

Free Advice to the remaining PC makers - yalimgerger
http://gerger.co/yalimslodge/2011/08/19/free-advice-to-the-remaining-pc-makers/

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corin_
This isn't free advice, it's free whining. And if it was re-worded as advice,
it would still be a terrible article.

Points like "don't make hardware that breaks", "don't make batteries that run
down fast", "don't make noisy laptops", does he really imagine that Dell, Sony
et al are sat reading and muttering to themselves "holy cow, why didn't we
think of these ideas"?

Not to mention that half of the feedback isn't even about PC manufacturers, is
about Windows.

~~~
yalimgerger
This is exactly my point though. I underline in the post that these are way to
obvious things yet it is not easy to find a good PC-Laptop that delivers all
these qualities.

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alexholehouse
To be honest, this guy sounds like he's just horrible at buying and using
laptops;

... "This reached absurd levels when I bought a netbook that had a full C
drive right from the purchase"

Sorry what? I bough a netbook a year and a half ago, and it had a 250GB HD
then, are you sure you're not looking at the recovery partition?

Some of the points stand, but they're hardly consistent across all "Windows"
laptops (whatever that is...).

~~~
yalimgerger
I swear to God. It was an Eee PC or whatever. I bought this around 08-09. The
D drive was with like 20-30GB of empty space. The C drive had way less than
1GB free. Needless to say, the computer stopped functioning within days, after
the first windows update.

~~~
bsphil
It seems like you almost purposefully make poor purchasing decisions just to
get yourself fired up about how much more you like Apple PCs.

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captain-asshat
The author seems to be generalising on a massive scale. The reason there's so
much crap in the PC laptop market is because there's a lot of demand for cheap
hardware.

Many of his negative points about windows are flat out wrong, and are either
because he bought a shitty 5400rpm hard drive or hasn't adjusted his power
settings. It's easy to tell windows to shutdown/hibernate when you close the
lid.

In terms of looks, there are a couple of manufacturers that 'get it', and I
think Lenovo lately with their edge series and some others are starting to
really stand out in terms of design. The author seems to miss the point that
there's a trade-off between price/quality and size/quality in terms of price.
There are cheap small laptops, and good, expensive small laptops. There are
cheap big laptops, and good expensive big laptops (not nearly as useful.)

I think this is one of the major causes of consumer confusion these days,
since most people jump on the shitty cheap stuff and complain when it breaks
in 3 months. If you spend the same amount on a high end lenovo/sony you'll get
a lot more power than a mac, and better battery life too.

~~~
yalimgerger
Consumers don't accept having a bad experience with a product no matter how
little they paid for it. Have you read the one star hotel reviews on Expedia?
:-)

If the 5400 rpm hard drive provides a bad experience, a brand is better off
not selling it. It will damage the value of the brand in the eyes of the
consumer and he will not buy a more expensive device from the same brand
again. He won't realize that this is because of the shitty hard drive he
bought. He will blame the brand.

For example, with every low end crappy device Dell sells, it putts a customer
through a bad experience and mentally prepares the customer for a hefty
purchase from Apple.

------
Archit
Our friend here should first buy a laptop that is worth the same that of a
MacBook Air and then compare it.

"I cannot escape hardware failures no matter what brand I buy" - That includes
Apple sir!

"Built-in mics/cameras don’t work, batteries don’t charge, hard disks crash,
motherboards die" - sounds like a $100 laptop. What else can you expect?

"I still have laptops that take 15 minutes to start." - My Windows 7 Dell XPS
laptop starts in under 1 minute or sometimes max 2 mins.

"Shut Down Time and the 255 Different Ways Of Doing It" - takes lesser than
starting up. I have set it to hibernate if i close my lid and to shut down if
i press the power button.

"Battery Life" - I have a 9 cell lithium battery which gives me no less than 6
hours of usage. None of the Macs can give that.

"Performance" - If you are ranting so much about a "cheap" laptop which you
bought ages ago and not the modern high-config (like the Macs) laptops, then I
have no idea what "performance" you are talking about.

"Portability" and "Noise" again a sign that you bought a cheap laptop and not
a good, configured laptop.

You seriously need to get a life my friend. Buy a good laptop (which will cost
you money, but still less than that of any of Apple's laptops) and then
compare it with a Mac.

Over 90% of the world is just using Windows for bullshit reasons like that of
your's.

If you buy a cheap laptop you will get cheap features.

~~~
yalimgerger
For what is worth, the mic is on a >$3000 HP laptop. We tried to record a
podcast with it. It was as if we were talking in the other room. We ended up
using an iPhone.

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yalimgerger
Geez guys...Slow down for a minute. :-). Give me the benefit of the doubt,
will you. :-)

Most comments indicate that all my complaints are fixable by tweaking
settings. But please look at the problem from a regular users perspective. The
settings that we think easy to adjust are just impossible for regular people.

I mostly bought HP, and expensive HP's. I bought Toshiba and Sony laptops as
well.

I also bought low end notebooks that cost as much as an iPad or more. My
reasonable expectation was that they should perform at a similar level for
simple tasks like...I don't know word processing. They did not.

There is really something terribly wrong the PC industry has done. They've
built crappy products that are eye sores. I am not trying to day that Macs are
perfect. They are not. But they are better...way better.

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mathattack
It's a strange article for THIS audience, in that we are power users of
technology. We don't buy the cheapest machines on the market - we tweak the
best ones on the market.

That said, Apple is succeeding with folks less like us. Folks like our
parents, who never heard of disk defragmenting. Uber-Cheap Windows machines do
indeed fail this market. The buyers do get what they pay for, but it's also
because they don't know better. Those folks are who this guy is writing for.

~~~
yalimgerger
Yes. Thank you. I think we the software developers need to see, evaluate tech
products from a regular user perspective. As I mentioned in a comment above,
no consumer accepts a bad experience just because he bought a cheap computer
just like nobody accepts his private parts to be visible when he buys cheap
pants. As far as the consumer is concerned he found a good deal.

~~~
captain-asshat
And therein lies the problem. When people buy these awful computers it sends a
message to the companies that there's a market for them. If they wanted to
change their image they'd need to _only_ compete with apple, which is a losing
strategy in the short term.

What would you do?

~~~
yalimgerger
Excellent question. The answer deserves a blog post of its own. :-)

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aw3c2
Flame-bait junk, save yourself the time and skip this.

