5 ms·

You can tell your opinion is unpopular, you're already getting downvotes. I would have to mostly agree though, maybe besides the HP point. It's not quite a pro

by odiroot 11y ago

You can tell your opinion is unpopular, you're already getting downvotes. I would have to mostly agree though, maybe besides the HP point. It's not quite a proper comparison.

evgen 11y ago
The down votes are not because the opinion is unpopular, it is because it is so easily demonstrated to be incorrect. The rehash of the "mac tax" arguments (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple), misunderstanding how enterprises discount capex, anecdotes about support requirements, etc. The companies that are mainly Mac-based know what they are doing and what works at scale.
- slantyyz 11y ago
  >> (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple) If you're focused on specs, build quality and performance, etc., of course they are not equivalent. On the other hand, if you look at how they are to be used in the real world (i.e., a typical staffer who primarily does e-mail, Office and accesses web apps), they could be equivalent in terms of end-user effectiveness/productivity. A lot of people use computers that have too much capacity for their daily tasks.
  - mokus 11y ago
    Absolutely, but it is incorrect to cast that as a problem of the units being overpriced. I don't need Teledyne-LeCroy's 100 GHz oscilloscope at work, so if I bought one anyway when a 1 GHz unit would do, it'd be hardly fair to claim they overpriced it. I'd just be an idiot for buying a machine far more powerful than I can justify.
- rebootthesystem 11y ago
  I'm sorry, but this sort of thing can only come from people who are religious about their computer rather than practical. A $250 HP laptop like the one's I just bought my kids is just as capable and useful than a $2,000 Macbook Pro. Let's see, can it be used to log onto something like SalesForce by sales people, assistants, managers and other workers to manage customer leads and the sales process. YUP. Can it be used by various people to do email, browse the web, produce Word and Excel documents, make Skype calls and run other business applications. YUP. Can you use it to make presentations? YUP. Large display? YUP. Edit videos? YUP. Edit sound? YUP? Run Photoshop, Illustrator? YUP. Can it be used by software developers to maintain the company's website/s. YUP. Can it be used by graphic artists to work on brochures, images, pamphlets and other printed and web-based sales materials? YUP. Can it be used by engineers to run SolidWorks, AutoCAD or an EDA tool like Altium Designer. YUP. Embedded development, Keil? YUP. Run Eclipse? YUP. NetBeans? YUP. PyCharm, etc.? YUP. Can it be used to SSH into a server to run, well, whatever? YUP. Oh, let's see, can you run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Workstation? YUP. Can you run a VM with a Linux server? YUP. Multiple instances? YES! ...and the above list is not complete. Well, then. What, pray-tell, do you get for $2,000 that you cannot do with a $250 machine? Please don't say quality. That's nonsense. Yes, Apple machines have great design and quality. That is true. However, the $250 machine isn't crap and easily outlives it's useful life (meaning, you'll replace it with a new model way before it fails) and it offers just as much utility and functionality as the $2,000 Mac. Yes, some are crap. The beauty of the PC ecosystem is that you get MULTIPLE choices at every price point from a multitude of manufacturers. We've had good luck with HP, Sony and Acer. YMMV. And, when we buy laptops, we test the hell out of one for 30 days and then buy a dozen of them if they do well. You can nearly buy a dozen great PC laptops for the price of a single Macbook Pro. You can outfit an entire small company for the same money as one computer. That's saying something. And, frankly, the vast majority of the machines you see at the store from major brands are really nice machines. If you want to splurge and get a monster of a machine, spend $500. BTW, we have both Macs and PC's. Most of our engineering machines (either type) cost $10K to $50K by the time you account for the software and hardware installed in them. The point is that we are not delusional about why we have the machines we have. They are tools for a job. We would have no use whatsoever for Macs if it were not to work on iOS projects. Everything else, including web development can be done on any one of a horde of excellent PC's running Linux or Windows. Even commodity computers today are grotesquely over-powered for the vast majority of applications normal and not-so-normal businesses typically run. Look, wanting to buy a Ferrari is OK. Pretending it is a sensible solution when you commute on the 405 on a daily basis is delusional. Yet, if someone truly wants to drive a Ferrari and they can swing it, it's OK so long as they don't start to believe that this is a reasonable decision for everyone else out there. Please, answer my question: What do you get from a $2,000 machine (beyond above listed utility) that you can't get with a $250 machine? It's a very simple question.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    I'll bite. It's lighter, has better hardware specs, a better screen, an incredibly well thought out operating system, better support by far, its a far more fair comparison to compare a rMBP to a ThinkPad, or an HP EliteBook, than it is to the 250 dollar HP you can buy at Walmart or Best Buy - yes, they do the same thing, but they are not the same thing. When compared to a comparable product in the market, the product Apple sells isn't merely the hardware, its the total package, the support offered, the ecosystem, and honestly a certain amount of brand name snobbery - the big thing that impressed me about my Mac versus the 4 ThinkPad's I had was that everything "just worked" right out of the box, no full day customizing, and applying windows updates. Instead I was able to start work immediately, yes, I installed some software, and a better text editor, but that was not due to deficiencies with the built in software (as in it wouldn't work at all), but that I had certain work flow preferences that required something more advanced. I loved my ThinkPads, yes, they're expensive, but incredibly well built machines, but I always was having some sort of Windows related issue - or worse, when I got my last TP in 2010, I installed all the updates on it, and the BIOS update deleted the SLIC (the BIOS based windows activation) and the only repair was a new machine or a planar (system board) replacement - so they replaced it, and extended my warranty for 6 months - but I had other issues that required Depot Service, bad Lenovo packaged nVidia drivers that caused me to only get 16 bit color (they replaced the screen and system board under warranty), a RAM issue (intermittent of course), 5 replacement keyboards, and so on, and while I have no issue with the quality of the support I was offered, I paid 2000 odd dollars for the hardware, it shouldn't need depot service in the first year really of ownership, yet it was in the shop twice in the first year. I've had my rMBP for a year, and other than perpetual issues with time machine backups (largely because I'm using netatalk) its been completely trouble free - I'm not saying Apple products are perfect, they just require less effort on my part to keep working - and when you spend all day long troubleshooting other peoples problems, the last thing you want to do is come home and fix your own tech.
rebootthesystem 11y ago
I don't care about the down-votes. They don't change reality. This is to be expected on HN. A good number of people here have never run a real business yet think they understand how things work. Mark Twain: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" The corollary to that is "A man who has held a cat by the tail can spot one who hasn't a mile away". I remember the era of the dot-com boom. Everyone had to have masseuses, incredible desks, thousand dollar chairs, insane office architecture, an on-site chef and all manner of other inconsequential crap. And, eventually, reality hit and businesses learned the hard way that spending extravagantly doesn't make your business successful. I don't have a problem with Macs. We own a bunch of them. Expensive ones. Fully loaded. And for the right reasons. Suggesting that a restaurant chain, health club, bakery chain or other average businesses are justified spending 10x on computers that deliver zero value when compared to a $250 computer can only happen in the context of having no idea how an average business with normal margins runs. I'll go further than that. As an employee, throwing a fit if you don't get your toy is not only juvenile but a sure sign that someone isn't connected to reality and does not care about the success of the enterprise. Businesses with normal margins need to be brutal about managing those margins. I'd rather pay people $1,000 more a year than throw it into a computer that is not going to add any real measurable value to the business. It's all about that damn cat.

by odiroot 11y ago

You can tell your opinion is unpopular, you're already getting downvotes. I would have to mostly agree though, maybe besides the HP point. It's not quite a proper comparison.

evgen 11y ago

The down votes are not because the opinion is unpopular, it is because it is so easily demonstrated to be incorrect. The rehash of the "mac tax" arguments (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple), misunderstanding how enterprises discount capex, anecdotes about support requirements, etc. The companies that are mainly Mac-based know what they are doing and what works at scale.

slantyyz 11y ago
>> (e.g. claiming that a $250 HP laptop is in any way equivalent to what you could get for $2K at Apple) If you're focused on specs, build quality and performance, etc., of course they are not equivalent. On the other hand, if you look at how they are to be used in the real world (i.e., a typical staffer who primarily does e-mail, Office and accesses web apps), they could be equivalent in terms of end-user effectiveness/productivity. A lot of people use computers that have too much capacity for their daily tasks.
- mokus 11y ago
  Absolutely, but it is incorrect to cast that as a problem of the units being overpriced. I don't need Teledyne-LeCroy's 100 GHz oscilloscope at work, so if I bought one anyway when a 1 GHz unit would do, it'd be hardly fair to claim they overpriced it. I'd just be an idiot for buying a machine far more powerful than I can justify.
rebootthesystem 11y ago
I'm sorry, but this sort of thing can only come from people who are religious about their computer rather than practical. A $250 HP laptop like the one's I just bought my kids is just as capable and useful than a $2,000 Macbook Pro. Let's see, can it be used to log onto something like SalesForce by sales people, assistants, managers and other workers to manage customer leads and the sales process. YUP. Can it be used by various people to do email, browse the web, produce Word and Excel documents, make Skype calls and run other business applications. YUP. Can you use it to make presentations? YUP. Large display? YUP. Edit videos? YUP. Edit sound? YUP? Run Photoshop, Illustrator? YUP. Can it be used by software developers to maintain the company's website/s. YUP. Can it be used by graphic artists to work on brochures, images, pamphlets and other printed and web-based sales materials? YUP. Can it be used by engineers to run SolidWorks, AutoCAD or an EDA tool like Altium Designer. YUP. Embedded development, Keil? YUP. Run Eclipse? YUP. NetBeans? YUP. PyCharm, etc.? YUP. Can it be used to SSH into a server to run, well, whatever? YUP. Oh, let's see, can you run a virtual machine with Ubuntu Workstation? YUP. Can you run a VM with a Linux server? YUP. Multiple instances? YES! ...and the above list is not complete. Well, then. What, pray-tell, do you get for $2,000 that you cannot do with a $250 machine? Please don't say quality. That's nonsense. Yes, Apple machines have great design and quality. That is true. However, the $250 machine isn't crap and easily outlives it's useful life (meaning, you'll replace it with a new model way before it fails) and it offers just as much utility and functionality as the $2,000 Mac. Yes, some are crap. The beauty of the PC ecosystem is that you get MULTIPLE choices at every price point from a multitude of manufacturers. We've had good luck with HP, Sony and Acer. YMMV. And, when we buy laptops, we test the hell out of one for 30 days and then buy a dozen of them if they do well. You can nearly buy a dozen great PC laptops for the price of a single Macbook Pro. You can outfit an entire small company for the same money as one computer. That's saying something. And, frankly, the vast majority of the machines you see at the store from major brands are really nice machines. If you want to splurge and get a monster of a machine, spend $500. BTW, we have both Macs and PC's. Most of our engineering machines (either type) cost $10K to $50K by the time you account for the software and hardware installed in them. The point is that we are not delusional about why we have the machines we have. They are tools for a job. We would have no use whatsoever for Macs if it were not to work on iOS projects. Everything else, including web development can be done on any one of a horde of excellent PC's running Linux or Windows. Even commodity computers today are grotesquely over-powered for the vast majority of applications normal and not-so-normal businesses typically run. Look, wanting to buy a Ferrari is OK. Pretending it is a sensible solution when you commute on the 405 on a daily basis is delusional. Yet, if someone truly wants to drive a Ferrari and they can swing it, it's OK so long as they don't start to believe that this is a reasonable decision for everyone else out there. Please, answer my question: What do you get from a $2,000 machine (beyond above listed utility) that you can't get with a $250 machine? It's a very simple question.
- Aloha 11y ago
  I'll bite. It's lighter, has better hardware specs, a better screen, an incredibly well thought out operating system, better support by far, its a far more fair comparison to compare a rMBP to a ThinkPad, or an HP EliteBook, than it is to the 250 dollar HP you can buy at Walmart or Best Buy - yes, they do the same thing, but they are not the same thing. When compared to a comparable product in the market, the product Apple sells isn't merely the hardware, its the total package, the support offered, the ecosystem, and honestly a certain amount of brand name snobbery - the big thing that impressed me about my Mac versus the 4 ThinkPad's I had was that everything "just worked" right out of the box, no full day customizing, and applying windows updates. Instead I was able to start work immediately, yes, I installed some software, and a better text editor, but that was not due to deficiencies with the built in software (as in it wouldn't work at all), but that I had certain work flow preferences that required something more advanced. I loved my ThinkPads, yes, they're expensive, but incredibly well built machines, but I always was having some sort of Windows related issue - or worse, when I got my last TP in 2010, I installed all the updates on it, and the BIOS update deleted the SLIC (the BIOS based windows activation) and the only repair was a new machine or a planar (system board) replacement - so they replaced it, and extended my warranty for 6 months - but I had other issues that required Depot Service, bad Lenovo packaged nVidia drivers that caused me to only get 16 bit color (they replaced the screen and system board under warranty), a RAM issue (intermittent of course), 5 replacement keyboards, and so on, and while I have no issue with the quality of the support I was offered, I paid 2000 odd dollars for the hardware, it shouldn't need depot service in the first year really of ownership, yet it was in the shop twice in the first year. I've had my rMBP for a year, and other than perpetual issues with time machine backups (largely because I'm using netatalk) its been completely trouble free - I'm not saying Apple products are perfect, they just require less effort on my part to keep working - and when you spend all day long troubleshooting other peoples problems, the last thing you want to do is come home and fix your own tech.

rebootthesystem 11y ago

I don't care about the down-votes. They don't change reality. This is to be expected on HN. A good number of people here have never run a real business yet think they understand how things work. Mark Twain: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" The corollary to that is "A man who has held a cat by the tail can spot one who hasn't a mile away". I remember the era of the dot-com boom. Everyone had to have masseuses, incredible desks, thousand dollar chairs, insane office architecture, an on-site chef and all manner of other inconsequential crap. And, eventually, reality hit and businesses learned the hard way that spending extravagantly doesn't make your business successful. I don't have a problem with Macs. We own a bunch of them. Expensive ones. Fully loaded. And for the right reasons. Suggesting that a restaurant chain, health club, bakery chain or other average businesses are justified spending 10x on computers that deliver zero value when compared to a $250 computer can only happen in the context of having no idea how an average business with normal margins runs. I'll go further than that. As an employee, throwing a fit if you don't get your toy is not only juvenile but a sure sign that someone isn't connected to reality and does not care about the success of the enterprise. Businesses with normal margins need to be brutal about managing those margins. I'd rather pay people $1,000 more a year than throw it into a computer that is not going to add any real measurable value to the business. It's all about that damn cat.