Apple prices are in disarray

Mine did - years ago when I had a few that is. They broke. They had engineering defects. There were hardware-software conflict etc.

The biggest problem I had that caused me to dump Apple was not the reality that no computer is perfect. But rather the defensive, aggressive and nasty attitude of fanbois whenever I tried asking the "community" for help.

At least in non-Apple land, people could openly acknowledge problems and help each other out without having to protect and spew the dogma.

Never again will I be caught buying from the Apple monopoly.

@butterflocks

You can't claim - as you appear do be claiming - that because your Dell Latitude is a piece of shit and your newer Macbook isn't, that PCs must therefore be inferior.

I've never gotten along with Dells either but I'm not about to go and squander £1,889 on a Macbook Pro - not when my sales guys have just replaced their PowerPoint mules with i7-based HPs for about £900 each. Same screen as the Macbook, but bigger HDD, faster GPU, plus Windows 7 and a modern processor rather than that dog-eared Core 2 you'll find in the Mac.

There are many reasons you seldom find Apple products in corporate environments and yesterday's technology mixing it with piss-poor value for money are just the start. The *nix-obsessives here will have something to say, but toy-mad sysadmins and the occasional addled consumer who thinks he's getting genuine quality (rather than falling for a simple marketing ploy) ain't going to help their market share.

Your Dell most likely crawls because you don't spend the 5 minutes a month that I do keeping it in shape. Those porn and free cursor sites really take a toll after awhile. Not to mention the "free" crapware you probably didn't uninstall when you got it.

My Machine ran XP smooth as silk and fast as I like until I replaced it with Win 7 6 months ago. My anti-virus does it's job without input from me and 2 malware scans a month that take 60 seconds to start and a couple minutes to study and finish. I spend as much time with my Linux install keeping packages up to date.

And Bob, If yours has never broken, count yourself lucky. The Mac tech where I work is as busy as I am with PC's. Mac's break just as often as PC's and contrary to popular belief about the average IQ of PC and Mac users, they do just as many stupid things to break their precious Macs as PC users.

i don't consider myself an apple fan boy because i use an assortment of linux, windows, and mac. but i can tell you for what i do, software development, i have been using my macbook black edition from 2007 and it's fine in terms of performance, could use a little more memory, otherwise sufficient. my dell latitude is a real piece of shit that crawls most likely because of windows xp.

I agree with H.P.O. that most consumers basically need a machine for internet stuff and word processing. Some people also need more powerful graphics for editing video, etc., or for playing games. It's debatable there what makes the most sense for people (actually, for games, a PC is likely a better choice). But, then there are people like me, who mostly write code in a Unix environment. In the past, I've purchased a Dell or Thinkpad and spent several days removing Windows, reconfiguring it, installing some form of Linux, etc, and once completed, I often have to constantly run updates. Plus, sometime finding or writing appropriate Linux drivers can take days, and Cygwin is a less than optimal solution. When I first purchased a Mac, however, I found that I could almost instantly do much of the programming I needed to do, and it comes with all of the basic multimedia stuff I need. Also, a lot of the scientific software that used to only be available in Unix or Windows (such as Matlab or Maple), is now available for the Mac. And, if I really need it, I can use Boot Camp to install Linux or Windows. The Mac OS, however, does mostly everything I need.

The Mac machines may be overpriced, but I've never had one break, and it does everything I need, so I'm willing to pay the price.

If tits by Apple, then asses buy Microsoft. Also, I thought Apple was for him, her and it. I wonder if I will go gay if I get myself an iPad then...

I could be wrong, but those prices listed in the Engadget article look to be about the same as what the Macbook Pro and the Macbook Air were sold at about 6 months ago before they did the price drop when the new Macbook & new iMacs came out. Perhaps its a mistake advertising the old prices? Albeit a pretty bad mistake from a company that doesn't do many "bad" PR blunders. (leaks aside, although it is debated as to whether apple intentionally leak information to create a buzz, but that's just the cynic in me).

Tits will still flock to buy Macs, regardless of pricing, because tits perceive that Firefox, iTunes, Pidgin, Photoshop, not to mention every other application also available for Windows, will somehow be made to run in a superior fashion on Apple hardware. This is all bollocks marketing of course, but it's bollocks marketing to which nobody at Apple will ever admit, and no tit customer of theirs is going to want to hear it anyway - not having just spent £2,000 on some tarted-up Intel machine the sane among us wouldn't value at much more than £399. Hard to believe that "Micro$haft" are the ones saddled with the ironic name.