@Paul

You can get a similar or better spec HP or Dell desktop for over €1k less.

@Mark – Exactly. Apple is all about its sleek marketing and its army of credulous followers who are easily distracted by shiny things.

Mark you sure can, but specs don’t always add up in the same way. Windows 8 was dire and 8.1 is worse. Saving up for a mac as we speak. Know a few doctors who trained with the same mac for 5/6 years no hassle. Eminent last two years have had a dell and a HP and dell was a disaster from beginning. No point buying cheap if you’re buying twice !

Eminent?? * in the last.

Whats wrong with nice shiny things ?

Brendan anyone who spends money on an Apple laptop is bonkers in my eyes. The cheapest laptop they have is still over a grand. I bought a Lenovo three years ago and it’s still going just as good as the day I got it. Before that I had a Dell for around 5 years and that’s still going it’s a just a little dated on the hardware side of things now. Comparing my Lenovo to the cheapest Macbook Air I’ve got an extra 1 GHz in processor speed with the same architecture, twice as much RAM, 8 times as much hard drive space (not flash memory but a 250Gb SSD on Amazon is only about 100 quid if you have to have it), a 15.6 inch screen vs an 11 inch on the Mac and all this for €450 cheaper. It’s utter madness spending money on an Apple laptop, saying that Windows laptops break all the time is BS too, they only break if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Yeah……but are they as shiny ?

I use mac and would love to get the new Mac Pro but the price is extraterrestrial

@ Brendan

Apples go wrong too. I’ve seen first hand an iPhone 3GS explode due to a battery failure. I’ve had numerous Dells and Lenovos for work over the years with very little trouble. It comes down to if you think something similar is worth 2x the price. The components on the inside are essentially the same so you are paying extra for the OS.

@Paul

All that glistens ain’t gold.

@Mark You can’t really say the components are the same, a 1.3Ghz processor seems extremely low for a laptop costing over a grand considering phones now come with processors at 1.4 and 1.6 GHz. I should revise my previous comment in relation to the architecture though, mine is from the same line of processors but a couple generations older, still have to feel that a 2.3Ghz has the beating of 1.3Ghz though even if is newer. The OS is obviously a personal choice. The biggest thing the Macbook has going for it is the compact size but now you can get really nice slim Asus laptops with much stronger spec listings for a few hundred euro cheaper.

“Mark you sure can, but specs don’t always add up in the same way. Windows 8 was dire and 8.1 is worse.” <- So install Linux.

@Jimbo…..to be fair, the build quality of Apple computers is tough to beat and none of the mainstream manufacturers put much effort into trying.

Despite this, Apple hardware, while looking great is just as prone to failure as a cheap dell and the parts are rediculoisly expensive.

I repair both Windows and Apple machines and most Apples once a main component goes, is for the bin. A “cheap” dell or HP can be repaired cheaply and quickly nullifying the expensive build quality of the Apple hardware.

.. But they do look great …….

OSX is pretty awful too

Leopold

When I say the same I mean from the same suppliers, Intel, Foxconn etc. same chance of HW going wrong as any other brand.

What about it ? Build a custom PC and it would laugh at a Mac Pro

Where do you get your info? I know him as someone who’s excellent at putting together technologies that compliment one another. That’s called innovation, some call it invention.

and this is News… C’mon Now journal.

Journal doesn’t do news, it does public interest stories to raise advertising revenue. They have no product and sell nothing. They have writers not reporters.

“I know him as someone who’s excellent at putting together technologies that compliment one another” <- can you give an example?

Did he come up with the idea of phones having cameras? No.

Did he come up with the idea of tablet computers? No

Did he come up with the idea of selling PDAs that can make phone calls and referring to them as phones? No

What original combination of technology do you imagine Steve Jobs or Apple computers came up with?

You tell me what phone had a very user friendly OS, large touchscreen, Google Maps, camera, apps and app store, music store, great build quality, great design all in one prior to the iPhone?

Not to mention since it has led with top cameras, top screens, the first 64bit processor in a phone, fingerprint reader….

Oh it just so happens other phones come out with these after Apple is it?
It just so happens the people who manufacture the tech Apple uses then follow with it in their models which are pretty obviously based on the original iPhone?

Oh right ye.

The LG Prada came before the iPhone and had most of the features you mentioned. It was also the first phone with a capacitive touchscreen, which is what basically every phone now has.

The reality is that all of the technology already existed. All apple really did is wait until the components were cheap enough to be sold to the general public and then start selling them as a single device. Their competitive advantage in the beginning was down to some patents they bought, business deals with third parties.

People complain about the recent “incremental” changes to the iphone, but in the wider scheme of things, even the first iphone was an based solely on incremental improvements to existing technology.

Laptops with finger-print scanners have been around for about 20 years. That the technology improved to a point where it was small enough and light enough to include with a phone is not apple’s innovation, the idea of adding one to a computing device was not apple’s innovation either. And BTW. the fingerprint scanner 0n the iphone was hacked within 24 hours of its release. Clap clap.

Google made google maps and put it in app form available for phones. How is that Apple’s innovation?

The app store and itunes are business inventions designed to tie you to a single brand and hand over more money. Hardly something to brag about.

I had a philips phone in 2003 that came with a camera. So, no Apple didn’t come up with that either.

He combined the MP3 player, the online digital music repository of iTunes to create the iPod which reinvented to music industry.

He introduced a product in the iphone, iPad and iPod touch that incorporated accelerometers, touchscreen displays and a radically new way of deploying applications via AppStore creating a multi billion euro market.

There’s 2 multibillion markets he created by brining existing and emerging technologies together completely disrupting the status quo. That’s just off the top of my head