5 ms·

The thing is, Apple get away with charging a premium on its products because they are very well made. I'm no Apple fan but I admit the stuff that Apple produces

The thing is, Apple get away with charging a premium on its products because they are very well made. I'm no Apple fan but I admit the stuff that Apple produces, especially in hardware, is extremely well built. In my own opinion, Apple products are probably about 30% better than competitors, but probably have 20% less features, however because they're simply better, they can charge probably 70% more than competitors simply because a lot people want and are willing to pay for the quality. (Please dont read into the figures i've just used, i pulled them out my arse, they're for illustration purposes only.)

gouranga 14y ago
Having had piles of apple kit over the years, I can assure you that the quality is an illusion generated by the high price. Here's what has died on me just outside a year since 2006 MacBook pro (logic board failure), iMac (won't boot), a MacBook (won't charge), just about every damn usb cable they've ever given me (broken at type a connector), airport express (melted). A friend of mine's MacBook pro caught fire. I won't even bother to catalogue the 22 dead iPhones my company has... My iPod nano and a 2009 macbook are still fine. conversely, my circa 2007 Lenovo t61 cost around $100 2 years ago and has been dropped, yanked off tables and has a couple of drinks in it and it just stares at you and takes it. It had a new battery last year and a new power connector (self installed) with no problems as they have full service manuals available. That's engineering and service. (I am a qualified EE so will not comment on the initial article as it makes me squirm a bit)
- kens 14y ago
  Please feel free to send me comments on the parts that make you squirm; I would be happy to update it and learn what I got wrong.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    It's just the gushing over the thing that does me in. It's pretty standard for a vendor shipped item and TBH the only reason it's like it is, is due to the fact the last one they shipped was a pile of shite. In the EU we have quite hefty electrical safety laws and I doubt it could be CE marked or approved in the UK at least based on the line voltage isolation.
- digitalchaos 14y ago
  You clearly have a large pool of hardware. Your numbers mean nothing without knowing the hardware that DIDN'T fail. To give a more useful metric, for the last 4 years I have maintained a company have about 150 machines. 50% are Macbook Pros. 50% are Lenovos. I saw, on average, 5-6 Lenovos have some sort of hardware failure per year. The Macbook Pros would see 1-2 hardware failures per year. The Macbook Pros were also giving about 6-12 months of extra life before needing to be replaced. The external packaging of the Lenovos would produce MUCH more wear year over year than the aluminum Macbook Pro.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    I listed all the hardware I personally owned. It is all caveated on IMHO. Lucky you :)
  - swalsh 14y ago
    I believe the Lenovo is just a terrible hardware producer. I got a T410S when I started at my new company. It was brand new. 3 months later the screen had a 1" thick white line on the monitor. I treated the thing like royalty. A few months later the plastic casing started to crack despite the lack of obvious impacts. 6 months later, a fan error prevented it from booting. I bought a mac book air at the same time, and it's still looks/works like the day I bought it!
    - jarek 14y ago
      I have a Lenovo-built T60p, built in 2006, I own it since 2008, works like new and looks much better than you'd expect a six-year-old laptop. Anecdata!
  - dsirijus 14y ago
    And I assume those 50% Lenovos were in the MacBook Pro price range? Meaning, just the Xs?
- zdw 14y ago
  USB cable ends fraying has nearly always been undue strain or user error, in my experience. I've seen literally thousands of Apple USB cables in my work, and, while they probably won't hold up against heavy abuse as well as a rubbery booted end, they tend to either be totally fine or fraying at the ends. The funny thing is that people with fraying ends tend to have all their cables fraying, whereas those with undamaged cables tend to have all undamaged cables. There's something about use case here where Apple's cables just don't hold up to common (mis?)use case by a subset of their users.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    Undue stain? If they're fraying then it's bad engineering plain and simple. A $5 set of Sony earphones goes through several orders of magnitude more shearing, twisting and pulling and last years. Why can't apple do that? Because it looks pretty before it has sound engineering.
    - zdw 14y ago
      Apple builds bulletproof, toughly built stuff when they need to - for example the "pulling out the prongs" example in the discussion root article, or devices like the original "toilet seat" iBook models. Apple doesn't do it for everything for mainly aesthetic and packaging reasons - iOS 30 pin cables are much smaller than they used to be before the iPhone came out, to fit in even smaller packaging. I'm sure there would be complaints about the "big, ugly cable" if Apple beefed up their cables ends, especially if the only benefit would be to the 20-30% of the population that is hard on their gear, and even in that case the enhanced durability would only increase the cable's lifespan slightly.
- jrockway 14y ago
  My experience is the same. I recently pulled my x220 off the table onto a hard floor. My first thought was, "what an idiot!" My second thought was, "oh, it's a Thinkpad, nevermind". The laptop is obviously undamaged. (I will admit the display is rather flexible, but so are all Apple laptops. Gone are the days when you could run over your laptop with a car, sadly. I guess being so cheap that you can replace them without caring is better peace of mind than any magnesium roll cage.) I am a qualified EE so will not comment on the initial article as it makes me squirm a bit. I'm not, though I did take a lot of EE classes in college, and I think the article is fine. He took the thing apart and noted which components Apple used. He's not telling anyone how to engineer their own power supply.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    - jrockway 14y ago
      UL didn't seem to mind. There is a lot of insulation between the primary and the USB socket: tape, plastic, the secondary winding, more tape, and so on. I can't imagine a failure mode for this system that would occur in normal use.
      - gouranga 14y ago
        Tape melts, emits gas which is poisonous and is more conductive than the plain air gap. There's your failure mode. Bear in mind my Airport express melted and blew my circuit breakers so shorts are definitely a possibility.
        jrockway 14y ago
        It also fails if subjected to a large amount of shrapnel!
    - kens 14y ago
      Note that many of the pictures don't include all the insulation. (I mention this in Footnote 5, so it's easy to miss.) In particular, there was a black plastic insulator over the USB output plug that only appears in the first picture. And there are several layers of insulating tape around the transformer. This should meet the safety standards; if it didn't, they wouldn't approve it after all.
- marcusf 14y ago
  I've gone through my fair share of Apple HW. I'll agree it's not without its failures. Broke a Powerbook G4 logic board, a MBP screen and one old iPod (abt 30% of what I've owned of Apple HW). What I've found which makes me happy though is they've always fixed it without charge and with no AppleCare, at least so far. I'll admit to only owning my own custom built PCs (and Nokia & SE phones) before that, at least for 10 years prior so I've nothing to compare with. (Also an EE by education if not by trade, though that doesn't really count here)
  - gouranga 14y ago
    I will say that they replace earphones readily. Unfortunately my dead MBP resulted in me being pretty much told to F Off depsite being literally 2 days out of warranty.
rmrm 14y ago
I come from an industrial (rather than consumer) background in electronics. There is nothing really interesting or impressive about this power supply. This is how you do it, you'd find similar designs in a wide range of industrial products. What the real story is, is how cheaply power supply circuits are generally done in consumer electronics. They cut all kinds of corners and are quite amazing and often frightening. I actually find the cheap, hideous designs more impressive in some ways.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  They cut all kinds of corners and are quite amazing and often frightening. I actually find the cheap, hideous designs more impressive in some ways. Indeed. Mad Man Muntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz) is alive and well and living in China.
- mbell 14y ago
  As an EE myself I completely agree, this is a textbook SMPS topology used all the time, nothing technically special about it at all. The only interesting take away is that they didn't cut corners as is normally done in consumer gear.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Teardown of a cheap power supply, from Mike's Electric Stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88ej64aXUM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88ej64aXUM
its_so_on 14y ago
I agree with the gist of your post, however I must say that in my experience Apple products are manufactured to a standard that is 170% that of competitor's (really, just put a Macbook next to a Dell, or an iPhone next to a Blackberry and pore over the differences). On the features, I would say that roughly 75% more features are accessible to a casual user: you can simply do more without even thinking about it. However, to the professional user, only 15% of the features are available. (!) A professional user who got a degree in this subject can simply do literally six and a half times as many things on an Android or on a Linux desktop than with an iPhone or Mac OS X. On pricing, I don't have any figures but do not consider it out of line to consider an Apple product as being a durable replacement for several cheap plastic versions. An investment in OS X in the guise of a $1800 MacBook Pro could easily take the place of a $700, a $500 and a $600 laptop bought over the same period of time. By the end of the period the specs of the MacBook would be severely out of date, however in other respects its usage may be preferable to the usage of the new $600 laptop. If you are not comparing on this basis, Apple products may be up to 300% as expensive as their competition, again as shown by the laptop example. These numbers are scientific, have high statistical confidence, and good to eighteen decimal places. I show them with only one or two significant figures, however the full figures are going through a process of peer review and should appear soon in the IEEE Spectrum. Or not...
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  > A professional user who got a degree in this subject can simply do literally six and a half times as many things on an Android or on a Linux desktop than with an iPhone or Mac OS X. I almost agree with you on Android/iPhone (though 6.5 times is a big, big exaggeration, more likely 40%), but absolutely disagree with you about OS X/Linux. To me (I don't do kernel debugging, but use tons of 'pro' development tools daily), they're on par, with Linux a tiny bit (a few percent) in the lead. OS X is more shiny and is more pleasant to use as a development machine, but in Linux your hands are freeer.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    If only Mac OS X ever got a proper packaging system (one not for installing nice GUI apps, but for deploying infrastructure things like libraries) - then it would be on par. Right now, unfortunately, it's still subpar - doing the same things takes more time. I know theres ports and fink and homebrew, but each of them has its deficiencies, and they regularly step on each other's toes and make a mess of the system.
smsm42 14y ago
Some of it is well-built. But IMHO charger cables are not among them. Every charger for Apple hardware I used had cables to break down after less than a year of use, and I had to repeatedly replace them. The reason is the design of the connector that is very fragile and not resistant to constant bending and moving around that is common for a mobile device. When I used laptops from other providers, chargers - including cabling - lasted for years without any substantial wear - it was common to retire a laptop but the whole charger was still working as new. For Apple ones, it's definitely not the case. Cables are very weak and new L-design laptop connector is worse than old T-design and breaks twice as fast in my experience. They made it look much better than ones from, say, Thinkpad, but at the cost of durability. So here's a part that is definitely worse than the competitors.
- pearle 14y ago
  I agree with this. I have several IBM/Dell/Lenovo adapters and they are all in fine shape. My Apple adapters? Not so much -- they're all in various stages of cable breakage. I really do not care how the connector sleeves look on my cables. I'd prefer them to last longer than a year or two.
tjoff 14y ago
They aren't really that well designed compared to the competition. Apple can only focus on one thing at a time (and cutting corners on everything else). Example: LED backlight cinema display? Neat! Then they cheap out using a glossy coating, not even a HUD, no scaler, no inputs, the worst stand in the market for a prosumer monitor etc. etc. etc. You'd think that a company claiming to be focusing on quality actually cares about ergonomics, but apple only care about looks and perceived quality. God knows how they can uphold that image when peoples devices fail constantly, I don't even know of anyone that own a working iPod anymore. They can't even design the cooling for their laptops decently. They are hot and they are noisy (no margins at all), and it's not like you get anything in return. Buying an apple product you should just be happy if you can even exchange the battery. As always, there is one thing they do right. On laptops it's the trackpad. But the rest just doesn't impress and is at best on par with the competition (but lacking the extra features (which isn't really a bad thing (most of the time) - but it makes you wonder what you pay for). Apple has obviously gone to extra effort to reduce EMI interference, probably to keep the charger from interfering with the touchscreen I've yet to encounter problems with any mobile phone during charging, so that makes you wonder whether apple uses a cheaper touchscreen than everyone else, or if other charges are just as good in regards to the EMI interference or if apple has higher margins than everyone else (which I highly doubt considering the problems apple create just to look good (cable strain relief springs to mind)).
- kaiuhl 14y ago
  This is a silly comment. Apple's laptops are widely regarded as the best in the industry and have been for quite a few years. The cinema displays are not just displays either—they also include 2.1 speakers, a webcam, and an ambient light sensor, all in a package that looks really nice in a house or office. This is a package that other display manufacturers are yet to produce. It's nice to oversimplify for the sake of argument, but these kinds of non-reality based posts just show how polarizing Apple is. Good design is important to most.
  - tjoff 14y ago
    > Apple's laptops are widely regarded as the best in the industry and have been for quite a few years. Oh, well in that case. Sigh. Speakers, webcam and ambient light sensor... Those are the kind of non-features that you typically don't have to deal with on an apple product, if you care about a crappy webcam, inbuilt speakers in the monitor etc. you most certainly should buy a PC - they are crammed with useless stuff like that. These kind of non-reality based post just shows just how blindly loyal the typical apple customer is.
ricardobeat 14y ago
90% of me thinks that maybe 70% of the figures you quoted are 40% pointless.

gouranga 14y ago

Having had piles of apple kit over the years, I can assure you that the quality is an illusion generated by the high price. Here's what has died on me just outside a year since 2006 MacBook pro (logic board failure), iMac (won't boot), a MacBook (won't charge), just about every damn usb cable they've ever given me (broken at type a connector), airport express (melted). A friend of mine's MacBook pro caught fire. I won't even bother to catalogue the 22 dead iPhones my company has... My iPod nano and a 2009 macbook are still fine. conversely, my circa 2007 Lenovo t61 cost around $100 2 years ago and has been dropped, yanked off tables and has a couple of drinks in it and it just stares at you and takes it. It had a new battery last year and a new power connector (self installed) with no problems as they have full service manuals available. That's engineering and service. (I am a qualified EE so will not comment on the initial article as it makes me squirm a bit)

kens 14y ago
Please feel free to send me comments on the parts that make you squirm; I would be happy to update it and learn what I got wrong.
- gouranga 14y ago
  It's just the gushing over the thing that does me in. It's pretty standard for a vendor shipped item and TBH the only reason it's like it is, is due to the fact the last one they shipped was a pile of shite. In the EU we have quite hefty electrical safety laws and I doubt it could be CE marked or approved in the UK at least based on the line voltage isolation.
digitalchaos 14y ago
You clearly have a large pool of hardware. Your numbers mean nothing without knowing the hardware that DIDN'T fail. To give a more useful metric, for the last 4 years I have maintained a company have about 150 machines. 50% are Macbook Pros. 50% are Lenovos. I saw, on average, 5-6 Lenovos have some sort of hardware failure per year. The Macbook Pros would see 1-2 hardware failures per year. The Macbook Pros were also giving about 6-12 months of extra life before needing to be replaced. The external packaging of the Lenovos would produce MUCH more wear year over year than the aluminum Macbook Pro.
- gouranga 14y ago
  I listed all the hardware I personally owned. It is all caveated on IMHO. Lucky you :)
- swalsh 14y ago
  I believe the Lenovo is just a terrible hardware producer. I got a T410S when I started at my new company. It was brand new. 3 months later the screen had a 1" thick white line on the monitor. I treated the thing like royalty. A few months later the plastic casing started to crack despite the lack of obvious impacts. 6 months later, a fan error prevented it from booting. I bought a mac book air at the same time, and it's still looks/works like the day I bought it!
  - jarek 14y ago
    I have a Lenovo-built T60p, built in 2006, I own it since 2008, works like new and looks much better than you'd expect a six-year-old laptop. Anecdata!
- dsirijus 14y ago
  And I assume those 50% Lenovos were in the MacBook Pro price range? Meaning, just the Xs?
zdw 14y ago
USB cable ends fraying has nearly always been undue strain or user error, in my experience. I've seen literally thousands of Apple USB cables in my work, and, while they probably won't hold up against heavy abuse as well as a rubbery booted end, they tend to either be totally fine or fraying at the ends. The funny thing is that people with fraying ends tend to have all their cables fraying, whereas those with undamaged cables tend to have all undamaged cables. There's something about use case here where Apple's cables just don't hold up to common (mis?)use case by a subset of their users.
- gouranga 14y ago
  Undue stain? If they're fraying then it's bad engineering plain and simple. A $5 set of Sony earphones goes through several orders of magnitude more shearing, twisting and pulling and last years. Why can't apple do that? Because it looks pretty before it has sound engineering.
  - zdw 14y ago
    Apple builds bulletproof, toughly built stuff when they need to - for example the "pulling out the prongs" example in the discussion root article, or devices like the original "toilet seat" iBook models. Apple doesn't do it for everything for mainly aesthetic and packaging reasons - iOS 30 pin cables are much smaller than they used to be before the iPhone came out, to fit in even smaller packaging. I'm sure there would be complaints about the "big, ugly cable" if Apple beefed up their cables ends, especially if the only benefit would be to the 20-30% of the population that is hard on their gear, and even in that case the enhanced durability would only increase the cable's lifespan slightly.
jrockway 14y ago
My experience is the same. I recently pulled my x220 off the table onto a hard floor. My first thought was, "what an idiot!" My second thought was, "oh, it's a Thinkpad, nevermind". The laptop is obviously undamaged. (I will admit the display is rather flexible, but so are all Apple laptops. Gone are the days when you could run over your laptop with a car, sadly. I guess being so cheap that you can replace them without caring is better peace of mind than any magnesium roll cage.) I am a qualified EE so will not comment on the initial article as it makes me squirm a bit. I'm not, though I did take a lot of EE classes in college, and I think the article is fine. He took the thing apart and noted which components Apple used. He's not telling anyone how to engineer their own power supply.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - jrockway 14y ago
    UL didn't seem to mind. There is a lot of insulation between the primary and the USB socket: tape, plastic, the secondary winding, more tape, and so on. I can't imagine a failure mode for this system that would occur in normal use.
    - gouranga 14y ago
      Tape melts, emits gas which is poisonous and is more conductive than the plain air gap. There's your failure mode. Bear in mind my Airport express melted and blew my circuit breakers so shorts are definitely a possibility.
      - jrockway 14y ago
        It also fails if subjected to a large amount of shrapnel!
  - kens 14y ago
    Note that many of the pictures don't include all the insulation. (I mention this in Footnote 5, so it's easy to miss.) In particular, there was a black plastic insulator over the USB output plug that only appears in the first picture. And there are several layers of insulating tape around the transformer. This should meet the safety standards; if it didn't, they wouldn't approve it after all.
marcusf 14y ago
I've gone through my fair share of Apple HW. I'll agree it's not without its failures. Broke a Powerbook G4 logic board, a MBP screen and one old iPod (abt 30% of what I've owned of Apple HW). What I've found which makes me happy though is they've always fixed it without charge and with no AppleCare, at least so far. I'll admit to only owning my own custom built PCs (and Nokia & SE phones) before that, at least for 10 years prior so I've nothing to compare with. (Also an EE by education if not by trade, though that doesn't really count here)
- gouranga 14y ago
  I will say that they replace earphones readily. Unfortunately my dead MBP resulted in me being pretty much told to F Off depsite being literally 2 days out of warranty.

rmrm 14y ago

I come from an industrial (rather than consumer) background in electronics. There is nothing really interesting or impressive about this power supply. This is how you do it, you'd find similar designs in a wide range of industrial products. What the real story is, is how cheaply power supply circuits are generally done in consumer electronics. They cut all kinds of corners and are quite amazing and often frightening. I actually find the cheap, hideous designs more impressive in some ways.

CamperBob2 14y ago
They cut all kinds of corners and are quite amazing and often frightening. I actually find the cheap, hideous designs more impressive in some ways. Indeed. Mad Man Muntz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_Muntz) is alive and well and living in China.
mbell 14y ago
As an EE myself I completely agree, this is a textbook SMPS topology used all the time, nothing technically special about it at all. The only interesting take away is that they didn't cut corners as is normally done in consumer gear.
smackfu 14y ago
Teardown of a cheap power supply, from Mike's Electric Stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88ej64aXUM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T88ej64aXUM

its_so_on 14y ago

I agree with the gist of your post, however I must say that in my experience Apple products are manufactured to a standard that is 170% that of competitor's (really, just put a Macbook next to a Dell, or an iPhone next to a Blackberry and pore over the differences). On the features, I would say that roughly 75% more features are accessible to a casual user: you can simply do more without even thinking about it. However, to the professional user, only 15% of the features are available. (!) A professional user who got a degree in this subject can simply do literally six and a half times as many things on an Android or on a Linux desktop than with an iPhone or Mac OS X. On pricing, I don't have any figures but do not consider it out of line to consider an Apple product as being a durable replacement for several cheap plastic versions. An investment in OS X in the guise of a $1800 MacBook Pro could easily take the place of a $700, a $500 and a $600 laptop bought over the same period of time. By the end of the period the specs of the MacBook would be severely out of date, however in other respects its usage may be preferable to the usage of the new $600 laptop. If you are not comparing on this basis, Apple products may be up to 300% as expensive as their competition, again as shown by the laptop example. These numbers are scientific, have high statistical confidence, and good to eighteen decimal places. I show them with only one or two significant figures, however the full figures are going through a process of peer review and should appear soon in the IEEE Spectrum. Or not...

pooriaazimi 14y ago
> A professional user who got a degree in this subject can simply do literally six and a half times as many things on an Android or on a Linux desktop than with an iPhone or Mac OS X. I almost agree with you on Android/iPhone (though 6.5 times is a big, big exaggeration, more likely 40%), but absolutely disagree with you about OS X/Linux. To me (I don't do kernel debugging, but use tons of 'pro' development tools daily), they're on par, with Linux a tiny bit (a few percent) in the lead. OS X is more shiny and is more pleasant to use as a development machine, but in Linux your hands are freeer.
- smsm42 14y ago
  If only Mac OS X ever got a proper packaging system (one not for installing nice GUI apps, but for deploying infrastructure things like libraries) - then it would be on par. Right now, unfortunately, it's still subpar - doing the same things takes more time. I know theres ports and fink and homebrew, but each of them has its deficiencies, and they regularly step on each other's toes and make a mess of the system.

smsm42 14y ago

Some of it is well-built. But IMHO charger cables are not among them. Every charger for Apple hardware I used had cables to break down after less than a year of use, and I had to repeatedly replace them. The reason is the design of the connector that is very fragile and not resistant to constant bending and moving around that is common for a mobile device. When I used laptops from other providers, chargers - including cabling - lasted for years without any substantial wear - it was common to retire a laptop but the whole charger was still working as new. For Apple ones, it's definitely not the case. Cables are very weak and new L-design laptop connector is worse than old T-design and breaks twice as fast in my experience. They made it look much better than ones from, say, Thinkpad, but at the cost of durability. So here's a part that is definitely worse than the competitors.

pearle 14y ago
I agree with this. I have several IBM/Dell/Lenovo adapters and they are all in fine shape. My Apple adapters? Not so much -- they're all in various stages of cable breakage. I really do not care how the connector sleeves look on my cables. I'd prefer them to last longer than a year or two.

tjoff 14y ago

They aren't really that well designed compared to the competition. Apple can only focus on one thing at a time (and cutting corners on everything else). Example: LED backlight cinema display? Neat! Then they cheap out using a glossy coating, not even a HUD, no scaler, no inputs, the worst stand in the market for a prosumer monitor etc. etc. etc. You'd think that a company claiming to be focusing on quality actually cares about ergonomics, but apple only care about looks and perceived quality. God knows how they can uphold that image when peoples devices fail constantly, I don't even know of anyone that own a working iPod anymore. They can't even design the cooling for their laptops decently. They are hot and they are noisy (no margins at all), and it's not like you get anything in return. Buying an apple product you should just be happy if you can even exchange the battery. As always, there is one thing they do right. On laptops it's the trackpad. But the rest just doesn't impress and is at best on par with the competition (but lacking the extra features (which isn't really a bad thing (most of the time) - but it makes you wonder what you pay for). Apple has obviously gone to extra effort to reduce EMI interference, probably to keep the charger from interfering with the touchscreen I've yet to encounter problems with any mobile phone during charging, so that makes you wonder whether apple uses a cheaper touchscreen than everyone else, or if other charges are just as good in regards to the EMI interference or if apple has higher margins than everyone else (which I highly doubt considering the problems apple create just to look good (cable strain relief springs to mind)).

kaiuhl 14y ago
This is a silly comment. Apple's laptops are widely regarded as the best in the industry and have been for quite a few years. The cinema displays are not just displays either—they also include 2.1 speakers, a webcam, and an ambient light sensor, all in a package that looks really nice in a house or office. This is a package that other display manufacturers are yet to produce. It's nice to oversimplify for the sake of argument, but these kinds of non-reality based posts just show how polarizing Apple is. Good design is important to most.
- tjoff 14y ago
  > Apple's laptops are widely regarded as the best in the industry and have been for quite a few years. Oh, well in that case. Sigh. Speakers, webcam and ambient light sensor... Those are the kind of non-features that you typically don't have to deal with on an apple product, if you care about a crappy webcam, inbuilt speakers in the monitor etc. you most certainly should buy a PC - they are crammed with useless stuff like that. These kind of non-reality based post just shows just how blindly loyal the typical apple customer is.

ricardobeat 14y ago

90% of me thinks that maybe 70% of the figures you quoted are 40% pointless.