I hate apple!

PenguinJim

Stoke wrote: »

Interesting post. For what it's worth, I don't think Asus laptops are too bad at all. I've certainly seen much worse. In fact, Asus were voted 3rd best manufacturer of laptops in 2014 behind Apple and Lenovo respectively and in 2013, they were voted the most reliable of all laptop manufacturers with just a 15% failure rate as opposed to Apple's 17%. I'd say HP and Toshiba are much worse.

Also Samsung produce phones for both the cheap end of the market and expensive. It's not fair to compare Samsung's cheap (awful in your words) phones with Apple's £700 device. If you compare the newest Galaxy with the newest iPhone, I'd say there isn't much difference, two very good phones.

I think my post really did fly over your head! I think Samsung and Asus make some excellent products. I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 as my phone. But did you know that Samsung released 196 different mobile phones onto the market during 2013? Of these, maybe three were excellent, and maybe forty were good. Do you see the point now?*

It's the same with Asus laptops. With an hour of research, you can find a very good Asus laptop. If you're already interested in the technical aspects and have a few hours, I don't think it would be too challenging to find an non-Apple laptop that surpasses a Macbook and at a much lower price.

But do you know how many laptops Asus released last year? And do you know how many of those were not really all that good? Now apply that to Acer, Samsung, Lenovo, Dell... hey, y'know what? Maybe we should stop applying broad strokes to the companies that release hundreds of laptops, and start appraising those laptops on a case-by-case basis? I never recommend an "Asus" or a "Dell" or an "Acer" - I would always recommend something specific from their line-ups, as they all make plenty of bad products as well as some great ones.

As for Asus being the most reliable laptop manufacturer in 2013, I tried Googling "asus voted most reliable laptop manufacturer 2013" and these were the top five links:

Apple first, Dell second, Asus third. (Seems to be based on 2012 data)
Apple first, Lenovo second, Asus third. (This was the same article for the second and third links)
This web page is not available. (I suspect Apple of foul play)
Apple first, Samsung second, Asus third.

What's your source for Asus being more reliable than Apple? (I had to buy a laptop in December 2013, so I'm surprised I didn't come across that during my research)

But having said all that...

prowla wrote: »

I guess the assessment of stupidity has to take into account whether you consider the above to be relevant or not. There are lots of things where you have to decide whether the product's quality is worth the extra.

It's not about paying extra for the product's "quality", though. It's about paying extra for buying from a company that generally makes very few bad products. That extra money isn't buying you something within the actual product - the additional expense is simply for the Apple name (which is well worth it in some cases, and worthless in others). There are plenty of devices of similar quality that cost half as much. And while Apple does tend to win polls as mentioned above, the difference isn't huge. (I'm also not sure by how much those figures are skewed by the Cult of Apple aspect, too )

*I pulled these figures out of nowhere, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out they're accurate.

Stoke

prowla wrote: »

Another side of Apple which hasn't been mentioned is the after-sales support. My son's iPod was broken when a boy pushed him and it fell on the ground. It was out of warranty and I took it to an Apple Store; they replaced FOC. I remembered that when I was looking to upgrade my phone, and it was a factor in getting the iPhone.

Apple's after-sales support? Glad you had a good experience. However maybe you should ask the thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people who bought early iPod's and suffered what was known as 'BatteryGate' and were told the only solution was to replace the iPod at a charge of several hundreds of pounds what their opinion is? This despite the fact replacing a battery in an 1st/2nd/3rd gen iPod takes about 5 minutes for an expert and less than an hour for a novice. It was only after the Neistat Brothers did their rather controversial film about Apple's policy on batteries that they changed their stance and started charging a reasonable £120 to replace the battery. I believe they've now amended it once again to £79 + shipping, despite the fact your local shop will do it for £30 fitted. So it's not quite as clear cut as you'd like it to be.

PenguinJim wrote: »

What's your source for Asus being more reliable than Apple? (I had to buy a laptop in December 2013, so I'm surprised I didn't come across that during my research)

http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/

spud17

The Apple after sales support isn't 'free', you pay for it up front, in a non negotiable way via their premium prices.

PenguinJim

Stoke wrote: »

Apple's after-sales support?

There was also the Momentus XT disaster with their MacBooks. I wouldn't implicitly trust their support either. I mean, just look at this. Yikes! Can companies really do that and get away with it?

Then again, engineering items to fail and be replaced is an ancient practice, and Apple possible get more press coverage about their disasters because they're... well, Apple. Did you hear about the problems with the wifi on the Acer R7 that went unfixed for over six months? Not really a headline-grabber, but it would have been a BBC news article for sure had it been a Macbook issue.

Stoke wrote: »

http://www.statisticbrain.com/laptop-malfunction-rates/

That doesn't look like Asus were "voted most reliable" or that it's 2013, but thank you. I'll have put some time into that site next week, as they also don't seem keen to share their sources/details (other than "U.S."). For example, the heading is "malfunction rate" but the column heading is "failure rate" - my laptop suffered a malfunction the first time I tried to change the HDD to an SSD ("Recovery" didn't work), but not a failure (I just cloned instead - but I'll never get that hour of my life back :mad:).

lionelator

I used to think Apple products were overpriced and for suckers. Then I tried my first MacBook. It was the last of the white polycarbonate models. I was blown away by how efficient it was, once I got past the learning curve, which isn't really that steep. Eventually I had it dual booting OSX and Ubuntu, and OSX is a pretty amazing OS.

When the screen broke, I was worried about the high prices of new MacBooks, and being of the general specs-concious crowd, I went for a top of the line Asus laptop for 1 and half thousand pounds instead, but far higher specced than the equivalently priced Apple model. The battery was busted in 3 months. They replaced it once. The battery conked out again in about 12 months and a week, just out of warranty. The screen fell apart. The fit and finish is awful. The laptop is slow as anything, Windows is just a horrible OS efficiency wise compared to OSX.

2 and a bit years ago, I committed to buying a MacBook again, and paid about a grand and a half again. I was back to an amazing experience, amazing hardware, I was so happy. Unfortunately, over the last 2 and a bit years, the logic board failed twice. It was fixed inside of 3 days each time under Applecare, but I still called them after the second time it was fixed to say I was disappointed the part failed twice.
They authorized a replacement MacBook as they said it was unacceptable for the same part to fail again. They refused to lower any specs on the previous one, so where I had a 750GB old style HD, they replaced it on the new model with a 1TB solid state drive. The new models don't have DVD drives, so they sent me an external one. They don't make non retina models anymore so I got the retina model. They scrimped on nothing.

I got a 2 and a half thousand pound laptop for free, 2 and a half years after paying about half that for my original MacBook. That's how they stand behind their products.
And it's why I can't see myself moving from MacBooks for a very very long time. If you can afford it there is nothing better.

Stoke

PenguinJim wrote: »

There was also the Momentus XT disaster with their MacBooks. I wouldn't implicitly trust their support either. I mean, just look at this. Yikes! Can companies really do that and get away with it?

Then again, engineering items to fail and be replaced is an ancient practice, and Apple possible get more press coverage about their disasters because they're... well, Apple. Did you hear about the problems with the wifi on the Acer R7 that went unfixed for over six months? Not really a headline-grabber, but it would have been a BBC news article for sure had it been a Macbook issue.

Possibly, but there's an old saying "with great fame comes great responsibility". The reason BatteryGate was such a newsworthy issue, was because iPod's at that time were incredibly popular and hellishly expensive (3rd gen was over £200 for the basic model) and at such a premium, things such as failing batteries should be unheard of. Not only that, the fact such batteries did fail and then required an excessive payment to replace them left thousands of customers feeling duped.

Let's not forget the amount of media coverage (and criticism) when Sony refused to honour warranties on cracked screens for their 'almost unbreakable' phone. They were heavily criticized despite the fact their phones seem to break from just being in peoples pockets.

However with Apple, it seems to be a recurring theme, remember the phantom moisture strips which are placed in the base of iPhone (4's I believe)... BBC Watchdog did an investigation which found many iPhones would not be covered by warranty because the moisture stripe in the base of the phone is too sensitive and could easily be triggered by sweat, even from holding the phone. Once again, they expected their customer to pay for a replacement. Poor.

prowla

PenguinJim wrote: »

It's not about paying extra for the product's "quality", though. It's about paying extra for buying from a company that generally makes very few bad products. That extra money isn't buying you something within the actual product - the additional expense is simply for the Apple name (which is well worth it in some cases, and worthless in others). There are plenty of devices of similar quality that cost half as much. And while Apple does tend to win polls as mentioned above, the difference isn't huge. (I'm also not sure by how much those figures are skewed by the Cult of Apple aspect, too )

But I'm saying that Apple's products are generally of high quality too. Well designed, work well, feel good to use, have a good support organization backing them up, and so-on.

You contrast the price of a Mac against a high-end Dell and so-on, and their price may not seem so high after all.

tronator

lionelator wrote: »

Some anecdote...

The Dell Vostro 1710 I bought 6 years ago for £415 still works. And thanks to (X)ubuntu there is no need to replace it soon...

lionelator

tronator wrote: »

Similar anecdote...

That's nice. I used Ubuntu for a bit too.
Let me know when you try using a Mac for an extended period. You'll understand then.

PenguinJim

Stoke wrote: »

Let's not forget the amount of media coverage (and criticism) when Sony refused to honour warranties on cracked screens for their 'almost unbreakable' phone. They were heavily criticized despite the fact their phones seem to break from just being in peoples pockets.

I never even heard about that (or was that your point?). I caught their exploding laptop batteries event, though.