While I was looking through a Best Buy add, I saw the a mac with 4 gb ram and 600+ hard drive was $1,200, while a laptop had the smae memory and was around $500. Why are apple products so expensive? This also goes for ipods, ipads, and the others.
Please share.Apple is a fascinating case study as a whole though. It's amazing how marketing and brand imaging have built that company up in the last decade. I mean, there have been better mp3 players than the IPod for the last 5 years at least. The actual computers themselves have already been discussed in the above posts.
One of the only real legitimately superior products I believe they have had is the IPhone when it first came out. It seems like that was the first touch screen phone to really get it right. Now it seems the market has caught up, but during its initial run, the IPhone was pretty unique.
Apple's products forced competitors to get their asses in gear, and as a result there's less that differentiates them. Nowadays win7 is a perfectly satisfactory OS and laptops in general have gotten more attractive, though yeah they're still not up to par with apple's offerings.Now it seems the market has caught up, but during its initial run, the IPhone was pretty unique.
You are definitely NOT going to go with iPods in terms of audio quality. MP3 Players such as Cowon, and a few models of the iRiver and Sandisk(I'm mostly familiar with these, because they're Korean brands, except for Sandisk) offer the best sound quality, coupled with a good pair of earbuds or headphones, such as Shure, or Sennheisers. Unless you couple the iPod with the SRS pack that's a pain to carry around, to enhance your sound, it's not going to sound up to par with its competitors.Please share.
It's true that Apple has one of the best Customer Services around; they've been constantly been touted by many sources as having the top 3 customer services around. However, I wouldn't say that the only reason to buy a Mac is because of its reliability and its customer service. I know that the current Macbooks carry a few flaws of their own. Their unibody design, while unique, carries huge thermal issues, coupled with the 12 cell battery they stuff in there (Have you seen the insides of a Macbook Pro, or the Air? Barely any room for thermal output, leading to parts dying early, and lower performance.) I took the liberty of doing a one day experiment by sticking in a temperature program that monitored it for 24 hours (with their permissions of course), and I find that even though idle at around 45-55 (decent temperatures, nothing spectacular), I find that they spike up to critical temperatures, to 80-90, even without stressing the processor or graphics card much. Of course, I can't speak for all the macs, because I only tested a small sample (around 5 Macbook pros, with varying specs, and 2 Macbook Airs, one of which was the newer model).The success behind mac is the comprehensibility and breadth of its line, coupled with excellent customer support.
I didn't buy such-and-such computer from such-and-such retailer-- I bought a mac. As I travel around the world, I pretty much got support wherever I go. Hey, if it's an MAC, than any apple retailer will be bending over the back to help me with it. I have constantly been impressed with support, even here in Japan. What seals it for me is all the built in software-- none of it is top level, but it's usable, and the one-to-one program Apple has is really useful (I've also taken up the classes here in Japan). Also, thank you boot camp, I now can use all those wonderful applications for PC. I just do all my internet surfing on my Apple side (with anti-virus screening) and don't even have to worry about virus protecting the PC side.
They create the image of excellent performance and support, and then they back it up.
There are a lot of wealthy people in this day and age (even in recession), and many are willing to pay the extra money to feel "safe" that they bought with someone "trustworthy".