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EL BROMANCE posted:But if your budget allows you to buy a Mac, then why wouldn't you? If it doesn't and the laptop is something that's important to you, then maybe wait a bit and save up? You're also comparing apples-to-oranges and I'm suggesting a premium Windows laptop, not a tacky budget item. Your point about service and support is completely valid and why I name-checked squaretrade as a suggested warranty, as their service receives excellent feedback. I've bought it before, but never had to use it. I'm not against owning a MacBook (my GF has one and I use it often; it's lovely running OSX) but why you'd buy one as a windows machine is tough to understand. Unless you really want to pay for a glowing Apple logo, the performance / warranty aspects can be replicated elsewhere and still give you enough money left over to buy an iPad.
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Sep 11, 2015 17:26
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But they are? Have you done a bootcamp install on your girlfriends MacBook? As said, there's a reason that Microsoft and other PC companies use Apple hardware when they do presentations and the like where stability has to be guaranteed. You're dealing with a very small set of well known components that have excellent driver support. It's a known quantity. I've only bothered to BootCamp once, because I have other PCs here, but the install was excellent and the driver support went further than I expected with regards to using my mouse and keyboard with full functionality on hot keys and the like. It's a nice touch, at least. I don't know much about Squaretrade as I've never used them... do they offer a service where I can literally take my laptop into my town centre (10 minutes walk) and speak face to face with the person who'll be undertaking my repair? Genuine question. That's the kind of service I cherish, and when I got dodgy service from Apple last year, I was pissed and I let them know. The service I've received from them this year has been absolute 5 star all round though, and I'm happy to recommend them again. You say 'premium Windows laptop', but how many choices are there really? In a similar conversation I had last year, the only brand someone could think of was Lenovo, and let's face it - Lenovo ThinkPads are not IBM ThinkPads. I was going to drop about $1,200 on a Windows laptop when I switched over about 10 years ago, and even then I would've struggled to have found a laptop that actually met my criteria. Sony definitely charged that amount of money, but Vaios were and always will be complete poo poo. I've got a tab open on a big UK computer reseller, and only have premium stuff listed. Acer (lol), Asus, Toshiba, Lenovo. None of whom I feel after years of dealing with their products that I could trust with $2,000 of purchasing power. I'm not a rabid fanboy or anything, but when I leave the country next year I can't see me rebutting any PC hardware as I don't have any real use for it anymore and I've kept it for legacy purposes only really. Maybe if the wife doesn't mind me hiding a server somewhere, then I'll probably buy something dedicated to that, but 99% of the stuff hanging off it will be Apple branded.
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Sep 11, 2015 17:38
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Windows on a Mac still can't use the Intel graphics in a dual GPU system, but that's an intentional choice of Apple's because they're assholes.
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Sep 11, 2015 17:47
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Also the trackpad is very limited unless you install somewhat unstable third party stuff like Trackpad++ Bootcamp is great to have as an option, but I'd probably pick up an XPS 13 or whatever if I needed a full time Windows machine.
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Sep 11, 2015 17:53
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I bought a Windows ultrabook (ASUS UX303) and I've been very happy with it. I think it was $900. There are definitely most-recent-MacBook competitors at a deep discount over Apple's offerings.
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Sep 11, 2015 18:59
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The only thing I've read that has been of interest from Loinkedin - is Apple slowly pushing out the carriers? No word on a software SIM in the phones this year, perhaps iPhone 7? https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iphone-6s-really-bad-news-carriers-christian-schuh?trk=hp-feed-article-title-hpm Also in German it's iPhone Sexess
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Sep 11, 2015 19:56
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EL BROMANCE posted:(too many words to quote) I think if you're honest, you'll see writing "lol" to review a line of laptops that are empirically the most reliable isn't really fair, and leaves nothing to be really said. There are lots of very tangible reasons why someone would want a non-Apple piece of hardware - Optical drives built in especially blueray - A sensible number of USB ports - Swappable batteries - HDMI built in - VGA built in - eSATA built in - etc There's a lot of hidden costs to the mac ecosystem and I just don't know why you would do it if you didn't want to partake in the whole ecosystem (OSX) instead of just the hardware shell. I don't even know how well support for the Mac's esoteric 3rd party connectors works on bootcamp, but a brief Google suggests various issues, especially with thunderbolt which requires reboots to swap what you have plugged in. It seems you don't actually bootcamp yourself though, but use OSX? Why recommend it then? Squaretrade is a guaranteed 5-day service. I have only been witness to one claim, wherein they simply shipped a refurb that arrived 2 days later as the repair would have taken 10 days, but 5 is what they say, so. It's also much cheaper than an applecare extended warranty if you're going beyond one year. If you want to claim their support is worth the extra cost to you, then that's fine and your choice, but you are essentially paying 100's of £ for the maybe required service time. For less money, you could take your windows laptop gone wrong, and throw it in a river. You can then re-buy it (same day!) and you'd still be quids-in vs owning a similarly specced Macbook. quote:But they are? Have you done a bootcamp install on your girlfriends MacBook? quote:As said, there's a reason that Microsoft and other PC companies use Apple hardware when they do presentations and the like where stability has to be guaranteed As a counterpoint there's essentially no Mac hardware in any industry sector (except creative .. and that's specifically to use OSX) as it's too expensive for the performance, so if you really want to make that argument it's not going to go your way. Khablam fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 21:19
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Yeah, Microsoft is pretty clearly trying to position themselves as the defining productivity cloud (as well as some other cloud services), and a pretty key bit of that is being visibly OS agnostic. It makes total sense to be seen using competitor OSes, and a mac shows that in a way a droid phone wouldn't. See also, microsoft showing off how good and cool their cloud services are on the new apple stuff.
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Sep 11, 2015 22:36
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Ok, looking over the iPhone Upgrade Program, someone help me see what I'm missing... I'm thinking of going from a 6 to a 6s+. I'm currently on a AT&T 2 year contract that doesn't make me eligible for upgrade until April 2016. At that point, their 2 year plan/subsidies are gone and they'd offer me the same phone for $42.45/month on the Next 12 plan. I could get the same thing from Apple tomorrow for $40.75, plus it comes with AppleCare+ AND I can upgrade when the 7 comes out next year if I so desire? Maybe I'm paranoid but I feel like this is too fair of a deal for me to pass up from Apple. Am I crazy?
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Sep 11, 2015 23:42
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There are two known catches compared to a carrier installment plan: 1. It's only available at Apple Retail stores. If you're not near a store (or are likely to be moving away from a store), you have to be prepared for a long drive to buy or upgrade. 2. It's being financed through Citizens Bank Personal Loans. Their credit approval process may be more stringent than the carriers', if this is a concern for you. But at a quick glance you're not missing anything. Next 12 is a 20 month installment plan, versus Apple's 24 months, so AT&T's installments will naturally be higher. Molten Llama fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 00:14
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Khablam posted:This discussion can't go anywhere because you've made your choice based on personal experiences (this is fine) and hand-wave any larger discussion on the issue (not fine but I don't really care to change your mind). This is true, and I understand your POV too but it's clear we're both coming from very different sides of this. The OP who you responded to originally and the target case for my argument specifically said he 'despised Windows laptops', which was why he was considering a MacBook. He's also got other elements from the Apple ecosystem, and he didn't say anything either way about maybe using OS X too. quote:I think if you're honest, you'll see writing "lol" to review a line of laptops that are empirically the most reliable isn't really fair, and leaves nothing to be really said. We're in a world where Acer are now the top end? Holy poo poo. I'm not being sarcastic or facetious, I wrote 'lol' while looking at an (admittedly older) Acer laptop that was under my chair because of how bad it was. Maybe they've really, really upped their game recently. Last I saw, I could've sworn they were knocking out MacBook Air clones at best. quote:There are lots of very tangible reasons why someone would want a non-Apple piece of hardware And this is where we really, really differ. I left the checkbox game years ago, and have zero desire to go back. Too long wasting time comparing motherboards against each other, "Well this one has 6 USB sockets, while this one has 4 on board SATA, but 2 of them are JMicron and they suck and... " blah. Hours of my life I'd want back. But to be specific - optical media? I have working drives in the house, and I use them maybe once a year. Swappable batteries? Only time I ever needed to swap a battery was because it was Sony built garbage that died out of the blue and needed to be replaced, and I don't recall ever seeing anyone walking around with a stack of li-on batteries in their laptop case. HDMI built in? Doesn't every Apple laptop have this? I'm sure they do. Maybe not that new MacBook (the gen 1 one) but it's pretty standard. VGA built in? Last thing I needed to connect to VGA was a Dreamcast, and I don't spend my life dealing with decrepit projectors. eSATA? holy poo poo. Well the only eSATA gear I have needs port multiplication and I have a gut feeling most laptops don't have that as part of their eSATA spec, which would make it useless to me anyway. It's building to checkbox lists, how many people actually need this poo poo? Because most of it is poo poo. I honestly could not give one crap about a geekbench score, because again - I left that crap behind, in the same way I left having PCs with their cases off for most of their lives, and dealing with a myriad of bullshit that was actually getting in the way of me doing what I wanted to, rather than CJing the computer. A number on a screen is just a dick waving contest between nerds who have nothing else better to do with their lives, not people who are looking to buy a good computer. I've also never understood this fascination some people have of hanging as many devices off their laptop at once. While that new MacBook thing wouldn't be my first purchase, I could easily survive off a single USB port. quote:It's also much cheaper than an applecare extended warranty if you're going beyond one year. You're making a lot of assumptions there. I didn't have extended warranties on my iMac, it was 5 years old when I walked into the store, it was fixed within a few days and it didn't cost me a penny. But again, it's all down to what the OP wants, and he sounds like someone who is sick to death of dealing with Windows laptops, in his own words. He's probably sick to death of us too now 
EL BROMANCE fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 01:26
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You can probably buy a high end Macbook in most cities, pay off ~60% initial value over the course of a year through a best buy card and then sell it for ~70% of initial value at year's end. Hell, you can use that money for Apple Care for the next computer you buy. That's the power of Apple products really.
Shammypants fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Sep 12, 2015 |
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Sep 12, 2015 03:26
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In my case, I paid about £1,200 for a fully loaded iMac (it was about £1,900 retail, but retail is for suckers) and I'll probably get £6-700 for it when I sell it in two months. That's a pretty drat good return on investment, and when I move I'll be buying the equivalent model they have out. Hoping for a new 5K that doesn't have the issues a 1st gen problem comes with.
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Sep 12, 2015 11:15
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And you're not going to tell us how you saved 700 freaking pounds?
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Sep 12, 2015 11:40
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Ah, It was a combo of the big 'once per year' staff discount of 27% or whatever it is plus a one off credit combination I did through a friend, if it was 'one neat trick' I would've shared it. I'm unlikely to get as good a deal ever again sadly, but I always fish around for who's not going to use their big discount and throw them some incentive to throw it my way. Even educational discounts are pretty good though, think the standard on most hardware is close to 20%, it's a shame you can't stack that on a refurb (unless you can and I'm mistaken). Refurb is a good way of you have no access to discounts through work/edu though. I've never had seen anything bought through it that didn't look brand new. Managed to get an accidental discount when I bought an OG iPad for my mum when the 2nd came out and they reduced it for a bit. They weren't supposed to allow anything against that, but the system allowed it. One of the bosses wasn't happy about that apparently ha. But that return on my old hardware will make a nice dent on my new purchase, which I'll have to work out a way of getting cheap in a new country. Should be fun!
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Sep 12, 2015 12:07
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I have never needed eSATA ever.
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Sep 12, 2015 12:29
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I think the other "catch" on the Apple upgrade plan is that if you don't actually upgrade after 12 months, then it costs you the full price of the phone plus AppleCare+ after 24 months. If you don't normally get AppleCare+, maybe not a good deal. Also, it would be pretty easy for the carriers to increase the phone plan cost for unlocked phones. If they were feeling spiteful.
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Sep 12, 2015 12:32
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TinTower posted:I have never needed eSATA ever. I have a 4 bay enclosure I connect over USB because it needs port multiplication to work, and the esata interface on my premium ASUS motherboard of course doesn't support it. I could 'fix' this for about £20 and some messing about, but I just don't care enough.
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Sep 12, 2015 12:37
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EL BROMANCE posted:And this is where we really, really differ. I left the checkbox game years ago, and have zero desire to go back. Too long wasting time comparing motherboards against each other, "Well this one has 6 USB sockets, while this one has 4 on board SATA, but 2 of them are JMicron and they suck and... " blah. Hours of my life I'd want back. But to be specific - optical media? I have working drives in the house, and I use them maybe once a year. Swappable batteries? Only time I ever needed to swap a battery was because it was Sony built garbage that died out of the blue and needed to be replaced, and I don't recall ever seeing anyone walking around with a stack of li-on batteries in their laptop case. HDMI built in? Doesn't every Apple laptop have this? I'm sure they do. Maybe not that new MacBook (the gen 1 one) but it's pretty standard. VGA built in? Last thing I needed to connect to VGA was a Dreamcast, and I don't spend my life dealing with decrepit projectors. eSATA? holy poo poo. Well the only eSATA gear I have needs port multiplication and I have a gut feeling most laptops don't have that as part of their eSATA spec, which would make it useless to me anyway. You can sum all your post up as "I just want a laptop that works, is reliable, is high quality, is a known element, is zero hassle" and you can't really beat how well the MBPs (running OSX) do just that. I won't argue with that, in fact I will wholeheartedly agree and say it's a great ecosystem to buy into. But to buy it specifically to bootcamp? It's a tough sell. Perhaps if you were buying older hardware for reasonable prices, it would make more sense, as you're avoiding the premium cost of something you're not using. I've had a better look at this, and it seems day-to-day use would get irritating. Battery life takes a very noticeable hit, as does screen brightness control, trackpad use and using peripherals. I assume the emulated bios isn't playing well with power states? Hard to guess but it's an issue nonetheless. For the hard-lock to the integrated graphics alone where applicable, you lose a big part of the hardware you're paying for. I don't know how well it plays with the newer Iris stuff. Where you might have no use for HDMI, it's extremely common and only served by an adapter on older Macs, that uses thunderbolt, which is problematic for bootcamp. Obviously it's on the new MPB. VGA is still painfully around if your use includes any form of presentation. And whilst I get your point about not obsessing over ports, someone with multiple USB devices is going to look at 2 v 6 and instantly see an advantage, or recognise that you need to make trade-offs, or spend more. e.g. with limited connectivity my GF opted to pay instead for the larger SSD as keeping a USB occupied for an external HDD then leaves you simply swapping with one. Reliably getting a power socket on a train is a ball-ache, so yeah I do see people with spare batteries on commutes in and out of London pretty regularly. If you want MacBook performance for a little cheaper, but still with a high focus on a quality screen and build, the Dell XPS machines get high praise. For a lot less money and good performance the Acer machines are legit good now (but I don't know about their support).
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Sep 12, 2015 13:54
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I only ever bootcamped on my iMac so things like trackpad etc never became an issue, but my housemate has a fully loaded current gen MBP from his workplace and he's booted into Windows a lot for gaming (don't tell them) and I've not heard him complain about anything. If it was just the internal graphics chip, would he be able to play the newest GTA cranked pretty highly? I'm pretty sure that'd be beyond the scope of the chip, so it must be using the real GPU for that. It looked really good from what I could see anyway. He also plays a ton of Kerbal Space Program, but I'm not sure if it's quite as taxing, I expect not. But yeah, he spends hours in Windows and I've not heard him complain once. He loves that machine, but I'm not going to deny that it was very, very expensive. The battery life seems excellent too regardless of OS, but I'm always keen to plug in whenever I can. Obviously being on battery for long periods of time is going to be down to the owner. I think the current ones are rated at 12 hours, so even if Windows took a hit off that, it's still an impressive amount. We still don't really know the OPs expected use beyond a paragraph though, so we can both hypothesise about what he'd want to fit our own agendas.
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Sep 12, 2015 14:13
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Are phone companies still offering subsidized phones on contract, or are the payment plans the only way to get them now? I haven't really looked into any of the payment plans (either from carrier or from Apple), but if that's the way things are going, I guess I'll have to research them next year for the iPhone 7?
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Sep 12, 2015 21:42
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The two year contract is gasping its last breath.
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Sep 13, 2015 05:19
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OldSenileGuy posted:Are phone companies still offering subsidized phones on contract, or are the payment plans the only way to get them now? I haven't really looked into any of the payment plans (either from carrier or from Apple), but if that's the way things are going, I guess I'll have to research them next year for the iPhone 7?
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Sep 14, 2015 02:07
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Endless Mike posted:Currently AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon are still offering two-year contracts (AT&T only through their stores or online), but they're definitely pushing people towards payment plans. Of those, AT&T will probably drop them first, followed by Verizon, and Sprint will keep offering them in a last-ditch effort to maintain relevance. When I preordered through Verizon Saturday they didn't give me a 2 year contract option.
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Sep 14, 2015 14:34
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flipoff posted:When I preordered through Verizon Saturday they didn't give me a 2 year contract option. It's on the Apple Store website. Might only be for certain customers. 
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Sep 14, 2015 15:27
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Endless Mike posted:It's on the Apple Store website. Might only be for certain customers. Verizon has already dropped the two year contract option for new customers. You can only get one if you're already a customer on a contract now.
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Sep 14, 2015 15:57
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cstine posted:Verizon has already dropped the two year contract option for new customers. You can only get one if you're already a customer on a contract now. It's actually still there (at least in store), but it's both very much not advertised, and on the new plans paying for the phone no contract is a better option anyway.
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Sep 15, 2015 11:36
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