Behind the pretty plastic of an Apple is a circut board made in China, a chipset, guts of a monitor, HDD, power supply, RAM, that is made by firms with names that have little to do with “apple,” other than they screw the stuff topgether and stick their logo on it.
Your super duper Apple is a nice prepackaged consumer grade machine that’s easy to use and very pretty at an over the top price.
If you want quality or high end dedicated performace you buy a PC or build one yourself. Even the case of an Apple is crap! It’s just pretty.
The only really “special” thing about Macs is that they have a much better operating system than anything Microsquish puts out. The hardware nowadays isn’t really any better or different than what goes in a Wintel box.
I went the Newegg route and just finished assembling two butt-kicking gaming machines for about $2400 total. Expensive, yes, but a single 24” screen iMac with similar (slightly lower) hardware specs would run around $2000. I like OS X, and like seeing Apple competing with and pushing Microsoft in the marketplace, but I can’t bring myself to pay that big a premium for a better operating system...especially since I can always, should I no longer require Microsoft Vista for gaming, reformat and load a Linux distro for free.
}:-)4
The latest iMacs are made of aircraft grade aluminum, not plastic.
Your super duper Apple is a nice prepackaged consumer grade machine that’s easy to use and very pretty at an over the top price.
Go to Dell and build a computer to match the basic MacPro... hardly a "consumer grade machine"... as closely as possible and see what the price comes to. The last time I did it (about three weeks ago) the Dell was $1000 more expensive than the $2799 Mac and STILL did not equal the speed or performance of the Mac.
That is true for most manufacturers. The company asks "what can you give us" and builds a box using that. But Apple works closely with their manufacturers, stretching their abilities, asking "how can you change to give us what we want" and has that built. Apple has actually invented new manufacturing techniques and had the manufacturers switch to those for their products.
The product design team led by Jonathan Ive spends a lot of its time overseas making sure those manufacturers can make the design vision come true. Plus they work closely with the engineers so that what you get is never just a bunch of junk haphazardly crammed into a pretty shell. A lot of money is spent to make sure design, engineering and manufacturing work closely together. Other OEMs spend very little money on such things.
Some of us would rather work than tinker. I want a machine that will run the top of the line video editing and graphics software with a minimum of crashes, hangups and slowdowns. I don't have the time or background to build my own car, house, washing machine, telephone or computer, so I look for the best that is commercially available that I can afford. In a computer, that happens to be a Mac.
What is the point of telling someone to build their own computer? If they haven't done it by now, they're probably not inclined to, so I guess you're just trying to show us how wonderful you are.
About 3 months after my dad got a Powerbook, Delta dropped it and put a big dent in the side of it. Now three years later it is still trucking with no problems. How many PC laptops can do that? Most of them are in fact plastic and would have shattered. The aluminum Mac book just took it and kept on going like it was normal business.
Damn right!
I got tired of the crap coming out of Detroit so I'm building my own car.........which I should be able to drive in a couple of years...........
Actually, for channeling air in order to keep the "guts" cool, it's one of the best designed in the industry, on par with HP Proliant Server designs.
All computers are pretty much the same when you look at their components. Some manufacturers choose better components than others. Some manufacturers, like Apple, have very stringent requirements on their components to ensure that they meet certain standards, and will work without the incompatability problems you can see from time to time when putting together your own system.
The simple fact of the matter is that when you're dealing with businesses that need to ensure that their systems are up and running at near "five nines" reliability levels in a corporate environment, you NEVER see PCs or systems built up by the techs. NEVER. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
Mark
I have my dual G4 still running at my office. It is 8 years old, I have never had to wipe it clean and reinstall everything like I did with my windows machines. I have thrown out probably 100 computers in the same time frame that were dell, sony, compaq, and hp. My office is now all apple, has been for about two years. Not one instance of having to rebuild and reinstall any computer. The only decent non Apple I have had is my rack full of Compaq Proliant servers. The case on an Apple is crap? What are you smoking? You should see my MacBook Pro...It has been dropped many many times, looks like it was put in a washing machine. It is beat up and ugly now but will outlast any garbage you buy. You sound like George Castanza when he was upset because it was cold and he had shrinkage.