Comment Re:Failure on our part. (Score 1) 439
Those of us with mortgages & kids have to keep budgets, etc... Apple maintains a 5 year cycle on supporting products. Let's put a figure on it: [$712/yr]
I agree with your numbers for the most part (I too have a mortgage, a wife and a pile of kids), although we don't have a tablet. Even without Apple, the laptops are on about a 3-6 year cycle, depending on how necessary you feel it to update. (the Toshiba U300 laptop I bought 4 years ago is still going strong, but is getting a little weak to develop on and was just replaced with an 11" Air for Christmas). Phones get updated every 2-3 years regardless of make. Actually my wife went from iPhone 3G (had it 2.5y) to Galaxy S, then went right back to i4s within 6 months of having the Android device. She *hated* it, but felt that the iphone was too expensive. I figure the hardware cost is worth the lack of aggravation that we get with Android.
Those 5 year update/support cycles and the corresponding lack of freedom they include become remarkably sharply defined after you've lived thru a few of them. My wife and I love Apple products, and they do tend to last, but we're getting ready to leave the orchard, at least for desktop/laptops. The coupling between expensive closed phones/tablets and "partially closed and getting worse rapidly" desktops/laptops is simply too expensive.
I definitely agree when it comes to laptops, and tablets, but as I mentioned above, phones are on that cycle regardless of make, and are actually the cheapest part of the cost figures that you estimated. I am *really* curious to see how long this apple laptop lasts, I have never been a huge fan of OSX, but I refuse to pay for Windows, and I'm really getting tired of linux on the desktop. I'm one of Linux's biggest fans and I make my living designing hardware and making it sing in embedded environments. There is, however, something to be said about usability when someone such as myself starts to actually *use* an OSX laptop for a daily workstation and is impressed with the way that it mostly just works, and has a full POSIX shell and development environment for nearly everything else. I was on the fence with spending so much for a laptop -- my Toshiba cost $650 on sale, and after $200 for 4G of RAM, a new HDD and a proper (US) keyboard -- but my wife made the decision and I'll give it a try. If the apple hardware lasts at least as good as that Toshiba I'll have to take a very serious look at spending another $1800 in 4-5 years. Not having to dick with everything does have a certain value to it, as does a solid (aluminum) case. Is it worth $250/yr? I'm not sure yet. Ask me in 4-5 years.
I can sync my phone/pad to Windows running in a VBox VM on Linux.
That's exactly what I have been doing for the last