I think these articles come from the fact that nobody in the tech industry takes marketing classes. When I say marketing I don't mean advertising, but the actual science of how products are developed and placed to target certain market segments. To compare all laptops is the same as comparing all cars. While they can all get you from point A to point B and have the same basic interface there is a huge difference between a low end Kia and a BMW Z3, and it's not all just the horsepower. The MacBook Pro is a luxury / professional product. It is not designed to go after the same market as the HP, thus is is lighter, has better battery life, a better keyboard, a brighter (and denser) screen, and many other features and qualities that I would expect in a luxury product. Apple does not make a laptop for the economy market, just as BMW does not make a car that competes with l Kia sedan, and no comparison will make them equivalent products. If you want to compare a midrange PC laptop to one from Apple, then you should be comparing against the MacBook, which is much closer in target market to your typical PC laptop. (or you should compare the MacBook Pro against a nice Sony Vaio).
The real question I have is why has the market turned out this way. Why is Apple, and to a certain extent Sony, the only company that can make products where a significant portion of the product budget is spent on quality and usability features, rather than on pure numeric features (like RAM & MHZ) or cost cutting? Why are all PCs except Apple's considered commodity products that seem to be in a race to the bottom? Why cant' someone else make a premium laptop with quality parts, is easy to use, and has a better buying experience? There must be some thing more than just technical reasons. - Josh On Sep 2, 2008, at 6:44 AM, Reinier Zwitserloot wrote: > > 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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