I'm actually very interested in a laptop you can find that has the same weight, thinness, 7hr battery life, backlit keyboard, and sturdiness of say Apple's new 13" MBP. It will cost me $1100 due to university pricing. I've looked for a really long time and haven't found any that fit the bill. Seriously, I haven't found a single other company that designs as good looking notebooks for less money, though Sony comes close. My HP tablet's LEDs aren't even quite the same color blue (all 14 of them mind you), the glossy plastic looks horrible after a few days, flexes like crazy, fan is so loud I can't use it in quiet meetings, and is being repaired for the third time in 8 months as of right now. The dell studio14z feature wise is also close, but once you even the specs out roughly, there's only a $200 or so difference that I'd gladly pay for Apple's design and little extra features (and for many consumers, a free ipod touch).
Regarding OEM's putting all the programs you need on your PC, you must be referring to the mounds of shovelware and trials they so kindly leave for you. Very rarely have I bought a PC that didn't need extensive uninstalling, downloading of third party programs, reinstalling. I've had a handful of PCs that I've had to wipe the drive the instant I got the machine because of how horrible it was (HP I'm lookin' at you.)
Quad-cores, you're right, apple doesn't offer them, but for most uses, they are of dubious benefits. Video encoding and manipulation is the exception, but the number of people I know who actually do heavy video work on a computer often enough that it would really matter are small. I know very few people with desktops of any sort nowadays honestly. I'm talking about what's best for most consumers. I don't believe that most consumers are doing things that necessitate a quad core processor.
And yes, I know the Admin isn't a true administrator any longer, but whether or not this is Microsoft's fault, pc users in general tend to get malware left and right. In a purely practical sense, I tell my friends and family to consider macs just because I know that few people practice perfectly safe computing. These people aren't dumb, but manage to find themselves in trouble all the time. A sort of undeserved plus for macs is that it's very rare to get these sort of things.
And I've yet to see a dell that had nearly everything you'd ever need preinstalled. Just take a typical American teenager. IM? you'll sometimes have the ad-infested AIM client by the OEM there, but ichat is much better integrated (it's dead simple to do things like remote desktop through ichat with no setup) Music? itunes is the king right now. Mail? never seen as good as mail.app on the pc side preinstalled, and windows 7 is stripping out much of the MS versions. I don't trust budget PC OEMs to fill out the lineup. FFS my My last pc tablet was, straight out of the box, barely usable because of ads and trials, and wanted me to register for half a dozen things first boot. Name an OEM that includes no crapware, a solid suite for mail, calendar, internet, music, im, and ilife equivalents that are up to what is included in a mac. You can literally get apple's ilife/osx/iwork package and never have to download a single piece of software.
I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of how Apple can't fit certain scenarios, but what I'm getting at is the general populace of middle-class users who don't mind an extra $200 for design, use their notebooks for several hours a day for reports, college, business, presentations, internet, entertainment, etc. and need a quality notebook that doesn't have to be the fastest per dollar, but have a good all around experience from shopping for the computer to daily usage.
I still stand by the separation of windows and apps, but alas, it's not worth it to argue preference. But saying that superfetch will equalize program starting and launching a new window is simply wrong. For small light-weight programs, this is true, but opening a program is much more than just dumping the preloaded files from memory into an active state. Large programs take 4-5 seconds to initialize and run through the program's start up routine. And even programs like firefox can take a second or so. It's not a huge deal, but those little awkward pauses when you're working on have to wait 3 seconds vs a fraction of a second really influence how well a computer just gets out of your way to let you work.
Regarding OEM's putting all the programs you need on your PC, you must be referring to the mounds of shovelware and trials they so kindly leave for you. Very rarely have I bought a PC that didn't need extensive uninstalling, downloading of third party programs, reinstalling. I've had a handful of PCs that I've had to wipe the drive the instant I got the machine because of how horrible it was (HP I'm lookin' at you.)
Quad-cores, you're right, apple doesn't offer them, but for most uses, they are of dubious benefits. Video encoding and manipulation is the exception, but the number of people I know who actually do heavy video work on a computer often enough that it would really matter are small. I know very few people with desktops of any sort nowadays honestly. I'm talking about what's best for most consumers. I don't believe that most consumers are doing things that necessitate a quad core processor.
And yes, I know the Admin isn't a true administrator any longer, but whether or not this is Microsoft's fault, pc users in general tend to get malware left and right. In a purely practical sense, I tell my friends and family to consider macs just because I know that few people practice perfectly safe computing. These people aren't dumb, but manage to find themselves in trouble all the time. A sort of undeserved plus for macs is that it's very rare to get these sort of things.
And I've yet to see a dell that had nearly everything you'd ever need preinstalled. Just take a typical American teenager. IM? you'll sometimes have the ad-infested AIM client by the OEM there, but ichat is much better integrated (it's dead simple to do things like remote desktop through ichat with no setup) Music? itunes is the king right now. Mail? never seen as good as mail.app on the pc side preinstalled, and windows 7 is stripping out much of the MS versions. I don't trust budget PC OEMs to fill out the lineup. FFS my My last pc tablet was, straight out of the box, barely usable because of ads and trials, and wanted me to register for half a dozen things first boot. Name an OEM that includes no crapware, a solid suite for mail, calendar, internet, music, im, and ilife equivalents that are up to what is included in a mac. You can literally get apple's ilife/osx/iwork package and never have to download a single piece of software.
I'm sure you can find plenty of examples of how Apple can't fit certain scenarios, but what I'm getting at is the general populace of middle-class users who don't mind an extra $200 for design, use their notebooks for several hours a day for reports, college, business, presentations, internet, entertainment, etc. and need a quality notebook that doesn't have to be the fastest per dollar, but have a good all around experience from shopping for the computer to daily usage.
My Computer
- OS
- Windows 7
