Insourcing and Apple design...

Macs have never given shorter life of useful service than PCs. Check out their resale value years later. It's the same with iPhones. They're like Hondas and Toyotas. Some people think they're expensive. Some think they're cheap.

Love,

For the record, I moved on to other Macs because the previous Macs were owned by former employers, stolen, defective and replaced at no cost, taken for use by other staff, passed on to family members, exchanged for a different size screen... Several of those Macs are still in use today. As I said, Apple's peerless design is indestructible.

It's late at night, though, and honesty compels me to admit I dream of being able to use a Dell trackpad with Windows 8 and replacing my keyboard with a stylus.

* * *

Added Friday:

For those still following comments under this post, back when I was weighing moving into an SSD, I spent loads of time reading what I consider the best source of serious tech reviews and recommendations, AnandTech. If you're able to read unbiased geeks, this is the place for you to make decisions.

In that context, here's how a recent review of Acer's latest Ultrabook offering, the Acer Aspire S7, begins:

Acer has long been the poster child when it comes to the race to the bottom in consumer laptops. In the effort to get a laptop into every home, prices had to come down and the easiest path for doing that was to cut corners. We've often lauded Acer's products for being extremely affordable, but when it comes to overall impressions there are some concerns. These days, every big OEM has at least a few inexpensive laptops sitting on retail shelves, and they're all basically the same: AMD Llano or Trinity APUs or an Intel Celeron/Pentium/Core i3/Core i5 CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive, and a 1366x768 display. Wrap it all up in an injection molded plastic chassis and slap a $400 to $600 price tag on it, and you're done. The problem is that you get what you pay for, and in this case what you often end up with is a laptop that will start to fall apart after a year or two of moderate use, not to mention the slow hard drive and lousy display.

Chase these cost reducing measures for long enough and what you end up with is a 5% reduction in overall quality, compounded yearly. Ten years later, what we have are a bunch of laptops that are faster, but they're also about half the quality of what we used to see. What if, instead of iterating on lowering prices and quality, we went the other direction with quality while trying to keep pricing relatively constant? Instead of getting cheaper, what if someone were to make laptops that are 5% better each iteration—or maybe even 10% better? Compound that through multiple release cycles and now you're looking at a laptop that's not only faster (thanks to Moore's Law), but it's also built better. That in a nutshell is what I've been seeing with Ultrabooks for the past 18 months.

The first Ultrabooks were all very thin, but the quality ranged from decent down to quite poor, with some experiencing cooling problems, overheating, noisy fans, and of course most came with bottom-of-the-barrel 1366x768 displays. The second generation designs weren't a revolution, but at least we started to see a greater focus on improving the tangibles like the display and keyboard. Now that trend continues with Acer's S7, which is the first Windows 8 Ultrabook to hit our labs.

And here's how it ends:

I wouldn’t be willing to fork over more than $1000 for an Ultrabook, and I would guess most people feel the same way. That’s the real problem, because it means Acer’s most innovative laptop in years could end up doing poorly at retail. That’s where Apple’s approach of building a premium brand name with devices that stand out from the crowd has been so successful. Say what you want about the company and their products, but the fact is that Apple sells more MacBooks than any other laptop brand I can name, and they sell more iPads than any other tablet brand. Acer and the other large OEMs have hundreds of competing laptops, and most of them are budget-friendly “Best Buy” models that cost less than half of what the Aspire S7 will set you back. That in turn leads to them selling well and the quality products like the S7 get left on the warehouse shelves.

As I said in the introduction, I’d love to see a reversal of this gradual downward trend in laptop quality all in the name of chasing lower prices. The S7 costs a lot, but at the same time it’s a step in the right direction for quality and innovation. For that reason if nothing else, I want the S7 to sell well and get some followers, but to do that it probably needs to be priced at least $300 lower. Whatever happens with the S7, Acer is big enough that they’re not going anywhere. Hopefully when we see Haswell based Ultrabooks, Acer will take all the good elements of the S3, S5, and S7 and improve once more. If they can keep doing that, another year or two could very well see them with some of the most compelling Ultrabooks on the block.

This is typical of AnandTech's quality.

Here's the third comment under AnandTech's recent review of the 13" MacBook Air:

I am wondering what percentage of "power users" will start trending towards machines like the MacBook Air and Pro. It seems that the cost differences are eroding away between the likes of computers like Clevo-based Malibal and Apple products. It seems to me that the Apple products are priced pretty competitively, and offer more flexibility by being able (to) run OSX as well as Windows or Linux.

I doubt I'll purchase an Apple computer, but it seems more compelling than ever, especially with the display on the MacBook Pro.

Keep reading below this comment and there's an education to be had—and not from PC or Mac fanatics, but expert techies.

Leaving brand choices behind, there's simply no better way to get faster than moving to SSD. Lucas Weeks has replaced several of our staff members' hard drives with SSD and the change is radical. For advice on SSD, whether Mac or PC, there's no better source than AnandTech.

Love,

PS: AnandTech is no slouch on smartphone reviews, either. Check out their reviews of the iPhone 5, Nexus 4, Galaxy Note 2, as well as this PREview of Windows Phones 8 & 8X. (No review of the Lumia 920, yet.) Here's their comparison of smartphone performance. 

Speaking of money, for the past ten years the IU Surplus store has had tables of Macs up and running for near the same price of their tables of Compaqs and Dells also up and running. They're all between $200 and $300 and will provide years of service. 

I don't have a tablet because it's always seemed to me to be a waste if you have a good ultrabook and type all the time. Why use a virtual keyboard or a stylus when you can type on a real keyboard and the whole package weighs just a tad more than a tablet? But yes, I'm weird in this regard.

Reviewers know (read AnandTech's reviews) that there's no premium charged for comparable Ultrabooks in either the Mac or PC world. This is the reason more people buy Apple laptops than any other brand. And if you wanted, you could use the educational discount (as I do) and buy from Apple's refurbished store which provides a full as-new warranty (as I often have). Then your costs would be slightly below the cost of a comparable PC. Sadly, though, you'd have to use the Mac OS instead of Windows 8.

|-O