I can concur to this anecdote. I'm personally in the IT field, and just got tired of fixing computers all day, to come home and fix my own computer. It was something I loved enough to make a career out of, but yet I grew exasperated at having to maintain my own setup just to keep it in a semi-enjoyable state.

Once I had another hardware failure, I scrapped the whole thing for one of the first gen white Intel iMacs, and never looked back. I no longer get in to a domestic dispute with my computer when I come home at the end of the day. My desktop is at peace.

I have often wondered what people do to their computer to break it? I have a windows 7 install that is a couple of years old at this point. And my linux install is an unbroken series of debian upgrades going about 7 years.

I'm sitting here using a year-old $1300 HP Envy 14. It's the MBP of PCs -- all aluminum/magnesium alloy case, backlit island style keyboard, edge to edge glass around a 1600x900 display, i5, switchable graphics adapters, the works.

The fan cycles on and off every 3 seconds the entire time it runs. It hard freezes if I play certain games for a few hours. Sometimes it emits a high pitched noise. There's some discoloration starting where my palms rest. I doubt it'll make it another year without needing service to at least apply new thermal paste or pads or something. This is HP's finest build quality and it's still not up to Apple standards.

As for the software side, one of my jobs is to resell advertising services, and I manually review each order to make sure the sites to advertise meet some quality guidelines - 20 to 30 a day. At least one of them each day will be a site distributing malware of some sort. Even with a firewall, Windows Update set to auto, Microsoft Security Essential Real-Time Protection enabled, and using the auto-updating Google Chrome... I sometimes get infected by one of these sites anyway. Last week it was one of those pieces of malware that pretends to be an antivirus program telling you to register to clear an infection -- while autokilling all processes except explorer.exe and iexplore.exe on the system. Took me half an hour in the registry editor in safe mode to get rid of it.

I built a high end machine a few years ago. Quad core. 6gb RAM, fastest gpu available at the time. All quality parts, in excess of $1500. Installed Win 7.

I barely ever used it. I have a late 2009 MacBook that I use daily. About 6 months ago, I decided to turn my desktop into a Hackintosh. Put OS X on it.

Ever since, I use the desktop at least as much as my laptop now. I've determined it's the OS that's more important than hardware. Even with high end hardware, I can't work with Windows. Put Mac OS on the very same hardware and it becomes a powerhouse.

  > There's some discoloration starting where my palms rest.

  > This is HP's finest build quality and it's still
  > not up to Apple standards.

Apple dealt with that issue a while back. They constantly tried to downplay it until they came out with newer models that didn't have the issue. The Apple fanboys of the day were constantly berating the people that complained about it stating that they "must be dirty, sweaty and days without a shower." I remember constant calls for people to, "just wash your hands."

So you're saying apple is eight years ahead of HP in plastic cases.

It's an entirely metal case, not plastic. Whatever finish is coated on top of the metal is what's showing some wear.

This exact problem happened to me. Do you know what Apple did? They took my computer, replaced the case and did a full diagnostics on everything to make sure it was in perfect working order. I had the computer back at the end of the day.

HP has never gotten their laptop thermal solutions right, sorry cant help you with that. For the other problem - create a virtual machine with windows installed. Then use a clone of this virtual machine to do your actual surfing. Once that gets infected just make anohter clone of the virtual machine and resume surfing. I am assuming that there is something windows specific in what you are doing, if not just surf in linux and kiss most malware goodbye.

"Create a virtual machine for the express purpose of surfing the internet" is a solution that should never have to be proposed.

...especially when "Use a Mac" is an equally effective solution, with pretty much equivalent user-friendliness (arguably more, given that so much hacker-friendly software is *nix friendly [and in fact developed on a Mac] and won't run on Windows at all).

What about the situation when you have a client that is using activex?

> I'm sitting here using a year-old $1300 HP Envy 14. It's the MBP of PCs

Sorry. Had to stop reading after that because it'll be obvious what's coming. The problem here is that you are the prey of "High-End" PC companies with emphasis on the air quotes. You fell for /the works/ and the bells and whistles.

This is the problem with PCs. Anyone who can make a decent build for $700 will tell you the same: Pre-built PCs are the built like matchstick homes. As long as you put enough glossy paint on the exterior, you can sell it to any sap.

Now I don't go out there and advocating that /everyone/ build their own PCs (though they should at least consider it). I do advocate, however, that one should do enough research to be comfortable with their purchase and to NOT be comfortable with "I just bought a $2000 PC with all these shiny parts. It /has/ to be good."

> The problem here is that you are the prey of "High-End" PC companies with emphasis on the air quotes. You fell for /the works/ and the bells and whistles.

I didn't fall for something, I chose the only option available. I went to Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax, OfficeDepot, Walmart, Target and Sears. Not a single one of those stores carried a single laptop under 17" with a higher density display than 1366x768. On a laptop this size, at 1366x768 you can see the damned grid etched onto the glass the pixels are so big. It's a huge leap backwards compared to what was offered before everyone went widescreen. Any of those computers would've been worse to work on than the one I was trying to replace.

HP offered a 1600x900 14" screen for a brief period and since that's important to me (my laptop is my primary development machine), I paid what it cost to get it. The only other option for a comparable screen in that size is a 15" MBP. A 15" MBP with 8GB RAM, a 128GB SSD and the display upgrade (the options needed to be comparable) costs $2299 or $1000 more than I paid.

> I don't go out there and advocating that /everyone/ build their own PCs (though they should at least consider it)

Nobody builds their own laptops.

Next time, get the thinkpad T-series. Yes, it's plastic rather than pretty metal, but the build quality is spectacular, even compared to my (Stolen.) MBP 13 inch. It runs both Linux and Windows like a champ. Oh, and it's easy to put in your own memory and hard drive, which decreases the relative cost. (I have an HDD and an SDD in there right now in place of the CD-ROM.

But people do build their own laptops, relatively speaking. They get Clevo bare bones and put what they want in it. I happen to think the clevo bodies are clunky, but to each their own.

I buy old 4:3 ThinkPads on craigslist. It's the only way to get a decent-resolution display today.

yeah, my last laptop was a dell inspiron 14" with a 1400x900 resolution. my current one is a dell inspiron 15" that does 1366x768 :( i could simply not get a 900 vertical resolution without paying an exorbitant price. (for my next laptop i probably will pay the price and get a decent vertical resolution)

Building your own laptop, though?

Now there's an idea. Standardised components so you could build your own laptop, just as you would a PC.

I am a big PC fan (love the openness) but even I will concede that buying a laptop has not been easy for quite some time now. fwiw - the asus u series is pretty good, good battery life and very light, the lenovo t series is built like a tank, and the hp elitebooks are very nice. For a desktop I would recommend PC's anyday, but for notebooks I must grudgingly concede that buying a mac laptop is the logical thing to do from a hardware standpoint.

Agreed, Redhat 9 was hell but Ubuntu saved Linux for me. I hardly ever have any problems, especially the crapware, malware, 30 different "please update me" popups kind of problem that are a dime a dozen on windows. I also like that I know what's going on with the system all the way down to the bare metal.

The main thing that I can't use Linux for: Watching Netflix or other premium content is largely solved by the fact that I do all that, and play video games on my big screen TV via a PS3 and the built in Netflix/Amazon Video features of the TV.

Yes netflix has now replaced flash as the top frustration on linux. No easy solution seems to be in sight.

I had an install of XP that went for 4 years, then another 4 after something in it broke and forced a reinstall. Windows 7 is shaping up to beat that record. I don't want to say people are exaggerating or leaving out details like doing uncommon things, but I don't see how so many people have problems with Window otherwise.

What hardware are you running it on?

A self assembled PC that I put together eons ago.

Would you say you used high-quality parts? ;)

Only the very best - I prefer to use server boards which dont have whizbang features but receive bios updates for a couple of years. I think buying PC's is like an art. You dont want to buy any PC that has a radical feature vendor specific. For eg I would never buy anything with Nvidia optimus, chances of Nvidia sticking around to maintain it five years from now are zero. Youre much safer buying a middle of the road model that will receive vendor updates because the vendors lifeline depends on it. Buying motherboards that are used in supercomputing clusters is also great because those users tend to actually contribute kernel patches in case compatibility breaks over the years.

What you wrote pretty much sums up why I went with a Macbook Air recently. My first Apple product ever. I used to think in terms of cutting edge video card, processor, etc. But my last Windows laptop would freeze up from getting too hot. Just watching a video on Netflix caused this problem unless I elevated the machine to allow free flow of air.

My Macbook Air can compile a video lecture while I'm watching a Netflix video without overheating. I've realized that Apple creates a great computing experience without using cutting edge specs and their experience is much better than other PC manufacturers. And their products look like something you'd want to take care of and appreciate.

People buy Macs when they can afford it and/or want to spend money on quality. But most people can not afford Macs or are not willing to spend that much on a computer. That's why the other PC manufacturers manage to keep selling, and that's also why the other PC manufacturers struggle with razor thin margins.

I used a ThinkPad T400 for about a year and a half before getting a Macbook Pro. The ThinkPad is junk compared to the MBP. Sadly, it's still one of the best Windows business laptops you can get.

I've had exactly the opposite experience. I've owned 3 thinkpads, 4 macbook pros (between my wife and i), and an ibook. The thinkpads are tanks that take any beating i give them and keep running. The ibook was solid. The macbook pros have been complete crap--breaking dvd drives, failing harddrives, failing keyboards, cracked displays, failing trackpads. On the dvd drives, Apple has refused to admit the problem, and has repeated deleted forums with people discussing it. They've completely lost me as a customer.

The t400 is a tank. It survived university and being dropped more than a few times, and beer spilled all over it. MBPs are like Maserati/BMW/whatever which are sexy but require much more maintenance and care than the Honda civic of laptops aka the thinkpad T-series.