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[Rant]Kids these days are useless!
GullRaDriel
Member #3,861
September 2003
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yeah, it was for making fun about Mac user :-)

There just one fact on which you could not do anything else than agree with me:

For the price of a Mac laptop you have some better hardware in a PC laptop. I just talk about the hardware, not the OS or other consideration.

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ixilom
Member #7,167
April 2006
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Kids are just evil. Those who say otherwise are just in denial.

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Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
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Quote:

For the price of a Mac laptop you have some better hardware in a PC laptop. I just talk about the hardware, not the OS or other consideration.

My main argument would be that taking hardware in abstraction is so artificial as to make this observation irrelevant, regardless of its truth.

I'd further or alternatively argue that you would be unable to find a PC laptop that offered better performance outside of the same price range, where performance is deemed to be the overall abilities of the hardware as perceived by the user. So that includes stuff like longevity and effect on overall performance of drivers. I appreciate that is bordering on software territory, but I'm trying to make the point that it means nothing to have a series of more functional discrete components if, due to the overall configuration of the machine, some components impede on the functionality of others. That necessarily means talking something about software. I'm taking your comment in the spirit of "let's not discuss OS X versus Vista", i.e. discounting the user experience of software that is meant to be (roughly) invariant across different hardware.

So, e.g. being able to tick a box saying you bought a machine with bluetooth (which I've picked arbitrarily to make a point about tick box comparisons, not necessarily because it's a useful feature for many people) and also say that you found a faster processor doesn't mean much if the bluetooth driver causes your computer to take an extra 20 seconds to boot and slows your whole system down.

My feeling about the whole debate, moving completely away from your comments, is that people want computers for tasks and only care about numbers as far as they affect the ability to perform those tasks. So it's false to abstract hardware from software in terms of what you're getting for your money. Improved questions would be "which type of machine is cheaper if I want to do basic word processing?", "which type of machine is cheaper if I want to edit video?" and the most realistic questions would be of the form "where is the best balance of cost to functionality if I want to <perform task X>?"

I think that it's too easy for those of us that are computer literate and care about fringe activities that put us in direct contact with the hardware, such as programming, to forget about the vast quantities of professionals who have to equate time with money and want to be able to do tasks with maximum efficiency, not just say that they've been able to do them at all, and the vast array of casual users who want to be able to perform certain tasks and don't really care about how the computer works beyond that.

I wouldn't be surprised if vanilla PC is the better buy for many people and Apple PCs are the better buy for many others.

GullRaDriel
Member #3,861
September 2003
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Meh. I must say that I agree with you Thomas. >:(

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m c
Member #5,337
December 2004
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solution: Save the money from the crapple notebook to get a really good PC notebook, and then re-image the hard drive with a MacOSX install.

Hope that it had no trojans, log in and change the password username etc, and have fun. This is assuming that you downloaded the MacOSX install image on bittorrent, if you actually know someone who bought a mac then just copy their hdd.

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Evert
Member #794
November 2000
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Quote:

For the price of a Mac laptop you have some better hardware in a PC laptop.

That's funny, because when I got my Mac laptop there wasn't a PC laptop that offered the same in terms of weight, size, battery life and performance as my Mac - I decided what I wanted and went with the cheapest option, which happened to be the Mac.

Sure, I could have gotten a PC laptop with a faster processor and a better graphics card. It'd have weighed a ton, wouldn't have fit snugly in my backpack and would have had a battery life of an hour or two if I was lucky.
Maybe we have a different opinion of what "better hardware" means for a laptop, but from where I'm sitting, I could get a Mac or a PC laptop with crappy hardware and dodgy operating system support.

jhuuskon
Member #302
April 2000
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Quote:

Sure, I could have gotten a PC laptop with a faster processor and a better graphics card. It'd have weighed a ton, wouldn't have fit snugly in my backpack and would have had a battery life of an hour or two if I was lucky.

Ever heard of the Thinkpad X series? :)

Granted, they aren't cheap but...

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Evert
Member #794
November 2000
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Quote:

Ever heard of the Thinkpad X series?

That was pretty much the alternative, yes.
As you say, they're not cheap, though they seem to be cheaper now than they were a few years ago (and lighter as well, with better battery life). As far as I recall, the low-end models were on par with my iBook in terms of specs and about 1.5-2 times as expensive when I looked into it.

That, and all the software I use on a dayly basis runs more naturally in a UNIX environment, which is a pain to set up under Windows, which can be solved by installing Linux on it, which tends (or tended) to have problems with wireless and beamers, which would have meant dual booting for presentations, which would have meant a lot of hassle and annoyance.

Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
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Quote:

That's funny, because when I got my Mac laptop there wasn't a PC laptop that offered the same in terms of weight, size, battery life and performance as my Mac

And yet that idiot Jobs still thinks we'd rather have an expensive thin-but-large laptop rather than a smaller replacement for the old 12" iBooks and PowerBooks, which would probably be about half the price judging by history.

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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Quote:

That's funny, because when I got my Mac laptop there wasn't a PC laptop that offered the same in terms of weight, size, battery life and performance as my Mac - I decided what I wanted and went with the cheapest option, which happened to be the Mac.

I've always liked how Mac buyers respond to the "Mac is expensive" truth. They take one of Apple's few offerings that are mass produced and try to compare it to an equivalent PC of a single vendor.

It's very well possible that a $1200 MacBook is better priced than a $1200 PC in terms of hardware. (Although I'm pretty sure one could find a better PC deal if he looked hard enough.)

But what if you want to buy a $600 laptop? How do you buy a brand new $600 Apple laptop? You cannot ... because they are more expensive than a PC!

jhuuskon
Member #302
April 2000
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Quote:

And yet that idiot Jobs still thinks we'd rather have an expensive thin-but-large laptop rather than a smaller replacement for the old 12" iBooks and PowerBooks, which would probably be about half the price judging by history.

Not to mention that the cheapest X61's are very much competitive in specs (apart from the obvious differences in display specs and faster processor, SATA HD and 3x longer warranty) but somehow I suspect the Air wouldn't withstand even close to the abuse an X-series can take in. For someone as clumsy as I am, it is a significant sales point. :P

You don't deserve my sig.

Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
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Quote:

But what if you want to buy a $600 laptop? How do you buy a brand new $600 Apple laptop? You cannot ... because they are more expensive than a PC!

I think it's because most charges of "Apple computers cost too much" on the internet aren't the simple statement they present themselves to be, but are designed and targeted as a conflation of allegations that Apple gouge on prices and that Apple buyers are idiots as a result. So most replies respond to those topics even though they aren't necessarily in the slightest bit active in the mind of the person who makes the allegation.

I think it's impossible to argue with the proposition that the cheapest new PC is cheaper than the cheapest new Mac, since it's just clearly true. If I were asked to advise someone who only had £X00 and/or set the goal of minimum expenditure as an absolute primary objective then I think Eee PC or something like that would be the way forwards. With an external monitor and keyboard if they have the money. It seems to do all the basic tasks (Office + Internet) very well, and I figure anybody that has specific other software they want to run needs to make a decision based on that software, not on cost.

OICW
Member #4,069
November 2003
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Quote:

But what if you want to buy a $600 laptop? How do you buy a brand new $600 Apple laptop? You cannot ... because they are more expensive than a PC!

That's exactly what I was asking too.

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alethiophile
Member #9,349
December 2007
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I prefer PC hardware because it's cheaper and it's a computer ;D, and then I can install Linux, kill the Windows partition during the install, and have a great OS on an actual machine.

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Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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Quote:

If I were asked to advise someone who only had £X00 and/or set the goal of minimum expenditure as an absolute primary objective then I think Eee PC or something like that would be the way forwards.

I actually just got an Eee PC to keep me occupied during some of my more boring lectures (review coming soon!), and I would have to heartily disagree. If someone were looking for a laptop to use as a portable workstation and did not have much money, I'd recommend a cheap $500 laptop.

While I like the Eee PC for what it is, if I were to make a weekend or business trip, I'd get quite frustrated if I had to use it for extended periods of time as a workstation.

alethiophile
Member #9,349
December 2007
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Why the heck Eee PC? Weird name. Anyway, it looks really annoying to me.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
C++: An octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
I am the Lightning-Struck Penguin of Doom.

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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I have a nice 14" laptop, but I don't like carrying it around. It barely even fits on the desks at university; with the Eee PC, I can have it open along with a pencil and (paper) notebook. In fact, those are the only things I carry with me.

kikabo
Member #3,679
July 2003
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Quote:

Kids these days are useless!

Amateur!, if he can't can't put his chain on while riding, within one crank rotation, while signaling, braking, turning and avoiding the parked car who suddenly opened the driver door without looking and avoiding the car on your shoulder who just decided that it's the perfect safe moment to overtake (which is always if there is a bike in front) then there is no hope - next time tell him to go home and get a mac.

Frank Griffin
Member #7474
July 2006

Will it rain today?

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alethiophile
Member #9,349
December 2007
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57 = 39. 8-)

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Evert
Member #794
November 2000
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Quote:

I've always liked how Mac buyers respond to the "Mac is expensive" truth. They take one of Apple's few offerings that are mass produced and try to compare it to an equivalent PC of a single vendor.

I'm well aware of the irony that my iBook was actually the cheapest laptop that fit my needs. Apple's products do tend to be insanely priced most of the time (which is why the iBook is the only Apple product I own), but there's the odd exception.
Saying Apple is always too expensive is just short sighted.

Quote:

But what if you want to buy a $600 laptop?

If you want to buy a $600 laptop, you buy a $600 PC laptop, not a Mac (since there isn't one in that price range).
As I said, I didn't want a cheap $600 laptop because any cheap laptops I could find were large, bulky and had shoddy battery life. Not to mention questionable Linux support.

I'm not planning on a laptop replacement yet, but chances are I'll just take another Mac when I do need a replacement. Desktop machines are a different story, I wouldn't get a desktop Mac, personally.

alethiophile
Member #9,349
December 2007
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Threads really do get way off topic in this place, don't they.

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Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
C++: An octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog.
I am the Lightning-Struck Penguin of Doom.

Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
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Quote:

I actually just got an Eee PC to keep me occupied during some of my more boring lectures (review coming soon!), and I would have to heartily disagree. If someone were looking for a laptop to use as a portable workstation and did not have much money, I'd recommend a cheap $500 laptop.

$500 is still more than the cost of an Eee. If you're in a realm where price is the absolute determinant then you can't avoid that fact. And in any case, $500 could turn out to be substantially more once the user is in the mire of Microsoft. In my experience, the degree of openness provided by Microsoft and the way that it is implemented lead most users to bog down their machine over the years and then prematurely buy a new one. It's not necessarily Microsoft's fault and it isn't unavoidable, but I'm imagining the situation where an ordinary person walks off the street and says "I want to buy a computer, I want to minimise cost" and then I get neither to lecture that person nor to ever see them again.

So I find not just the price point of the Eee attractive, but the also way that it's a lot closer to an appliance than a full PC — which is what I think a lot of people actually want from their computers. It's like the return of the Amstrad PCW, but now it does much more than basic word processing.

Quote:

While I like the Eee PC for what it is, if I were to make a weekend or business trip, I'd get quite frustrated if I had to use it for extended periods of time as a workstation.

Obviously it'd be incorrect to second guess your thoughts, but I look forward to your review. I have no firsthand experience, I was just going on user feedback I've read on the web and the reasoning expressed above. I could well be wrong.

Matthew Leverton
Supreme Loser
January 1999
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Walmart sells full sized laptops as low as $400. I just picked $500 because there tends to be a lot of difference between them. The 4GB Eee PC is $400; the 2GB at one at $300 is unreasonably restricted.

Then if you want to get 8GB of extra storage and 1GB of RAM, you are looking at $450 for the Eee PC. At that point you are in the range of cheap, full sized laptops.

It's not that the Eee PC is unusable as a cheap, stand alone PC. It's just if you plan on using it remotely, it's too small for extended use... unless you happen to have an extra monitor, keyboard, and mouse everywhere you go. Couple that with the small storage space, and it becomes not very nice as your only machine.

Its usefulness as a portable machine is mostly limited to when you are going to be in tight spaces (e.g., airplane, bus, classroom, etc). It's only then when you really appreciate its small size.

I agree though, that PCs should operate more like devices for the average user. The trouble is convincing them of that. I think the PDA like icon / fullscreen approach to an OS (like the default Xandros on the Eee PC) is far easier to use than both Windows and OS X without any limited loss of functionality (with respect to how the average person uses a computer).

ImLeftFooted
Member #3,935
October 2003
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A guy asked me if he should buy one of those mac ultra-thin notebook things so I did a thorough comparison of Sony's line up against Apple.

Sony beats them in every department, including cost. If you catch them during a sale you can get an equivalent apple laptop for ~60% of the cost.

I can't see a single logical reason (short of the sexual appeal) to throw your money at an apple laptop.



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