Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity. The difference in price between a good Dell laptop and Apple one is same as wage for 1-2 months for a middle class person in most parts of the worlds.
My life is full of crappy cheap gadgets and things. Nearly everything I deal with on a day to day basis has been designed to be manufactured as cheaply and as quickly as possible, and it's evident. I like using my little MacBook; it's slim, it's light, it's beautifully built, it's aesthetically pleasing, it has a great keyboard, there's nothing else out there that comes close to the trackpad, it's full of nice touches and it feels like someone has put a lot of thought into it's design.
About the same time, my sister bought herself a Toshiba laptop that, on paper, was equivalent to my macbook, but it cost her about 25% less. The toshiba is almost twice as fat, has a horrid keyboard, an even worse touch pad, a battery life of about two hours and flexes like you wouldn't believe.
I guess it's similar to buying expensive clothes or paying more for a nice car (I have neither)
I love the aesthetics of a Macbook Air for instance, but I'd be terrified to travel with one the way I travel.
The thing I've learned is that people often value things differently to how I do, and for reasons I don't often understand.
Personally, I find Windows to be a hugely annoying OS to use, and very limiting, but I understand that for almost everybody else it suits their needs fine and they like it. I'm a big fan of Linux, but I realise that may not suit everyone.
Same with music; you wouldn't believe what I listen to, and I don't imagine for a second you'd like it (hint: if an album doesn't have at least a few tracks that go for over 10 minutes, I'm not interested), and the reverse is possibly true as well.
What am I getting at here? Thankfully, we're not all clones of each other, and often personal tastes are very different. Expecting some stranger to justify their choices to you kind of indicates you haven't figured this yet.
You like it simply because you like it. You recognize some people may not like it, and may like other things. And that's ok. You think your Mac is fine for you, and does what you want to do the way you want to do them and it may or may not be the case for other people and find that to be and alright way for the world to be.
Enlightened.
You know what is intelligent? Having a counter argument. All you have is snotty insults.
Kinda proves my point for me.
Evidence of this abounds: my favorite example is the multitouch touchpad that Apple uses. If somebody is saying something good about a pointing device on a non-Apple laptop, odds are good that they've never spent time with Apple's touchpad. It's that much better, but if you haven't used it and you don't trust Apple or anybody who uses Apple products, you'll probably never assign it more than about $5 of value, when experienced users would easily value it at ten times that. (That's why it isn't insane for apple to release a standalone touchpad for $70).
Fortunately for Apple, far more people have been willing to try the iPhone than have been willing to try their computers, and many of them have discovered that "not sucking" is worth more than a few hundred megahertz. The "halo effect" is real, and is not due entirely to people "buying in" to an Apple lifestyle.
The people who have strong technical or financial barriers to using Apple computers are far outnumbered by the proud Apple haters who haven't actually used a Mac long enough to appreciate the little things. However, unless somebody else starts releasing well designed computer hardware and software, Apple will eventually win over most of the haters through sheer ubiquity. (I expect that at some point, there will be a tipping point where hating Apple becomes uncool. If we pass that tipping point before Apple has serious competition, Apple will probably achieve a near-monopoly.)
Most people I know that have (and love) the iPhone today hated it before they tried it. I had a friend who kept saying his Windows Mobile phone was fine for all the stuff he needed, and there was no reason to get an iPhone. After he moved in with me in Vancouver (from New Brunswick) and saw how fluid it was for me to use my iPhone, and how I never had to dick around with it uselessly like he did with his just to get it to work, he switched.
Two years of me telling him it was great, and he didn't believe me. A week of seeing me use it changed his mind.
Personally, I despise the acceleration curve Apple uses when I'm using a mouse with my MBP. I went through all kinds of contortions to deal with it or change it. I tossed out my mighty mouse after a couple months due to crud build-up and returned the magic mouse because it was virtually impossible to use without hand cramps or having it slide across my desk.
The only thing I really think is special about the trackpad on my MBP is its size, but I've found that the pad on my Dell just seems to work better with higher accuracy and less padding around and the ergonomics "feel" better to me.
I'd pay extra money for them to un-suck their pointy interface devices and software. They're really that bad.
Why I can't I hook up something like an iPad to my Mac as an interface device? Mirror the screen on it so I have some direct eye-finger synergy? I'd pay for something like that, with a nice capacitive touch screen.
>Maybe only Americans can afford such frivolity.
Tell us more about how you're better than us, please.
And newer SUV's are even worse. You can't even see out of the back of a fucking 08 Explorer.
I have about 6 different brands of laptop, which I use as my desktop and carry with me on my long commute. Every one of them started having odd hardware issues. The latest was a Acer. Within 2 weeks the backlight stopped working. I got it fixed (no laptop for at least 2 weeks) and within another month it was broken again. It continued to be a problem until the warranty expired. I'll never touch another Acer product as long as I live.
Mac can and will have lemons like any company does, but their support makes me not have to fear this. That alone is worth any little extra I pay.
And you can buy a HP/Dell that costs exactly the same as your Mac, if you looked at the more expensive end of their lineup.
Apple does not make cheap computers. HP/Dell make both.
And who really cares about faster these days?
Edit: I guess I should make it clear that I am agreeing with you.
Ever tried ThinkPad? :)
For those who disliked the comment didn't the POTUS [Obama] himself comment that iPad was a distraction.