Cheap hardware yields cheap results. The computers bought by Lauren >and "G" were bad mistakes.
Maybe not for what they intended. But I wouldn't buy either one.
I suspect that most people don't actually evaluate and research what's available at a price point and usually don't have a clue what their options are in the context of their needs. They do know that they want a thing, but as has been pointed out at some length here, that is not what drives most purchase decisions. I'm sure that many people here are capable of assembling a desktop machine that will easily blow away a top of the line Dell for at least 20% less of the initial cost. All of the parts will have warranties and there won't be any preloaded crapware on it. In terms of parts quality and performance it will probably be easily able to spank a Mac Pro. But there is the subtle lure of the easy way. And that's about buying an appliance off the shelf. I happen to believe that the computer hasn't yet become an appliance in the same sense as a refrigerator or a clothes dryer. I doubt that anyone here would seriously contemplate building a refrigerator compared to buying one off the shelf. It could be done, but it would be tremendously inefficient in terms of cost. Someone, I can't really remember who, said that Americans are really, really good at finding solutions to problems that no one else recognizes as problems. AAPL, IMHO, excels at that. MSFT used to excel at that. Remember, three decades ago there were almost no computers in private hands. Today you can get a tremendously powerful one at Best Buy for a week's pay at a middle class wage. You can buy a slightly less capable but still good one for peanuts, used. That's incredible. But can you use it to do what you need to do? There's the rub. Lauren and G are fictional characters--but are they, really? I was hacking PDP-11s and Tandy CoCos before either one of them were born, I suspect that a lot of people here were doing similar. I think I could make either machine do what I wanted it to do for the cost of an OEM copy of XP Pro. Legally. So blame the craftsman before the tools, I think. But it is not surprising that bad tools are sold. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
