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Apple Hardware - how fairly priced?

The hardware is overpriced, but that's the tip of the iceberg. Apple taking a cut on software and media makes it a worse deal for consumers and producers.

Still...slick lines and shiny buttons have been great marketing tools since Captain Cook's time.
 
editor said:
My primary laptop is now a £260 Asus Transformer. Fast, powerful and with a 12 hour battery life - and the ability to turn into a tablet - it does everything I need it to do for a fraction of the price of the swishy Sony Windows ultra-thin carbon fibre laptop that is currently gathering dust next to me.
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can I ask what model? or more importantly what processor and how much ram? I've got a cheap 8.1 HP which is so slow I've nearly hurled it across the room too many times. I thought the Transformers were pretty equivalent.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
There was a period in which Apple construction standards went down. The laptop that I got to replace my old 17" PPC machine (hugely solid and reliable) when it was stolen was distinctly inferior - it fails to work now when I have really historical iBooks that are fine. OTOH my MacBook Air 2nd gen is still absolutely usable despite being 5+ years old, and everything in the last few years has been the same from what I can see.
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I remember seeing more complaints about apple build quality when they made the switch from PPC to intel chips.
 
It's difficult to call Apple hardware "overpriced", because there generally aren't comparable Windows machines. There's always something different between them, and if the Apple offering happens to have what you need then there's little alternative.

That being said, if all you need is a bog standard machine then your money goes a helluva lot farther when you're not buying something with a fruit logo on it. It all depends on how fussy you are and what you need.
 
Chz said:
It's difficult to call Apple hardware "overpriced", because there generally aren't comparable Windows machines. There's always something different between them, and if the Apple offering happens to have what you need then there's little alternative.

That being said, if all you need is a bog standard machine then your money goes a helluva lot farther when you're not buying something with a fruit logo on it. It all depends on how fussy you are and what you need.
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"Fussy" in what sense?
 
Macs have a nicer touchpad than about 99% of other laptops out there, for instance. It's not so much that it's ever bothered me personally, but I do know people who cringe at the pads on even the nicer Ultrabooks out there. To me, that's fussy. They both do the job, and I've never found it makes the slightest difference to me.
 
editor said:
Are they really? They must have really terrible sales with loads of returns then.
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I got a cheap lenovo, the touchpad is not fit for purpose. If it weren't for the touch screen I'd either need to carry a mouse or return it.

Sometimes the Apple machines are good value compared to Dell/HP/Lenovo. But in part that's because no one buys them at list price.

Also apple only target relatively narrow parts of the market compared to the big OEMs. Start with Dell then try to find a matching Mac and its going to generally come out even worse than going Apple to Dell.
 
Bob_the_lost said:
I got a cheap lenovo, the touchpad is not fit for purpose. If it weren't for the touch screen I'd either need to carry a mouse or return it.
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If I bought a laptop with a touchpad that was so bad that it was "not fit for purpose" I'd take it straight back. That said, I never ever use the touchpad on my Asus because I much prefer to use the the touchscreen.
 
I have a £900 Dell ultrabook for work and I can't use the ultrabook trackpad without tearing my hair out, I have to use a mouse instead. The reason it frustrates me so much is because I've been using mac trackpads for 2 years and the difference is massive.

This thread has just reminded me to put in my business case for a mac.
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
Yes.
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Makes you wonder how they manage to sell so many millions of units for years and years and years on end, doesn't it? Or maybe people aren't as hyper critical as you, neither can they afford to pay thousands of pounds for a laptop like you, and maybe they find that a lower price unit provides a decent enough way to get stuff done.
 
editor said:
I don't like trackpads much anyway. Not even - gasp! - Apple ones.
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They're kind of handy for me. I go to a lot of conferences where my laptop is on my lap and there's no room for a mouse. There's always a lack of power sockets at these things and a new mac will last pretty much all day and this crappy dell lasts me about 3 hours.

I'm going to buy a decent keyboard/case for my Nexus tablet to use for work events so I can leave the ultrabook in the office.
 
editor said:
Makes you wonder how they manage to sell so many millions of units for years and years and years on end, doesn't it? Or maybe people aren't as hyper critical as you, neither can they afford to pay thousands of pounds for a laptop like you, and maybe they find that a lower price unit provides a decent enough way to get stuff done.
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Hyper critical, from someone who doesn't even use them at all? Could you be letting your relative ignorance of the topic shade things?

I use a lot of different laptops in a year and there is a huge difference between the track pad in some models and marques. That's ignoring the ones without separate buttons, mutli touch, additional gesture support etc...

Saying that you've never had an issue, when you don't use them and then taking the most fisher-price interpretation of the market isn't helpful or insightful.

Finally, shipping a lot of units doesn't mean they are any good nor is a high return rate unheard of for some hardware. See Xbox 360.
 
Bob_the_lost said:
Hyper critical, from someone who doesn't even use them at all? Could you be letting your relative ignorance of the topic shade things?

I use a lot of different laptops in a year and there is a huge difference between the track pad in some models and marques. That's ignoring the ones without separate buttons, mutli touch, additional gesture support etc...

Saying that you've never had an issue, when you don't use them and then taking the most fisher-price interpretation of the market isn't helpful or insightful.

Finally, shipping a lot of units doesn't mean they are any good nor is a high return rate unheard of for some hardware. See Xbox 360.
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Err, I have used Apple laptops a fair bit, but I find this constant sneering about the supposedly massive shortcomings of perfectly functional machines from those who can't afford hugely expensive laptops more than a little condescending. And snobbish too.
 
Mapped said:
They're kind of handy for me. I go to a lot of conferences where my laptop is on my lap and there's no room for a mouse. There's always a lack of power sockets at these things and a new mac will last pretty much all day and this crappy dell lasts me about 3 hours.

I'm going to buy a decent keyboard/case for my Nexus tablet to use for work events so I can leave the ultrabook in the office.
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I get the best of both worlds with the Transformer - 12 hour battery life + plus keyboard + touchscreen (and trackpad if I ever decide I want to use one). It won't replace a MacBook for massive power users wanting to render 3D images while batch converting huge directories of images and manipulating complex wireframe models via the touchpoad, but for everyday use it's fantastic. Cheap too.
 
I was dealing with a bunch of pretty high spec Lenovos a year or so ago - the trackpads were nowhere near Macbook quality, even leaving out the integration between the trackpad and OS for stuff like multi-touch. I don't even like trackpads particularly but it was noticeable and really pretty irritating.
 
Isn't this trackpad argument more a case of 'its what you're used to'?

All my sub £500 laptops (Lenovo, Toshiba and and old IBM) have been fine as regards the trackpads,if there have been issues it has been driver based which I've sorted out myself (in both Windows and Linux).
 
I've got a mac air and will be swapping it out for a lightweight PC when it comes to it's end of life. As a piece of kit they are excellent and the customer service in the stores if you buy the card is probably the best you'll find anywhere. If I look at something like the carbon x1 the air looks pretty good value.
 
paolo said:
Dell Precision M3800 Workstation

Metal body, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD... Two Grand - SPECIAL OFFER!

(This is a 15", so comparable to the MacBook Pro 15)
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Yes, but it contains a professional level graphics card (the Nvidia Quadro), which actually none of the MacBooks have, so not that comparable to a Macbook Pro 15

on and on trackpads, the Macbook's one is *hugely* better than any other that I've used (however I've not really used that many), it's the gestures, like two fingered scrolling, two fingered tap for right mouse button, swiping through browser history etc, and the relatively large size.
 
paolo said:
(Firstly - this isn't meant as platform war. We all have our preferences, and there's definitely no universal "this is best")

I was in the market for a new PC a year or so ago. I'd borked so many Windows machines over the years. Not for them being Windows, but they got bashed, were a plasticky, and all ended up dying.

So I finally switched camp and sunk an OMG level of money into a MacBook.

At the time I thought, well, that's what you pay for buying Apple. But then - after buying - looked at what was available for Windows, similar spec. Metal case, backlit keyboard, SSD, HiDPI display, all that stuff.

I was really surprised. Some equivalent Windows machines were (and still are) more expensive than Apple. My favourite Windows supplier, Sony, bailed. I think Samsung have bailed too, in Europe at least.

I guess my conclusion - but maybe it's wrong - is that for higher end specs on laptops, Apple aren't too bad.
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My MacBook Pro is 4.5 years old and still going strong. I never owned a windows machine that could go that long and still have 70% of the original battery life, still run multiple apps without crashing, still boot up in less than two minutes and still run every piece of software as well as it did the day I opened it.

While that's the state of play I see no value in going back to 'cheaper' windows machines.
 
Battery life and easy to obtain/repair standard parts has always been a big sales point for me with Apple. Plus the magnetic power cord. Seems like a silly thing but the amount of times that has saved me from nearly tripping up is worth a few more quid. Plus, you can boot into windows anyway on them now so even when I need to use Windows I can still do it on a mac.

I like the ASUS transformer as a tablet but its keyboard is too fiddly to use as a laptop. I had about 2 weeks to play with one as I bought one for my mother in law and set it up. I think the 11" air has it just about right in that capacity.
 
easy to obtain/repair standard parts has always been a big sales point for me with Apple
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That's a fairly new thing with them. Older Macbooks/Powerbooks were far and away the worst things to have to do maintenance on. I once counted 17 screws (of different sizes!) that I had to remove just to swap a hard disk on one.

These days they're essentially the same as anyone else, bar the MBA.
 
Support adds to the cost for Apple hardware. If you are within a reasonable distance from an Apple shop you can get courses on how to use your laptop and big applications many of which are free. They can also sort out most issues with your laptop in the shop.

How much this is worth to you is depends on your skill with computers but even if you are good with them, having somewhere to go to get help is nice. No other PC company offers this level of service, sacrificing it in the drive to the bottom that occured for windows laptops.
 
Chz said:
That's a fairly new thing with them. Older Macbooks/Powerbooks were far and away the worst things to have to do maintenance on. I once counted 17 screws (of different sizes!) that I had to remove just to swap a hard disk on one.

These days they're essentially the same as anyone else, bar the MBA.
Click to expand...

Current MBPr 13 is *dreadful* for DiY hardware jobs. I was pondering cleaning the internals of the keyboard and trackpad... watched some YouTube videos... Geez. 100 screws maybe?

iFixit gave it 1/10 on ease of maint.

Still, on performance it's one the best bits of kit I've ever owned. Doing some big number crunching, on Windows as it happens, it way outperforms a big EC2 instance I fired up the other night.

I can get close to a gigabit/s on WiFi, and close to a gigabyte/s on local file access.

Not many people really need that kind of performance, but for me it's the best Windows laptop I've ever owned ;)
 
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