Braineack

iTrader: (62)

laughed so hard on that

kotomile

iTrader: (24)

Thanks, in part, to me!

icantthink4155

iTrader: (12)

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

who will pump all the oil?

pusha

iTrader: (5)

lol

icantthink4155

iTrader: (12)

Ive never shopped for a mac, but holy F if its really this bad.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

hey lets compare the shoddy operation newegg's bargain prices to a built system with totally different quality control standards and warranties!

i'm not a mac fanboi by any means but this comparison is hardly fair.

for one, someone who doesn't know how (or want) to build a computer isn't going to give a flying **** about newegg's prices.

Also Apple may have higher supplier prices because they have stricter quality requirements. Your average Intel chip might have a (number out of ***) failure rate of 1 per 5000. Apple may require 1 per 50,000 and pay for it. I know they have very strict requirements for dead pixels on monitors.

Ultimately those people buying macs are willing to pay for what they get and not have to dick around with what slot to shove their $20 raid controller in.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

50% higher prices than typical retail prices?* It ought to come with a no-questions-asked lifetime guarantee at those prices.




*What's wrong with newegg? I've never had a problem with them.

Reverant

iTrader: (10)

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. Period.

I've owned 3 Macs in the past:

1) Apple TiBook. Failed LCD, exterior white paint on the sides flaked.
2) Apple PowerBook 17" Aluminum 1.33Ghz. Would never wake up from sleep. Reinstalled OSX from scratch 100 times, updated etc, no fix. Apple deleted all the threads in the forums about this problem.
3) Apple Cube. Started cracking after a while due to the temperatures (it was a fanless system). It just died a couple of years after and never worked again.

I do not (and could never) recommend a Mac to anyone for the life of me.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

So, what is the typical failure rate for retail-boxed copies of Microsoft Office?

(Yes, I know- technically it's been 100% ever since they implemented that stupid new "ribbon" interface. But you know what I mean.)



Agreed- I use them all the time.

But this is larger than Newegg. They're not the most expensive, but they're also not the cheapest.

Want markup? Check out Best Buy and re-do the comparison. Same story there.

Ditto Dell, and for that matter, nearly everyone else in the business.



The problem here is that people like whoever made that image are trying to compare a Mac to a computer, and that's just not a relevant comparison.

I'm totally serious, and I don't mean that in an entirely derogatory way. When you buy an Apple product, you're not just buying a computer, you're buying a "lifestyle product".

It's no different from some woman going out and paying $500 for a pair of ripped blue jeans, or $800 for a tiny purse. Or for you men-folk, substitute $200 sunglasses, $900 wristwatches, and $54,000 Mustangs with the name of some old guy from Texas written on the back.

Yeah, I can get perfectly good jeans for $18 from Wal-Mart, and they won't even have any rips in them. But don't even try reasoning with a 15 year old girl about that sort of thing.



I mean, how many people do you know who would actually refer to their Apple product as just "a computer"? They don't. They refer to their "Airbook", rather than their "Laptop", which would be about the same as me referring to my "Latitude", which just wouldn't work in conversation.


It's easier to just not be bothered by it.

Pen2_the_penguin

iTrader: (4)

no problems with newegg here... and I have the option to buy wholesale too, just to lazy.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

I get your point here, but I'll disagree a little bit.

The woman who buys $500 pre-ripped blue jeans doesn't generally around and claim to everyone who will stand still for 30 seconds that her $500 pre-ripped blue jeans actually function better as jeans than the $18 Wal-Mart jeans, or that she's actually saving money over the long run.

Likewise, I'm guessing that owners of Shelby Mustangs aren't under the delusion that the extra $20,000 is going directly to functional upgrades over regular Mustangs, or that regular Mustangs are nothing but frustration and trouble compared to Shelby Mustangs.

But somehow, the Cult of Mac has decided that everyone would be better off with a Mac instead of a PC. People who buy PC's simply haven't been enlightened to the Mac wisdom. They actually believe that they haven't simply made the best choice for their own priorities (whether those priorities are style, function, value, or what-have-you), but that it was the best choice for anyone.

Now, does Apple (or rather, its management and employees) believe this as well? Probably not, but they certainly aren't discouraging it among their customers.

viperormiata

iTrader: (24)

Faeflora

iTrader: (2)

Personally, I have an affinity for rodents, but everything dies someday. I think what matters more is how something lives. Killing a mouse instantly is totally "humane" compared to hundreds of millions of animals in factory farms soaking in their own **** covered sores, being pumped full of hormones, and only staying alive because of a constant dose of antibiotics.

pusha

iTrader: (5)

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

You'll get no argument from me there. I can't really think of a direct parallel outside of the computing industry, but I think that the fundamental paradigm is comparable.


Within Apple, I do believe that there are at least a few individuals who have drank the Kool-Aid. Jobs himself, for one. Many aspects of the design of the original Mac (lack of expansion slots, lack of memory expandability, etc) were a direct result of his personal mandate after having abandoned the Lisa project and seized personal control over the Mac team. Jobs genuinely believed that the product would in fact be "better" for these limitations, in that all Macs would be the same as a result, and one of the biggest challenges faced by writers of x86-class software (dealing with machines of differing configurations) would simply be eliminated.

In a way he was right, actually. No owner of a first-gen Mac had to worry about whether they had enough RAM to run a certain application, or ensure that they'd loaded the correct driver for their graphics card. Of course, it also meant that there was no way to be able to duplicate a floppy disk in a single pass (you had to swap disks over a dozen times to do this), and that when the next generation of operating systems and software came out, you had to toss the entire machine and buy a new one, rather than popping in a few new cards.


It's interesting to note what happened to Apple's products after Jobs went away for a while. The very next generation of Macs had separate monitors, expansion card slots, lots of different ports on the backside... all the things we consider "normal" in a PC. And they very nearly bankrupted the company.


Since Jobs' return, of course, Apple has been propelled into the stratosphere (well, the troposphere, anyway) even putting aside the consumer-electronics gadgets. Remember the iMac, that sickeningly colorful little gumdrop with the built-in CRT monitor and (gasp) no expansion slots? That was released a little over a year after Jobs came back on-board as CEO, and it was the machine that put Apple's balance sheets back into the black. Since then, all they've done is reformulate that basic design again and again, and they're still selling like gangbusters.



Whether or not the girl with the $500 jeans actually feels the need to proselytize to anyone who will listen about the inherent functional superiority of her pants vs. mine isn't what I was driving at. It's the underlying, intangible, nearly indescribable "thing" that drover her to buy the pants in the first place. She wanted to be part of the "in" club.


Years ago, I was an Amiga bigot. As a group, we were nearly as annoying as Mac owners, despite the fact that the machines we adored were designed by undisciplined hackers working at a company owned by a dangerous lunatic who hired delusional advisors and treated their word as gospel while belittling and abusing those who actually made the magic happen. And, to be honest, the machines were crap. Yeah, they were awesome for playing videogames. But the hardware was of poor quality, the OS was a confusing mishmash of concepts, the interlaced displays gave you a headache, and software that ran fine on an Amiga in Europe didn't work right in the US and vise-versa.

And yet we were all pretty sure that we were better than everyone else.

FRT_Fun

iTrader: (19)

I love when a family member buys a mac, something goes wrong, and I refuse to help them cause I don't feel like "learning" **** about macs. I've had many family members and friends, buy a mac, then a year later, buy a PC.

x808drifter

I love going over to friends hoses who just bought a MAC.I'll bring over my 6 year old 32bit XP tower and and watch the MAC freeze trying to muti-task like my old *** pc.

Buying a MAC IMO is like taking you car to a shity mechanic.
Why pay someone a **** ton of money to do something you can do yourself for MUCH cheaper.
Or your lazy and deserve to get ripped off.

gearhead_318

iTrader: (1)

I like mac computers, but I don't think I'd like OSX quite as much as I like Linux*. My parents had one of the old ones that looked like this. The only problem they ever was it would freeze quite often for a while but that was a user error. It lasted just about 10 years, but my brothers Dell that he got in February is starting to get the blue screen of death.

(*95% of the time at least, putting music on/off my iPod/laptop has proven to be a problem, but the same has become true of anything to do with iTunes)

9671111

iTrader: (10)

*