I’ll be damned if I am going to have to pay $119 for a battery after 1 year of service after spending $3000 on a laptop. First off an Apple replacement battery is more than likely over $200, probably much higher than that even. Secondly cars are more user serviceable even with newer cars.
I . . . [won't] pay $119 for a battery after 1 year of service after spending $3000 on a laptop. First off an Apple replacement battery is more than likely over $200, probably much higher than that even. Secondly cars are more user serviceable even with newer cars.
Part of the issue of the expense of maintaining a Mac is the cost of updates to the OS. Strictly speaking you don't have to update the OS from, say, Panther (10.3) to Tiger (10.4) (using a historical example). It's just that eventually you get to where you might want some software which requires the later version, if your hardware holds up and you don't ever get hardware upgrade lust. The reality is that the fact that you can expect the option to upgrade OS X actually adds to the value proposition when you consider buying a Mac. OS X upgrades have not tended to be hardware resource hogs, so upgrading the OS by itself is generally - but not universally - an option.In that respect it is interesting that Snow Leopard is to be less a traditional extension of the OS X user feature set than a consolidation of the software basis of the OS_X/multicore_Intel Mac platform. It will not support, and thus marks the obsolescence of, the PowerPC which lack the multicore CPU technology towards which OS X.6 is being optimized. With its features being largely development rather than user-facing, the 10.6 Snow Leopard distro will be lean and mean. And at its $29 price point (and without any sales to PowerPC Mac owners) it will not be much of a cash cow for Apple. To me, it looks more like a statement about the ability of OS X to allow developers to exploit graphics processors and multiple 64-bit cores than it does a consumer product as such.
I assume that the image stabilization feature of iPhoto '09 will exploit that processing capability, but it'll be interesting to see how else it's used. Games would be an obvious possibility, and I would wonder about speech processing - which I consider to be still in its infancy compared to what it's likely to become - as well.