mental_out said:
It's the former. They think owning an iphone makes them rich and high status even though I've seen loads of deadbeat chavs using iphones. It's just a shitty overpriced status symbol for idiots.
Absolutely. They are just status symbols like expensive designer clothes and shoes and performance cars (like Mercedes or BMW) only they have an annoying cult following. The only device apple make that is worth a damn is the macbook air (or was) i don't know if it got the macbook pro treatment yet? Those were pretty solid machines in terms of ports, performance, portability and battery life. I actually owned one for a while. Battery wise it was very good. I liked its portability and i couldn't believe the resale value it had. Only downside is i think even the SSD's are soldered to the board now. Processor, RAM and probably the wireless module are already soldered. So you're fucked if one fails, most of my other laptops have had multiple parts replaced and have been cleaned and had thermal compound every year or two. I have an old HP machine, a newer Lenovo machine and a a few Samsung machines all running Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
Most apple stuff is kind of shitty, its made by Chinese slave labour. Its basically just the same hardware that goes into Dell computers. The marketing wankers just spin so much shit and people just lap it up. Numerous Macbook pro models (except for 2013) have had issues with the discrete graphics chips dying due to faulty poor quality ATI chips and overheating because despite the fact its marketed to video editors it can't handle it. The older macbook pro models had substandard hinge mechanisms.
You now pay £2000+ for a machine that you can't even plug a USB device into. You have to put fucking dongles in. Available from apple for the every day low low price of £30 a pop. The capabilities of these machines is lack luster at best. Despite the fact apple manufacture the device and the hardware MacOS Sierra cannot give you a time estimate on your remaining battery life. Even android can do that fairly well. Oh and notice how they killed their "genius" magsafe charger. That they didn't invent by the way. They stole it from a Korean company that made blenders. Now they are even thinking of killing the lightning connector for USB-C. Make your fucking minds up! Apple has never invented anything. It just steals stuff from other peoples and patents retarded shit. Apple has a patent on rounded corners. The main achievement of the company is being able to produce a product and get it to market where someone else has failed.
The macbook machines are especially susceptible to water intrusion and moisture causing them to fail. Lenovo which is a shitty Chinese turd manufacturer has had water resistance in its machines for years and some of my shitty windows laptops have suffered water damage and are fine or were repaired for less than £50.
Now we have iphones that you can't even plug your headphones into. That are nearly double the price of the Samsung competitors for similar performance and no external storage. iOS is retarded. I used to use an ipad in my last job. Our company was trying to go "paperless" i had been an Android user since 2010. Trying to use iOS was impenetrable. Just trying to do basic things is miserable. Not to mention you have to fight with itunes to do stuff that you can do with windows explorer with an android device. iPhone's are just as vulnerable to water intrusion as their macbook cousins. Where as my Galaxy S5 went for a swim in a rancid CNC coolant tank and is fine to this day and has even been in salt water. The S5 was also nearly half the price of the equivalent iPhone.
Then there is forced obsolescence apple practices. Its most noticeable with iDevices where they persistently push updates out to devices which simply cannot handle it. I've wielded the axe of several peoples iphone4/4S/5's recently after updates bricked them and they couldn't be recovered. Where as Android devices generally are not updated beyond their capabilities and there is a whole scene with custom roms, they can also be re-purposed into Ubuntu devices or even into more stripped down Linux devices. A lot of the older Android devices thrown out in the west will still be running in the 3rd world doing something 10 years - 15 years from now. I expect forced obsolescence will be carried into the macOS market soon because the problem is that now Moores law has ended and current transistor technology is pretty much at its limit there is no need to upgrade a computer every 18 months-2 years. For what most people do, a machine from 2010 running Windows 7 with a decent spec i3-i5-i7 chip (available used at knock down price) with 4GB of RAM will be more than enough to handle tasks up to some video or photo editing. Even though the most intensive task most peoples machines do is watching streaming video. It will probably be enough until at least 2023-2025 and after that Ubuntu will probably give these machines another 10 years use.
