I want to start a severe love affair with Apple, but there’s a few things that stop me. The first is probably the crowd of people it attracts. You know, the guy who always thinks Macs have been superior to the PC since the dawn of the silicon chip, truth is, it’s just now catching up and doing a fine job of it (Yes, I’ll admit it, I’m not some PC jerk). I just can’t stand the smugness (I know Kenny might read this and I asked him about buying a Mac, I’ll get to that in a second). Wow, this post really only had 2 parts, I thought there was more. Ok, last point, HARDWARE. I know Apple tries to simplify this and make it for the lowest common denominator, but some PC enthusiast would love to replace parts, upgrade etc etc. I know I would. But our MacBooks at work only allow for the replacement and removal of two parts, the batter and RAM. Nothing else. The Dells allow us to troubleshoot the Battery, Wireless, Hard drive, RAM, Keyboard, internal fans, etc etc. The price of the hardware always gets me. You can almost never get a real good deal, unless you know someone that works for Apple (Hi Kenny!), and for some reason that’s always irked me. I mean, the most I’d probably do with a Mac is do what I do now, browse a couple sites and post on my blog. I barely play games anymore, but I still keep my PC around for the times I do wish to place. Anything laptop I want has to be portable, but it also has to be cheap. With the lowest end MacBook, I’ll probably come out even after upgrading the RAM myself. When I can get an HP or IBM small form factor for 3/4 the price of a Mac.
But there’s more! I actually do enjoy OS X a lot. I get to play with it at work and it’s just amazing sometimes. I do admit, I hate Finder and browsing directory trees, and mapping Windows drives statically and Apple’s fucking WWAN update that breaks Cisco VPN. This next point is very SAD. I love the way certain apps look in OS X, I wish shit would look that cool in Windows. AdiumX is so fucking sexy and I want it dammit. It’s GAIM skinned for OS X, bitch needs to release that shit PRONTO. Oh, and Icons, how sexy are they? But anyway, Apple, lower prices, you’ll be amazed at how many people would switch in a heartbeat or at least allow more customizable options, cause what’s out there just sucks. And please, through in a free iPod for me, I’m broke.
So there are several things I would like to address. I’ll start with price first. In the past several years, apple has drastically dropped the price not only on their desktops, but also their laptops. Conversely, Dell and a lot of other pc manufactures have upped theirs. Several years ago when Michael Dell was quoted saying “we make cheap computers, that’s what we do…”, or something to that effect he put things into perspective a lot of their clientele already knew, but hadn’t thoroughly looked over. As a business owner you don’t want to cheapest competitor, (I.E–the dumbest kid in class). It is true apple’s hardware is expensive, but the problem with dell and fellow pc competitors is that with your purchase a customer can always count that as a “starting cost”, with a mac you’re paying everything upfront-an umbrella cost, instead of monthly/yearly maintenance, firewall etc.
As for the pc enthusiast who loves to replace, upgrade and tamper with their pc to customize it’s performance, the macpro, or the powermac before it is a simple solution. Any standard serial ATA drive can be installed. third party ram, video card or upgrade to any of afore mentioned.
Secondly, in some respects I can agree with you. In finder, especially. especially in reguards to the idisk in uploading anything other than a small jpg or an office document it runs especially slow. With the impending release of leopard I am certain both of these problems will be ammended. As for the “typical mac user–created and immortalized first with “pirates of silicon valley” and more recently with apple’s ad campaign–I feel this is almost a toung in cheek for apple, but for the fanboys I both empathize and hate. But this I won’t exasperate any further.