They are competitive, at the beginning of their life cycle. Because of the way Apple updates its products, though, price competitiveness goes down throughout the cycle until the next refresh.
All this means is that yes, you should wait until the next refresh to buy a shiny new MB/MBP/MP.
Like many others here, it was logic that led me to CS. My degree is in philosophy, but my career is in software development. So maybe I'm a bit biased.
I can't really point to applications in the last 2.5 years, but I think you're overstating the case. I'm quite familiar with work done by people here (Nick Asher, mentioned on that page, was chair of UT's philosophy dept. for some time). Paul and Patricia Churchland have done a great deal to bring the philosophy of mind in line with contemporary scientific thought - which includes CS. Neural networks are now regularly discussed in undergraduate philosophy courses. In no other liberal arts major will you find students so familiar with the work of Kripke, Goedel, Turing, or Frege. Hell, I know CS majors who can't go toe-to-toe with a good philosophy major when it comes to theory.
And when you ask us to set aside "logic, predicate calculus and the philosophy of mathematics," you're asking us to ignore the foundation of the philosophy of language, a field of study that's enormously popular today and overlaps into linguistics, semantic modeling, etc.
That's not to mention whole subfields of metaphysics, such as ontology.
I'm not saying there's some "killer app" for philosophy here. But the fields are more closely bound than you make them seem.
What do you think? Can the Internet be use effectively to change policy in truly authoritarian governments?"The petition calls for elections in which both men and women would be allowed to vote.
The signatories want freedom of expression to be protected by law and they want the powers of the interior ministry curtailed.
But the Saudi authorities have made it clear they will not tolerate public calls for political change.
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol