And double the price of every other PC laptop out there with the same specs. Hell no.
Do you get ALL of the items below for the half price PC laptop?
• More battery life (up to 50% more than most Windows laptops, and topping the best of them by 10-20%) • Less weight. • A retina screen, with apps that fully support it (unlike the Windows Hi-DPI situation), and that is shown (on test and measurements) to be the best in laptops for brightness, color rendition etc. • OS X (and iWork / iLife apps for free as of Mavericks!). • solid, sturdy alimunium enclosure, machined from a single piece of metal (something that costs), and an industrial design that someone has toiled over, and not a quickly churned out plasticky mess of a case and parts placement. • Cheap SSD options (compared to buying one yourself or Wintel laptop SSD prices, the pre-configured Mac options are cheaper). • a multitouch trackpad (of the same quality as Mac's one)? • NO DVD drive (yes, I'd pay to remove that piece of obsolete crap and have no moving parts on my laptop). • thunderbolt ports, mag safe adapter, illuminated keyboard, etc etc.
If you don't get all of the above, then you don't really get "the same specs". Just the same memory/CPU/GPU. Especially people who buy laptops but don't seem to value portability (weight/size) and battery life are strange to me...
You keep saying that without providing any examples. Care to enlighten all of the people who have apparently been buying the wrong laptops?
Both with the Intel Core i7 2.8GHz / 3.3GHz TurboBoost, 8GB RAM, 256GB flash storage, etc.
The main difference is that the Mac display is 2560x1600 and the ASUS is 2560x1440 and the ASUS has a touchscreen.
This is a realistic competitor – I can't speak to build quality never having touched one but this is hardly the “way better specs” you've been claiming.
The same holds true for the Dell XPS 15. Comparing the only Dell XPS 15 which uses SSD primary storage[2] to the MacBook Pro 15" leaves us at $2,349 vs. $2,499. Again, I can't speak to build quality but unless you find a touchscreen a killer feature versus Apple's modern trackpad this boils down to how you feel about Windows 8 versus OS X or whether you've had a bad experience with one of the two vendors.
You've proven that your earlier “double the price of every other PC laptop out there with the same specs” claim was simply untrue.
1. Only the top-end model has an SSD as primary storage if you don't want the weight + power + size hit of an extra HDD: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-15-9530/pd?oc=dncwx1249h&model_... 2. http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=ME293L...
The Vaio Pro 13 is an exception though.
For most PC laptops, even if you configure them the same price as the Mac laptop, you still don't get a lot of stuff that makes the Mac better. E.g you get some stuff there but in a not-so-good implementation (like most high-end PC touchpads) and others lacking (like battery life).
For raw power though (if that's what counts for you, like if you do scientific calculations and such) you can get a PC with better CPU/GPU for similar money as the Mac would have. Though in most cases, the machines you get for that are no laptopy-enough anymore, coming closer to 3-4 kg and bulky.
But then there's always OS X, and the pain of using Windows. I always had to have Cygwin when I used Windows laptops, as I had to have a UNIX shell available.
You should pay more attention to the specs: since the switch to Intel, Mac laptops have been very competitive on price when you compare them to something which is actually equivalent hardware – there are tons of laptops which are half the cost but they got there by cutting corners. The usual trick is to match on one feature (CPU, GPU, screen resolution, etc.) and hope you won't notice that e.g. the display is much lower quality, there's a hard-drive instead of an SSD (or either is slower), the CPU is an older generation, etc.
If you do find something which is equivalent, it's as common for the cost to be higher as it is lower depending on when you buy in that particular manufacturer's product lifecycle.
If you're a cheap fuck, don't be surprised you can only find cheap shit.
Yeah… no. Unless you think the parts of a laptop are the CPU and GPU.
> I haven't seen anything you could do on a Mac that you couldn't do on the PC
Thus missing the point entirely.
> and there are very decent PC laptops out there, way, way cheaper than the Mac alternatives.
Care to enlighten everybody in this thread about them? There are definitely decent non-Apple laptops out there, but they're not "way, way cheaper" than the Apple version (usually the opposite).
Ha!
Try 10 hours doing security updates!