I haven't had a single issue with Photoshop or Illustrator on SL. My Mac just runs care free, unlike my Windows machine and its various "quirks" I deal with every week.

The reason Apple is successful lies with two things - quality control and user-oriented design. Its not hardware, pricing, or even popularity. That comes because you have a solid product that works and makes sense to use, and its not unique to Apple, Apple is just consistently good at it because it makes few compromises. When you are lacking those fundamentals, you have to compete on price, or having the newest tech, or marketing the crap out of your product to make it popular, but sometimes that doesn't work - Microsoft dropped what, one Billion dollars marketing Vista? Microsoft has been trying to build its mobile OS for what, 10 years now? Yet Apple and Google just show up on the scene and immediately are successful because they know how to build better product. Crap is crap.

Products with good quality control and user-oriented design are always popular unless they are torpedoed in some manner. Frankly I think Apple is a victim of its success in some ways - way too many mindless scene kiddies toting Apple products with no clue about them. The Apple community used to be pretty intelligent, but that's been slipping with its increase in market share.

 

 

My first laptop was a Compaq, around 6 years ago. That computer was balls slow, but it never had any issues. Then I got an HP (same company mind you) and the hard drive burned out twice and the battery stopped holding a charge (luckily mine didn't catch fire like some others with Sony batteries). Then I got a Dell which was balls slow because I didn't have 2 gajillion GB of RAM to run Vista.

My Mac is about a year old and haven't had any issues. My only quirk is the lack of a delete key.

 

Someone steal your key CU?

 

Haha well there's a backspace key (which is called delete) but there's no delete key! You know, the one that's usually next to insert on a PC keyboard.

I want to has it.

 

10/10 thread, Macs FTL.

 

^^
If you are on a MacBook/Powerbook you would hold the Fn (function) key + Backspace to do a forward delete. You can also press Control + D to forward delete on any Mac keyboard (this method will only work in Cocoa applications, which are most applications released today with some notable exceptions such as Firefox).

 

I said, "Word?"

 

If I understand the original article correctly, the author is complaining that while when Apple releases a new MacBook Pro it's competitive in terms of tech specs and price, Apple doesn't usually refresh the product for two or more years and in the meantime maintains the same price for old tech specs while competitors such as Dell and HP continuously introduce new products and discount older products. He brings up $150 and $200 reductions on the Sony Vaio FW prices as an example.

My thoughts:
Unless the author plans on purchasing a new MacBook Pro once a year, why does he care?

- For one, he says Apple is hurting its customers because they're keeping prices high. We've seen the sort of damage that the "race to the bottom" can do to a computer company. Consider the lead-in to the Reuters report on Dell's quarterly earnings from Feb: "Dell Inc's quarterly gross margin missed Wall Street expectations, hurt by sales of lower-priced personal computers for consumers and a rise in costs for memory chips and other components." Unless they're abusing their customers, I think a company is reasonably entitled to a profit. Hurting themselves by offering a product at a loss isn't normally good business practice - it's why Dell focuses on high-price, high-margin products and (not entirely successfully it seems) has tried to stay out of the price wars even though it has lost them market share. (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61H60O20100219) It's why HP has a large services division. He complains that Apple cannot compete with the sub-$1000 Blu-Ray offering laptops out there - but Apple doesn't want to, and is likely better off not doing so. One could argue about how much profit a company "should" make, but Apple's gross margin is 36%, while Dell's is 17% - consider that the S&P 500 has an average margin of 39%.

- He calls what Apple does a "price fixing scheme." I don't think "price fixing" means what he thinks it means - price fixing requires collusion between multiple parties. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing Simply not lowing a price as a product gets older is something completely different - or would he claim that the price increase on an S2000 from MY00 to MY01, substantially identical cars, is "price fixing?"

- He says Apple is "border[ing] on monopolistic behavior." Again, I don't think he understands the words he is using. Apple is the only company that makes Apple laptops, but you can get a laptop from dozens of different companies. Apple is no more a monopoly than Honda is because they're the only company that sells Civics.

- Another complaint is that the lack of updates "prevents progress from being made." I can see this - if all computer manufacturers made fewer demands for CPU, memory and graphics updates from vendors such as Intel and NVidia, yeah, I could understand Moore's Law falling by the way side.

Speaking as somebody who gets along just fine with a car that's over ten years old, and a computer that's over five (!) years old, I'm not a fan of consumeristic churn, and therefore think it's rather silly to "HATE" Apple simply because they don't update a $1200 to $2400 product every few months or whatever.

 

Good post Elistan.

The fact is, people are free to buy a Windows or Apple computer, but for the past six years or so, Apple has been growing at over 30% per year, so its doing something people like.