I think this is cool, but that’s the truth right there.
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Let me guess, security requirement to run a particular anti-virus and a management suite that only works on Windows? Kinda like being “safer” in a bad part of town because you brought security guards.
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Yup, about the only things cheaper in a rural area are labor and land, everything else is more expensive. Since most folks are on the labor side of things too it’s a double whammy.
You’re lucky that you even have a goodwill.
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Eh, fair enough. Just know that with Apple computers you’re paying a much higher markup on the parts and labor assembling them than you do with most other manufacturers.
That’s another thing, except for a few things that only benefit a narrow swath of users (triple AAA gamers, 4k video editors, animators, ect…), the raw power of desktop computers essentially plateaued about 5 years ago. I’m still using a home server I built in 2012 which was the equal of any Mac or PC at the time for a third the price of an equivalent Mac and half the price of an equivalent PC, and all I’ve had to do is upgrade the IO configuration to support newer cable standards. I applaud you for not caving to the market bullshit that tells you to buy a new computer every few years. Just know that your Mac didn’t last longer because it’s better, it lasted longer because computer hardware has largely stagnated when it comes to the benchmarks that the vast majority of users need them to meet. They are pretty to look at, and if that Apple tax is worth it for you then it’s your money. If it’s the OS you prefer, putting Mac OS on a Windows PC is much simpler than building a whole machine.
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It runs deeper than that. Those commercials did nothing to help but Mac vs. “PC” was a thing for at least a decade before Hodgman and Long. This kind of thing is always going to crop up when there’s something expensive and you have to make a choice. See Sega vs. Nintendo, Android vs. iOS, Ford vs. Chevy. It’s brand loyalty combined with a need to justify a big purchase; no one wants to feel like they wasted their money.
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The counter-snark is that there is no such thing as a Hackintosh that “works” in the sense of functioning like a computer you wouldn’t immediately return to the store. And I say that as someone who’s built one… sort of.
It’s not that it’s not a cool project or even a very useful thing to do, particularly if you have skillz. (I don’t have those kinds of skillz, as my long-dormant HackBook could tell you before crashing.) But “hey, check out my $150 Dell XPS ‘HackBook,’ it works great!” tends to mean that it works great as long as you got a base computer that was from a batch manufactured at a specific plant during a specific hour of a specific day, and you don’t mind closing the 17 terminal windows throwing up error messages on boot, and you already own one of the six specific routers where the drivers actually work, and you’re okay with it being permanently side-letterboxed and running at 24 fps, and you’re okay with the left shift key being hardcoded to reformat the hard drive, and you don’t mind running only odd-numbered versions of Safari, and you’re willing to learn the Old Norse (Dvorak) keyboard, and you’re comfortable manually allocating every program’s memory space, and you can live with it not refreshing the screen for exactly an hour after every keypress during daylight savings time.
Whatever the “biblical fruit emblem’s” other sins, their computers work more or less as they’re meant to, because a zillion code monkeys are typing away on a daily basis to ensure it. (Ditto every other cheaper computer too, of course.)
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It never ceases to amaze me how many kickass programmers can’t spend 10 seconds googling the resolution to a specific interface gripe that has an easy fix. And this one doesn’t even require a trip to the Terminal. Yes, it’s a stupid default, but it’s not like it’s hard-coded into the OS, and it’s not like there aren’t stupid infuriating defaults in other OSes either (like, say, web browsers putting each tab in its own “window” in the Windows taskbar).
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I don’t actually disagree with this. I just believe that they gouge their customers because they’re the only manufacturer that can easily and seamlessly run their OS, and most Mac users are unwilling to put up with the hassle that’s Windows less holistic OS or learn a Linux distro. And if that’s the case, then I guess that’s what that OS is worth to them. But I find it amusing that Mac users often think their hardware is intrinsically better than the hardware in all other machines, as if the elegance of the case confers some charm on the OEM parts inside it.
Watching the recent Macbook price hikes is like watching that lawyer in Planes, Trains and Automobiles say, anyone who would pay fifty dollars for a cab, would certainly pay seventy-five.
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Ha, fair enough. That case is super-elegant tho.
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Out of curiosity… which browser does that? I go back and forth between Chrome, Firefox, and occasionally (gasp) Edge, and I never had to change anything to keep that from happening. I guess that leaves Internet Exploder, but I use that only on alternate leap years and then only one tab.
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A friend made a hackintosh for me seven years ago and it’s been great. Aside from the $$$ saved (even with all new parts), the thing I like best is that the power switch, USB ports, phone and mic sockets, SD card slots, and disc drive are all on the FRONT and easily accessible.
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Plus, all of my aging machines are worth about 50% what I paid for them according to eBay and Low End Mac. That coupled with the fact that they never shit the bed like every Windows rig I’ve ever used does regularly and I’m not switching in this lifetime.
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Is there a good place to shop for inexpensive, new PC parts? I used to go to PriceWatch, but when I go there now I’m not so sure I’m seeing actual good deals.
Yes, but the main requirement is an encryption suite that can wipe the machine remotely if a kill-signal gets sent. Which is a bit of a fucker, to be honest.
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Didn’t say I’d not turned it off.
My issue is that there are so many “ten second” gripes in macos to be fixed that I gave up. Gave the mac back and BYOD-ed a Razer. Same form factor, comparable build quality, better machine, better OS(es).
Incidentally, I’ve never seen that each-tab-per-taskbar button functionality in windows. Not seen that since the bad old days before tabbed browsing.
I think this sums it up for me. I know that the parts inside my two macs over 16 years are made by seagate, or western digital, or AMD, ATI, etc. Like every PC. But every single windows machine I work on in that same time frame craps the bed. I’ve had 6 WIN laptops in that same time frame at work. They are absolute garbage…add to it the annoyance that is Windows, and no thank you.
Does anybody here remember the Capacitor Plague? I work with a bunch of doctor’s offices, and about 12 years ago Blue Cross gave them free computers. I never did understand the terms of the deal, or even the point, but suddenly a whole bunch of my doctors had free Dell Optiplex GX270 boxen, and I put them to work in their offices. Well, a bit less than a year later, every single one of those machines (I dealt with about 50; Blue Cross must have rolled out tens of thousands across SoCal) had swollen/leaking capacitors.
At around the same time, another of my clients - a plastic surgery practice - bought a bunch of 20" iMacs for the doctor’s desks and patient interview rooms. And - you guessed it - three out of five of them ended up with swollen/leaking capacitors.
The Dell machines were cheap pieces of crap; they probably retailed for about $500, and - considering that Blue Cross bought them cheap enough to give them away - Dell can’t have made much on them. But every single one of them got a new motherboard within one business day of the trouble ticket being called in - at least one of them was actually delivered the same afternoon!
By comparison, the iMacs were - for the time - magnificent pieces of engineering, and magnificently expensive too. When I took off the cover, I was seriously impressed by the clean, beautiful design of something that - in the usual run of business - is completely hidden. But getting Apple to repair those machines? Surely you jest. First they swore up and down that it was a user problem, then that it wasn’t covered under warranty (although the machines were less than six months old.) I ended up having to take the machines to an authorized service center; the repair took a couple of weeks, and the machines were returned with freshly-formatted hard disks.
Granted, this was before the first Apple store opened in Southern California; I’m sure things are much better in the Genius Bar era. But the whole experience taught me a few things…
- Everybody buys low-level components in the same marketplace, and when bad things happen at the supplier level nobody is immune.
- Paying many times more is no guarantee of good service.
- Dell mostly sucks, but even they are occasionally capable of good things.
- Recapping motherboards can be fun (I learned this a bit later, but still.)
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Holy wars.
Don’t count on it. Yes, they’ll fix a lot of simple problems users come to them with. But they’re not repair techs. Machines that need warranty service get sent away. A lot of very fixable problems Apple simply won’t, and they end up swapping out entire parts or boards that could be repaired, which is why their service costs more than many new computers. On top of that, Apple makes it their mission in life to make it as difficult as possible for anyone else to service their machines.
All manufacturer’s after-sales service sucks. Apple is just unusually polite about it.
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