Gotta hand it to Apple...

Foolish, Apple announced their intention to go Intel quite a while ago. Is this your first Mac? Most Mac users know better than to buy a new computer anywhere close to January. Macworld Expo has been Apple's forum for announcing new, upgraded products for a long time now.

In any case, be glad you can take your computer back and get credit for it. In just a few weeks you'll be able to get a new laptop that will blow the doors off your current "new" one, and for the same price!

I'll be saving up my pennies for sure! Yay!

Well since you are mostly always right, it's nice to know that on some subjects you can be dead wrong.

I would stick to the graphics advice, cause you seem to know little about Apple, it's business model, their hardware, the pricing or anything else in this general area. This post just seems like a lot of heavily biased assumptions strung together IMO.

I am sure Ulrika can set you straight if she has the time or interest to do so.

Oh no. Not my FIRST mac...

I did have a LISA over a decade ago, which soured me on Apple for years.


<sigh>

Still hate waiting for the new one... Just seems cruel now that I've had one in my grubby little claws...

Well that does suck, but when you run SL on your new one you'll feel a lot better

Ah let's see, they are bundling it with the OS? I thought that was such a terrible thing. How is it when Microsoft bundles a media player, or a web browser, they are evil incarnate, but when Apple does it, it is fine? How are Mac application developers supposed to compete fairly when these products are being given away for free or sold at well below their market value? It is harmful to smaller companies, and the fact that you so gleefully support this behavior surprises me.

Comparing the evils of MS and Apple is like comparing the evils of Pol Pot and George Costanza. They're both self serving but one is sitting on a mountain of corpses. In utilitarianism one must select the lesser of evils. In this case I am thankful that for me the good choice correlates with open (Linux) and high quality (MacOS).

~Ulrika~

Well since I am as anti-mac as they come I don'thave to hand it to apple at all.

It might be great for some people who need a lot of speed in their computers but for people, like my Mom and Dad, who all they want to be able to do is get on the internet or play some simple games. Macs are too expensive for those type of people. Heck, an Intel Graphics Accelerator is all they'd ever need to enjoy their computer. That is probably one of the reasons why the PC has done better than the Mac.

It seems to me that Apple is more of a monopoly than Microsoft, since only they make the majority of the parts. If there were several different companies that made Macs like they do the PCs the price of Macs would go down and more people would buy them.

What? Apple aren't more of a monopoly than MS! How much of the computer industry do they control, exactly?

Macs can't really compete on price, unless they compete with Over priced PC's.

I can get a much better computer, performance wise, on an amd platform than a mac. Escpecially when you factor in that I already have a good monitor, key board and mouse, and don't need to buy those.

Even more so when you facort in the upgrade aspect.

But the 1600 dollars a 20" I-mac will cost you would by you one hell of and AMD, with twice the graphics and memory capabilites of the IMAC. IMac does ieve come offering SLI. I don't know if the mac graphics are as fast as PCI express.

At this point IF you like OS-X that is about the only real draw for a mac, other than its small foot print and styling.

They do make very good laptops, not just in terms of the OS but also build quality, reliability and attention to detail. (I've never owned a desktop Mac so I can't comment there.) They're not cheap but they're the best machines out of any I've used or tried.

Well I can't comment about lap tops, I have a nice one in my HP pavillion, but I really would not expect it to be competitive with a desk top for performance.

My 17" pbook is a pretty good desktop replacement, I find. If I was only interested in desktops, though, I would have stuck with Linux on x86. I only got into Macs after emigrating, having an appalling time with an x86 laptop and thinking "hmm, I hear Macs are good for Unix geeks now, and that they make good laptops, and there's an Apple Store just down the road... maybe I'll try an iBook".

You dodged the question. Apple has a horrible reputation of fucking over developers and partners. These are small companies often that have been very loyal to Apple. Your blindness about Apple really surprises me. I could understand if you were gushing all over Linux, but gushing about a company that is every bit as mercenary as Microsoft and becoming a monopoly in its own right in the digital music space is just bizarre.

Actually he is right - within its own space, Apple is far more of a monopoly. As a PC buyer, you can choose from a wealth of hardware providers for your systems. If you want a Mac, you have to buy it from Apple. The same will continue to hold true. If you want a player to play the music you purchased from Apple, it has to be an iPod - they won't let it run on any other hardware. Imagine if you bought a CD from Virgin Records and it would only play on a Virgin CD player. THe CDs you got from Sony would only play on a Sony CD player. Apple is a complete monopoly on the Mac hardware side - and have become a monopoly in the digitial music space - to deny that is silly.

Hold on, Apple have a monopoly on the Apple products market? Well, yes. Similarly, Dell have a monopoly on the Dell market, Sony on the Sony market etc. I can go out and buy third-party products like memory, USB peripherals, monitors, mice... pretty much everything apart from the machine itself... for my powerbook, but Apple will always be pretty dominant in the market for Apple-related things, particularly when it comes to towers because there aren't many people who make compatible third-party components, though there are some. That's not a monopoly. It's not even a complete monopoly if you want to keep using Apple products, really.

As for the music market, they have market dominance in making players for music sold on the iTunes Music Store (which I dislike incidentally since I dislike DRM), but it's not like that's the entire market for music is it? If I wanted to for some reason I could ditch my iPod tomorrow and transfer my music across to whatever player I fancy; my music is all ripped or downloaded as MP3.

Gosh, Cristiano, hate Apple much?

Saying Dell has a monopoly on Dell products is not the same thing. To run Microsoft's OS, you can buy a Gateway computer, or a Sony, or any other brand that you choose. If you want to use MacOS, you can only by Apple hardware. Thus the OS is tied to the hardware, not allowing any choice of manufacturers. They used to allow a clone market, but they stopped. As long as Apple continues to force premium priced Apple only hardware to use MacOS, the MacOS will always have a small market share, regardless of how good it may be. This is to Apple's own detriment as there is too much alternative choice in the market, and fierce price competition.

As for the music market, I cannot take the songs I purchased from iTunes and play them on anything but an iPod. The software/hardware lockin is something Apple continues to do, and I have a serious problem with that. I would have a serious problem if Microsoft did the same thing.

Except "mom and dad" will never be able to figure out how to make the windows computer work, but if you give them a mac they can be emailing before dinner time. I have seen this over and over again in my work.

No actually I don't hate Apple. They have made some very interesting and innovative products, though overall I have never found them that appealing. What bugs me is the hypocrisy and arrogance of many Mac users. When Microsoft does something, it is evil, but when Apple does it, they fall all over themselves. I have particular distaste for Steve Jobs, whose arrogance and hyperbole just annoy the hell out fo me

As I have always said, if you like your Mac, that is wonderful - I don't have a problem with that. People should use whatever they like. It is always all the PC bashing that goes on - it can't just be "I like my Mac" - it is "My mac is so much better than your PC and PC users are stupid". It's childish and tiring, and ultimately the market has spoken anyway.

As I pointed out you don't have to use purely Apple hardware, there are third party products (the only Apple product I have connected to my pbook is a keyboard). You do, however, have to use an Apple base unit. And that is because Apple are not Microsoft; they're not a software company, they sell computer systems, hardware plus software. It's a particular business model, you can take it or leave it. Do you expect to be able to run whatever Sony's Playstation OS is called on generic hardware? Playstation users are a far larger segment of the console market than Apple users are of the computer market.

They simply do not have a monopoly that means anything. Apple would go under if they started insisting that their systems could only run Apple-approved software, create Apple-compatible data. Divide any market enough and you'll find that one company has a monopoly on something. If you're going to call Apple monopolists because they have a monopoly in the Apple products market I'll accept that, but I'll be laughing all the time.

True, but that wasn't my point. My point is that PC's are less expensive than Macs, so it has more of the market.

Cristiano is misusing the word monopoly.

A monopoly is:
"A situation in which a single company or group owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service. By definition, monopoly is characterized by an absence of competition - which often results in high prices and inferior products.

For a strict academic definition, a monopoly is a market containing a single firm."
- Investopedia

Microsoft used its desktop monopoly to try and also own the web browser and online media spaces by bundling applications with Windows, resulting in punishment both in the United States and the EU for monopolistic practices. Apple has had no such legal trouble.

Some will claim that the iTunes/iPod products constitute a monopoly. This is clearly not the case, as there are a multitude of competitive products in both the music player and downloadable music service spaces.

Yeah you do. Anyone who doesn't hate Apple wouldn't write as many paragraphs about it.

You're like you-know-who "fighting back" against the FIC.

Yeah, that's a major influence, even despite the fact that if you're a new user and you go into a shop and ask for a computer you'll generally get shown PCs. The Mac Mini has gone a little way to countering that but they started shipping it with far too little RAM, which didn't help.

An Intel Mini will be interesting - I wonder how that will affect the market.