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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

(Most) PC's Are Crap

My year-and-a-half old MacBook Pro recently went comatose. I certainly wasn't happy, but was damn glad I had AppleCare. It turned out being the logic board which Apple replaced within 3 days at no cost to me, other than the loss of the computer.

In the meantime, my company allowed me to pick up a backup computer. Now most of use (all but one actually) use Macs. But the lure of the low price tag compelled them to an HP.

Now many fault for Apple for the limit in choices of their computers. I for one welcome it. Shopping for a PC is a ridiculous exercise is frustration. Even though my search was already limited to HP's, there are an insane number of PCs to choose from, all within the same price point, all with different specs. It's truly insane. I researched online and went to two stores and I'm still not sure what my choices were or what they meant. I took the easy way out and chose a PC based on size and price.

It was a 14" HP laptop. God only knows what the model is and what the specifications are. But hey, I got a good deal - $650 and a free printer.

Oh joy. I get a plastic hunk of crap loaded with a crap OS (Vista). The seams don't quite fit together, the cooling fan sounds like a jet engine, the screen is sub par. Sure, it was only $650, but man, you get what you pay for.

Apples are definitely worth the premium. Sure, I know there are nicer and more expensive PCs out there. But what I saw was truly a pile of crap.

UpdateOkay, it's been pointed out that I may not be comparing Apples To Apples hear (pun intended, deal with it). Yes, it's not fair to compare a $650 PC with a $2400 Apple Mac. But I would gladly pay $1299 for a new MacBook over the $650 PC any day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're just wrong. It's interesting that you whine about how bad the PC was after sending your overpriced-but-oh-so-hip Mac in for repairs...
And, of course, you hop on the anti-Vista bandwagon.
Why do Mac users consistently knock the PC? Both are fine machines...could it be their way of dealing with buyer's remorse after spending 3 times what they would have for a PC that did everything the Mac does...?

Anonymous said...

Well, if we want to get into right/wrong here, let's do it. :-)

Macs are not 3 times the price. If you do a feature-for-feature comparison, Macs are the same and sometimes even less than PC's. Sure you could quibble about this port and that port, but at the end of the day, the price difference is not that different.

Any computer will fail from time to time. My MacBook Pro is a work horse. It's been on 24/7 for over a year and a half, tossed about, etc. The Lenovo Stinkpad I used to have for my old job would fail (display, logic board, hard drive - the list goes on) at least twice a year with the same amount of use.

The HP I bought in comparison to any Mac on the market is crap. Are there nicer PCs? Of course. I freely admit I'm comparing a Mercedes with a Chevy here so the comparison is not quite fair. But I'd much rather spend twice the price and get a much nicer machine, with more features, speed, less bloat and minimal plastic.

The bottom line is you get what you pay for. A $650 PC is a $650 PC. If Apple made a $650 machine it'd probably be crap too.

And I've been on the anti-Windows bandwagon since Windows 1.0. The Mac OS X experience is just simpler, better, faster, easier than Vista. Vista is pretty to look at compared to XP, but there's nothing special there and it's constant security alerts and such are simply

:-)