I've seen almost a hundred of these comparisons, and they arbitrarily swing to: Apple is the cheapest hardware you can actually buy today, to, apple is 200% more expensive.
You've thoroughly screwed up your comparison, however. - You DONT, under any circumstance, let apple install extra memory or harddrive space. You do it yourself. Rookie mistake. Buy a standard model, unscrew the memory bay, and install more if you want it. Harddrives is a bit more complicated: The 'apple premium' is merely ridiculous instead of completely outrageous as it is for memory, and only Macbooks have a user servicable HDD bay. - Your HP Pavilion has a crappy keyboard, a crappy trackpad, a crappy screen, and a crappy battery. More important than even that, is the end experience. In the good old days, the primary difference in user experience between any given pair of PCs was performance based. How big is the screen? How fast is it? How many programs can it run before it runs out of memory? Those are all quantifiable entities. Bigger is better. In today's world, that just doesn't apply anymore. Even hard core developers have some difficulty redlining their CPU often enough that it really makes an impact. Between swapping and lots of cheap RAM all around, I can run 2 parallels, eclipse, a server, postgres, watch a video, and have umptheen personal programs up, and -still- I'm not really noticing much swapping, and that's on an older macbook with 'just' 2GB of memory. At the same time, designers have finally figured out that computers are things you often sit behind for many hours, most days of the year. Keyboards on notebooks recently have vastly improved. Trackpad technology has become subtly better. They are more responsive, and far more precise. Battery technology is slowly evolving. So on and so forth. I'm not kidding that I will -gladly- buy a machine with half the CPU and a quarter of the RAM, for the same price, if it has a significantly better keyboard than the high powered alternative. My mind boggles at developers who don't agree with this sentiment. A bad keyboard easily costs you just as much productivity. Probably more. Most of these new yardsticks aren't very quantifiable. There's no Mhz for tactile keyboard feedback. Even the ones that are quantifiable, such as battery life, are quantified using a practical yardstick (work hours) instead of a factual yardstick (mHa or some such). Contrast this to the old yardsticks, such as CPU speed, which are still stated in factual yardsticks instead of practical yardsticks - cache, pipes, instruction set, northbridge, bus speeds - those all have more impact on how fast a computer really is than raw cycle speed, and yet we're still using that pointless yardstick of 'Ghz'. The problem is this: Only apple gets this. No other computer manufacturer has realized that the old yardsticks simply do not matter anymore. Innovation today no longer means 'faster'. We're done with that. And it shows: There's a reason why half the 'developer is a lifestyle' developers own a mac (and no, I'm not exaggerating. Go to any halfway hip conference where the majority are NOT there on a multi- thousand dollar admittance ticket paid by their employer, and half the participants are walking around with some apple logoed notebook under their arm. The rest have an Asus Eee or sony vaio. They are all design statements, and two of those three are vastly overpriced if you don't count better keyboards, rugged design, and screen quality). I don't know about other 'apple fanboys', but I will preach this principle any chance I get, because I'm scared that there's only one manufacturer in all the world that makes a decent notebook. I -really- don't want to be dependent on just Steve Jobs. I want other notebook manufacturers to get it. Unfortunately, the last big hope, Sony Vaio's, have since gone mostly backwards, abusing the brandname and introducing a slew of ergonomic problems. Even the asus Eee seems to be heading the wrong way, according to Eee using friends of mine. Abuse of brand name, new models that just missed the whole point of what notebooks ought to be about. The sign that the rest of the world has finally caught up will come when ads for computers stop quoting every quantifiable yardstick in the book. I can pick up a computer magazine and it'll show a grainy picture of the latest 'grey ugly box' variant, along with a big bulletpoint list of Mhz, MB RAM, MB HDD, XxY screen, pre-installed software I just don't care about, and a price tag. Pages full of the same pattern. Grainy picture, list of numbers, price. You'll never see 'has a keyboard that typing pros rate as quite good for a notebook keyboard!' in that list. You'll never see a picture of the power brick. No mention of the heaps of pre-installed demos and trials you'll need to remove. No quality assessment of the speakers. No clear indication of where the ports are and how conveniently you can access them. Not a word about the rugged feeling of the laptop (most non- apple laptops I know of creak and generally feel like they're about to break when you hold them, opened, at the side and walk around. The MacBook I own feels rock solid when I do that. That's more important than another half a ghz to me). I can't speak for the posse, but I wouldn't be surprised if they talk a lot about apple for the same reason I do: To impress upon the rest of the world that they really should be catering to us. Excellent way to show off that you're part of a large market: Be vocal about it. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. 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