Before he went off to college, we offered to buy my son a laptop. We gave him a budget and let him choose. He picked a MacBook. We just bought the cables required to hook his MacBook up to a TV. Ridiculous. Mini DVI to DVI then DVI to HDMI, none of which will carry the sound. That needed a stereo jack to RCA cable. And Lord knows you can't use the same cable as they use for MacBook Pros. Certainly not! You need a special cable for the MacBook.
Apple, by the way, has an absolutely criminal profit margin of about 28%, so a lot of my purchase went straight into the pockets of their board members. It reminds me of something the immortal Steve Jobs used to say.
"WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU, YOU MORON? THIS IS THE WRONG COLOR BLUE! DOES THIS LOOK LIKE THE RIGHT COLOR BLUE TO YOU? WERE YOU BORN ON A FARM? YOU MAKE ME SICK! MY COFFEE IS TERRIBLE! IF YOU CRY ONE MORE TIME, YOU'RE FIRED! AND WAX MY CAR! YOU'RE ALL IDIOTS!"
Or something like that.
9 comments:
Close enough! It's not quite as bad as you represent it. What is annoying is that they constantly CHANGE the ports. At work we have machines that span a period of four years. There are three different types of power jacks. And at least two different types of video jacks. Clearly their business model is for you to completely replace everything every two years.
Yeah, the difference in the ports was what floored me. We bought the cable for the MacBook Pro, never realizing he had the MacBook and the two were incompatible.
Apple is in the business of not letting you have any choice. The want to rope you into there model of buying everything through them. And it's getting worse. They are working toward not allowing you to buy any apps that don't go through them, just like the iPhone and iPad, or iTunes.
That said. My wife's PC just plain sucks. It's one year old, yet is the slowest computer we have. It's a triple core Phenom chip. My 7 year old MacBook Pro and my boy's 8-9 year old Mac Minis are much better, much more usable.
And it's not just Apple products. There was one occasion where a Dell laptop's power brick went missing. I had access to four other Dell laptops, and I figured at least one of them would have a compatible power supply.
Not only were none of them compatible with the one I was trying to match, none of them could be swapped with each other, either. Out of five randomly selected Dell laptops purchased over about a 5-year period, they all had mutually incompatible power supplies.
Incidentally, the new Captchas below are really annoying. There's always at least one letter that is like one of those "rabbit or duck?" illusions, and I have to guess as to which one it is supposed to be. The current one, I can't tell whether it is supposed to be an upper-case M, or an N followed by an I. Oh well, here goes.
I've got an ASUS laptop that I just love. I've been really happy with their products. This thing is a total beast - it weighs about 8 pounds and looks and feels like you've got a Lamborghini on your lap. That said, it's got the right ports and you don't need anything special to work with it.
I just recommended an ASUS to my brother in law based on your glowing reports.
As for Apple, I definelty agree with "Mostly Nothing." I really can't stand the direction Apple is moving towards. Everything is going to be running a OS that looks like an iPhone. They've completely given up on power users.
Kelly, this isn't my first ASUS. All of the ones I've used have been fine, standard laptops that last a long time.
I have an early Asus eeePC netbook. It's pretty nice for its age. I've got Linux on it, and it works well if all I do is use a terminal and chromium. Can't bring up a mail client, it will just thrash. Windows XP just thrashes on it. That and my old eyes have issues with the little screen.
At work, we have HP desktops and laptops. The power supply for the dock of the laptop is incompatible with the power supply for the laptop. But at least PCs use standard interfaces for video, usb, etc. My hope is that with Jobs death, the inovation of Apple will continue but the arrogance will subside.
I will stay out of this bash for reasons I think KT may understand.
My only comment was the thing I was most annoyed with about Jobs was not only was he verbally cruel to his employees, but he routinely parked his car in handicapped spots on the Apple campus.
Of course, my source is from the internet, so I can't verify that. I don't work for Apple, so please don't sue me for defamation.
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