This post is mainly for Apple fanboys only. If you’re not one of the people who think Apple is the best, then you can die. No, I’m just kidding. You can read this post, or head on over to our previous post, to see why Apple isn’t [supposedly] good. Don’t worry, that wasn’t written by me, but rather by a Microsoft-loving Republican. Anyways, to the point.
Apple. The “most expensive and useless” of all tech companies. Their products seem never to come up to par with the industry standard. Everything that comes from such a company must be overpriced and low-quality, right? Wrong.
Let’s look at argument number one of most anti-Apple people try and impose. This is the price. The 15-inch benchmark MacBook Pro stands at the price of $1,699. A Dell laptop with similar specifications may stand at a price of about $1,999. So what justifies the $300 price increase? The answers are below:
Customer Service
If you’ve never owned a Mac, chances are you’ve never had the opportunity to witness the awesomeness of Apple’s customer service department. The Store’s Service never fails to disappoint me. Point in Case: When my MacBook battery failed on me (after three years of working perfectly), I simply took it to the Apple Store, and without any questions asked or any hassles, they simply replaced the battery within fifteen minutes of me arriving at the store (A shout out to the team at Fairview Mall Apple Store in Toronto, you guys are awesome!). If you can get the same thing by going to Best Buy or Future shop, let me know, because I have never heard of one incident of a person actually getting their way there.
Let’s look at the intelligence of the employees. In order to get a job at Apple Retail, you generally have to be over 18, and extremely qualified. These people are experts in their fields, and due to the sparsity of Apple Stores, competition for jobs is intense. This means that only the top, and the best people can get their jobs there. At this point, one may think that my writing about Apple Retail Stores and Customer Service is only opinion, but I do have evidence to back it up. RetailWeek, a reputable retail reviewing agency, gave Apple’s two largest retail stores an award in product, service, and creativity. The Chief Executive of Liberty told RetailWeek that:
“Apple has implemented the three key factors in retail: excitement, education and ease. It makes your life easy, the store is exciting and people are available to educate you. The outside is unique. It is transparent, features a glass cube and has no ground floor, only basement. This represents the transparency of the retailer itself and the design is in line with the DNA of the brand.”
You can see why both jobs and Apple products are in high demand with the excellence of Apple’s customer service and retail stores. It’s easy for a person to get immersed in the beauty and stunning simplicity of an Apple Store.
And if it seems that that wasn’t enough to score the goal, wait until you hear what the American Consumer Satisfaction Index had to say about Apple.
It’s hard not to be impressed with Apple, This is product extension at its best where the new products, iPod and iPhone, are helping bring new customers to existing computer products. The fact that Apple is not dependent on the Windows Vista operating system hasn’t hurt either.
You can read the full report if necessary, but I think you get the point. It’s time to move on to a more important issue.
Longevity
For most non-techies, people look at the price and hard drive capacity of an item and buy it. But fortunately for those of us who are not ill-informed or have an ounce of common sense, we have Apple. When we buy a product from Apple, we may not get that 1TB hard drive that we wanted on our laptop, but instead we extended the life of the laptop by almost ten years! The unibody design of the MacBook Pro means no loose parts or screws, and the large, non-replaceable battery means charging can last over 1,000 cycles, which is much more than the industry standard for a PC. Choosing a Mac or a PC as a computer is comparable to choosing metal to paper, one just lasts longer and is more durable than the other. Let’s take a look at this example:
Microsoft’s latest advertisement shows an average computer user, Jane, who wants to buy a 17′ laptop. The commercial follows her as she discovers that Mac laptops are too expensive for her budget, then heads to Best Buy where she finds a PC that meets her specifications for $699.
The ad ends with Jane jumping in joy, but -understandably- Apple and its supporters are not as happy.
Business Week’s Arik Hesseldahl, along with an Apple spokesperson responded to the aforementioned ad by claiming that PC users don’t understand quality and economics, and that they are picking inferior machines. “Yes, $699 beats the $2,800 you’d pay for a Mac with a 17-in. screen. But when it comes to PCs, there’s still a great deal more to buy,” he wrote.
The first thing a PC user will need to buy, according to Hesseldahl, is a decent Antivirus software. “After the trial runs out you’ll pay Symantec $50 a year to protect your PC (and up to two others in your home) from all the nasty viruses, worms, and other malware lurking on the Internet. That’s $150 over the three years Lauren is likely to hold on to her PC. No need for antivirus on the Mac.”
It is worth noting that Apple has been recommending the use of antivirus software with Macs for almost half a year now. A note on Apple’s official support website reads: “Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”
“Next,” Hesseldahl added, “let’s say something goes wrong on the computer once the warranty expires and that it requires the intervention of a third party. Geek Squad will charge you $129 just for a diagnosis. A diagnosis from the Genius Bar in Apple’s retail stores? Free.”
After that Hesseldahl tried to calculate the cost of getting a multimedia suite similar to Mac’s iLife. For some reason, he expected that, in addition to Muvee Reveal($80), and CyberLink DVD Suite($104) , the average PC user needs Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, including a membership in Photoshop.com Plus ($140), Sonic Solutions’ Roxio Creator 2009, which combines video-editing and DVD-creating tools ($100)and Cubase Sequel ($100).
“Add it all up and it’s not hard to imagine Lauren’s $699 computer costing something closer to $1,500,” he concluded.
“But that doesn’t include harder-to-quantify shortcomings. The HP’s battery lasts only 2.5 hours on a charge, compared with eight hours for the 17-in. MacBook Pro, which also happens to be 1.2 lb. lighter and boasts substantially better screen resolution: 1,920 pixels wide by 1,440 high, vs. 1,440 by 900 for the HP.”
I don’t even think there’s a choice anymore. I cannot understand why someone would want to buy a PC. Really.
Conclusion
I have highlighted only two of the hundreds of reasons why a Mac reigns supreme, but in summation, when you buy an Apple computer, you know you’re getting quality for the amount of money you paid. A laptop, like a car or house, is an investment not to be taken lightly. Apple makes sure that investment is well placed and lasts long.
This post was written by j.dhanani, and he/she may not represent the opinions of this website or it's owner.
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