is $1300 for a desktop (but its integrated 21.5" monitor.)
What I’ll say negatively about those three options, is you can get “more” PC at each price point than you can with Apple. A $1200 Windows laptop will generally have more memory, faster CPU, and perhaps even an standalone video card at that price point.
But at the same time, you generally need to spend at least $800+ on a desktop or $1000+ on a laptop to get one that I would consider good enough to be worth spending money on. So Apple is right there around that baseline level that you should be trying to spend in any case.
Can I just say that the commercials for the Surface is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen? A bunch of idiots dancing with their shitty tablets is not going to get me to buy one, nor is the synchronized clicking of the keyboard accessory making me wet my pants in excitement. What the fuck does it do except lure all the hipsters out of their hiding holes into punchable range?
Pretty much. You’ve been able to get a $500 or less machine for ages and they’re usually made with the worst components, are prone to overheating, etc. Not everyone needs a decked out machine but even the machines that are geared towards a light user I’d expect to pay at leas $800 if you don’t want a piece of crap pc.
I thought I’d hate Windows 8. I mean, it looks gimmicky, and I’m usually extremely resistant to change. However, the way software deals through my school worked, there wasn’t another option when I built my desktop. I’d already used my free copy of Windows 7 on my MBA Virtual Box install; it was claim my free, legal copy of Windows 8 or (gasp) pay for an OS.
At first, I didn’t like it that much. It’s grown on me. Moving my mouse to the lower left and clicking brings up something analogous to the Start menu. Moving to the right allows me to search by typing. I’m not a huge fan of the full screen PDFs, but that’s easy enough to fix. I customized the hell out of my start menu, and it wasn’t even hard.
Granted, I spend 90% of my time in Desktop mode, but it’s perfectly serviceable. Also, as my eyes aren’t terrific, having the big colorful buttons lets me have insane resolution without making me lean in close to the screen to see what I’m opening. Christ, I’m 29 and I feel old…
Vista was a huge mistake, and I feel very sorry for any corporations that upgraded to that. Their IT people must be really hating life. Windows 7 was seen as “What Vista should have been” and I love it.
Maybe Windows Blue will be what Windows 8 should have been. The leaks show it won’t be horribly long before it comes out.
ME, Vista, Win 8 all show that Microsoft is terrible at Beta testing new OS’s. Maybe they just collect lots of oohs and ahhs from testers so they can show that the last few months or years haven’t been a waste, then bomb in the marketplace.
The difference being, Apple’s commercials are actually cool.
And anyway, they’re not about telling you about the product. They’re telling you about what you can do with the product. Apparently with the Surface, you can click the kickstand, play tablet-catch with your coworkers, and breakdance.
Yeah. I paid about the same for a Lenovo brand laptop about… wow about a year ago now… and it’s going strong, with basically no probems. And it can even play a decent amount of my steam games.
Spending $1000 on a laptop is completely unnecessary. I couldn’t be happier with my laptop and it cost me less than $400.
This has been true for me for the past 15 years..
All I need from my home computer is the ability to read the Dope, browse the web and watch youtube videos, do a few spreadsheets, a few letters typed in Word, and store a few hundred pictures downloaded from my camera.
Why should I ever need any kind of “upgrade” that I don’t know how to use? It’s actually just a downgrade…a big headache, with no advantages.
Yes, I remember a time when serious gamers would basically upgrade as soon as their wallets allowed. A computer one year newer than one you had decked out the year before was dramatically better. More casual users would usually want a new computer at the 3-4 year mark as newer software (not games, but just ordinary software) became more and more resource intensive so just casual use would get slow and painful after a few years.
Now, unless your computer physically breaks the casual user running a computer 10 years old operating Windows XP is unlikely to have any problems.
Even gamers can now deck out a computer every 3-5 years and the software just doesn’t catch up. You can run the best games at max settings with a really good computer 2-3 years old, which just was unheard of at one point in time.
Most upgrades now are done to replace PC with broken components. Which is why I recommend even casual users shell out a bit more than bottom of the barrel for their computer. You do get higher quality from paying more money, you get name brand components that have higher reliability ratings and usually better architecture inside the case (better cabling etc.) For laptops in particular Acers and HP have terrible three year failure rates. Every year or so Squaretrade releases a report on laptop reliability rates. In the last few years HP, Gateway, Acer, and Lenovo have had significantly higher failure rates than Asus, Sony, and Toshiba–which are generally the best in class reliability for Windows laptops.
The only company on the “dog” list I’ll defend is Lenovo. Lenovo tries to hit basically all price points, so produce a lot of really cheap stuff, but they also have higher priced machines that I’ve heard nothing but positives about. Asus/Sony generally you can’t get for under $650-800 for a reason.
How do you explain Toshiba then? From the same report they are ranked better than Apple (and only bested by Asus). I guarantee you can buy $300 Toshiba laptops and they have historically sold very inexpensive laptops for the times.
Windows 8 isn’t so bad. Granted, if you’re running it on a laptop, Metro is completely unnecessary. And, if you’re using a touchpad, the swiping gestures that bounce you out of the desktop are infuriating.
But with something like Classic Shell to give you back your start button, and a little fiddling with the registry to eliminate the gestures nonsense, it’s great. It’s fast, faster than Windows 7, and it has a few neat new features.
I don’t agree with this. I’m of the opinion that progress is made by having the courage to put things out there that people don’t think they like. Yes sometimes it’s a bust; but certainly not always. People are resistant to change; even if the change is for better. Frequently once people are forced to change; and then have to go back to an old way of doing things they realize how much better the new way is.
So you figure at some point I’ll realize the advantage of having a touch-screen based system on my touch-screenless computer? I’ll admit I don’t see that as being likely. A lot more likely is that Windows 8 will come to be seen as another failure like ME or Vista.
Windows 8 just misses the point. You don’t need your PC to be like a tablet, what the hell for? if that’s what you want you get a tablet. Selling thousand dollar computers to people who want to use the internet and check their email is a thing of the past, making PC’s look like tablets is not going to change that.
