Honestly, a hardrive failure is one of the easier things to identify and fix. I understand that Dell is a terrible company (any one remember last year when Kudlow, out of the blue, spent five minutes of his show just disrespecting the company and his own for even buying Dells?) and if you look at what the market is paying for a piece of Dell compared to what it is paying for a piece of Apple, it becomes quite clear which is the better company. But to make this out as a PC thing, as the author of the story does, is simple wrong. The problem was not with ‘PCs’ but with Dell.

My harddrive on my PC failed. I went to the store, bought a 1 TB for 80 bucks. Quick search on the internet, a 1 TB mac harddrive, 140 bucks. Because PCs are so simple, I didnt need a technician to hold my hand when I installed it. Honestly, any person who has ever assembled a Lego toy can build a PC from scratch.

And to go off an a tangent, I thought this story was illustrative of a greater issue in todays world. Believe it or not, building a computer isnt a hard thing to do. People think it is hard because they have never tried to do so on their own, or because ‘experts’ ie: technicians, give it the appearance of being hard. Why would technicians be around if it was easy, in effect.

The world today is run by ‘experts’ and it has eroded the confidence of the people. Poverty is caused in large part because we allowed ‘experts’ to deal with the problem (ie gov and non gov special interests). Our government is corrupt and inefficient because we dont care about it, and have instead shunted off the responsibility to ‘experts’, the rich aristocracy who we elect and who fills the beurocracy. Im sure the good reader of this post can think of a million other examples. Hayeks Road to Serfdom comes to mind.

Just last week the power supply on my macbook failed after 18 months. I made an appt. at the genius bar for the next day. I took it in, they confirmed the failure, and replaced the power supply free of charge despite it being out of warranty.

That simple gesture on their part saved me $80 and built up a ton of brand loyalty.

My first Apple was a $3600 2-floppy drive Mac in 1986. I’ve had Apples at home ever since, except for a brief foray with a Mac-clone back when they made a few of those. The main selling point to me is that I choose not to be a computer hobbyist in my spare time, and with the Macs, I don’t have to be one.

I couldn’t care less what chip is under the hood or what the clock speed is. The thing works fairly intuitively, and comes with some decent applications. It doesn’t have to use half its resources keeping viruses and unwanted intruders at bay.

I’ve used the AppleCare warranty service on several occasions and have always been pleased.

Over the weekend we took my daughter to the nearest Apple store, an hour away in Baton Rouge. She had dropped her iPhone while on a geology field trip, shattering the screen. She was told over the phone that it was a $200 repair, about the same as a replacement for the phone. She made an appointment online for 4:20 pm, and even though the store was packed, we were there on time & got waited on right away. The technician there also said it was a $200 repair; having no real alternatives, we had him fix the phone. When it was time to pay, he shrugged and said “Merry Christmas”.

Apple has earned a lot of their customers’ loyalty. Please pardon our fanaticism.

it keeps the PCs working good.

….I bought a Dell Studio 15 laptop a couple of months ago, Cost me just under $1400. Having a good knowledge of computers, if the hard drive dies, I can buy a new one, put Windows back on it, and be back in business in under two hours and for about $75, even without having to deal with Dell’s support at all. (In fact, short of a power supply issue, since those are still largely proprietary on laptops, I could do that for most everything on this.)

The closest MacBook Pro to the specs of my Dell would have cost me roughly $2350, and even then I would have had to make some sacrifices. The display on the 15″ MBP is lower resolution and has a lower color accuracy, the video device is slower (which is important; some of the statistical analysis packages I use are moving to using GPU acceleration), and it lacks a Blu-Ray drive.

There are two things where a MBP really shines, and those are in battery life and support from the network of Apple Stores across the country. But, with most of my portable computing being from office to office, my having good computer knowledge in terms of troubleshooting and repair, and the nearest Apple Store being an hour’s drive from here, I really had no notable reason to drop an extra $1000 on what was, for my purposes, a machine that met fewer of my needs.

So you went to a web site called TheAppleBlog and expect to get a “Fair and Ballanced” comparison of Apple vs. PC? I can search the net and find many people who have had great experiences having a PC fixed, and many people with a poor experience having a Mac repaired.

For example, the screen of my Dell laptop, which was out of warranty, broke after it was dropped. I called Dell, they told me to ship it back and would fix it. I expected to pay, but there was no charge. A friend bought a Dell and it stopped working a few days later. Dell was on-site the next day, found it was a dead processor, and replaced it.

A Mac user buys a Mac which sells for a premium (even though, as this article states, uses the same exact HDD as the “lowly” Dell – therefore not justifying the premium) and you still need to shell out 100s of dollars extra for a special “AppleCare” warranty. If I were to pay a few extra $100 to a woman for extra “care”, there would be a name for that. But when that user’s Mac breaks, they cannot get it repaired because the user happens to be a smoker (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/353512/apple-refuses-to-repair-smokers-macs).

I even have my own Apple story, such as the time when I was updating the firmware on my iPhone. It was bricked with error 1603. I took it to the Apple Store and they refused to fix or replace it, saying I was trying to hack the phone – which I did not do. Since I was only 2 months into a new AT&T contract, I needed to either pay a few $100 to get out of the contract, or buy a new phone and a new contract). A few months later, on the Apple web site, they acknowledged the problem but have yet to offer a fix.I cannot wait until I am free from this phone because of all the problems. Oh, and I should say, I have apps on the App Store (which means I also have a Mac, which has it’s own problems).

The article just above this one on the front page has an appropriate title for this article – “Shock! Cherry Pickers Accuse Cherry Pickers Of Picking Cherries “

(cough!) (choke!) politico article on money and the tea party movement:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29943.html

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

New life is always a joyous occasion.

May God Bless you all.

To get service from Dell all you have to do is give the Service Tag number that is printed on your computer.

I’m calling BS on this story.

On a personal note, I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with Dell to fix a very esoteric video card issue. The guy on the other end was patient, was able to connect directly into my computer to see what I was doing, and spent 20 minutes reading technical notes about a beta Nvidea driver to get dual screen SLI mode operational. Final result, dual screen mode was enabled and I was a happy customer.

And I didn’t have to leave my living room and go to a Geniud Bar.

Not to knock Apple, they have good products and good service, but it isn’t superior.

I’ve had as many as five Dell boxes in the house at one time and other than the usual viruses and too much porno downloaded by the boys, never had any real problems; none ever catastrophically failed. In fact, since I haven’t had kids around to do the things kids do to computers, the only failure I’ve had in years was the clock battery died on the Dell before this one and that puts them down until you get a new one in. Still have that one though I took the failure as a warning and bought a new one. The old one with the new battery is now a backup. I have one, my wife has one, and we have a Dell laptop we share. The laptop was our youngest son’s and did a tour in Afghanistan and another in Kosovo. He wanted a new one when he got home, so I took the ‘veteran” off his hands, had the hard drive flushed and disinfected and it just chugs along slinging my PowerPoints and running the light box.

I had a Mac network at work back in the Mac 2 days; they are easier and more intuitive to use, but PCs are cheap and ubiquitous and I’ve never had any serious problems with a PC since the IBM PS-2 days and Win 3.3 and trying to run a network on my own at home for the kids to do “homework.” Fortunately, the technology quickly outpaced those days.

They are the only computers you can still get that are not made in China.

to justify paying twice as much for a computer that runs 1/10th of the software.