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Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

You can get a $2,500 MBP, work on it for 3 years, and resell it for $700 or so after. So, that's $1,800 for 3 years, or about $12/week. So the price is reasonable if its something you use to make money or use all the time. Plus, with MBP you get OSX out of the box, plus it runs Linux and Windows, or all 3. Even if OSX is not your cup of tea, it's nice to have OSX available if you like to play with iOS development.

I have a friend who keeps bugging me about how expensive MBPs are. I asked him to find a better laptop for the money. I care about the following, in order: quality of screen, quality of keyboard, tough case, light wight, long betters life, fast hd, fast CPU, good gfx card. So far no results :) I actually kind of wish there was more choice in the high end market. I have seen a few nice ultrabooks, but they cost as much as a Mac, if not more, so what's the point?

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The price of everything is reasonable if instead of comparing it against alternatives, you compare it against not buying anything.

For example, $1000 shoes that last 1 year are reasonable when compared to going without shoes - only $3 a day, and you'll save money that you would have to pay to repair damage to your bare feet.

Could you find a better pair of shoes for less than $1000? Where's the gold leaf, and why do they lace up the front rather than snap up the sides? I think not.

My argument is that you can not find a laptop with a nicer screen and keyboard, with good battery life, durable case, light frame, and amazingly fast HD for less money then an rMBP would cost you. And given that's its only $12/week, why not choose the best tool for the job, especially if your job is working on your laptop.

Of course, same arguments can be applied to almost anything, but this thread was about premium laptops. You can't have a premium laptop that's also very cheep.

How about a Lenovo x230? Adding core i7 and 16GB RAM takes the price to USD 1300. Still weights around 3 lbs. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/x230/

Add to that a 250GB SSD and drop the ram to 8GB (for fair comparison) and the price is $1,430. Similar MacBook Air is $1,550. So, for extra $120 you get better screen, much nicer touchpad, light up keyboard, an OPTION to run OSX, and way nicer design.

The X1 Carbon is kind of nice. But same thing applies. Low res screen is a letdown, and by the time you load it up to be comparable to say, rMBP, it's about the same price.

Well, I have observed that boosting your RAM to 16G gives you much better performance because you almost never swap to disk. To get 16GB on a MacBook, you are looking north of $2000.

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