Comment Re:Trade crap for crap (Score 1) 365
Calm your nerd rage down a bit.
Corporate drones insist their companies to buy them overpriced toys so they can feel adequate in the company of other desperate status seekers. News at 11.
That's funny, because no one else at my office wants a MacBook Air because they are too different from what they are used to. I have a MacBook Air and an iMac because I want a stable UNIX desktop with native MS Office without the constant hell of keeping a Linux box updated and dealing with apps that use a different UI toolkits. Like it or not, as far as commercial UNIX desktops go with a decent library of well supported common desktop applications, Apple is really the only game in town unless you just want to run Windows in VirtualBox.
And the Macbook Air isn't exactly poorly specced and it's QUITE well built. Sure you could probably find a cheaper PC laptop with a slightly zippier CPU but it still won't be quite the same machine. Apple does have some things going for it.
So, a quick, light, very thin dual-core mobile UNIX workstation with an SSD that I don't have to dick around with much to get a great productive system.... I'll pay an extra couple hundred for that. Some of us actually have work to do and don't want to have to jump through hoops to exchange data with others at work yet still want a UNIX box. We also want an OS that doesn't feel like a constant beta release with apps using a dozen different UI toolkits. Being able to run X11 apps if needed is nice too but that's usually not necessary.
Basically, Windows is ugly and inadequate for some of my needs, Linux/BSD kinda suck as desktop OS's, Sun is dead, SGI is dead, Oracle is evil..... doesn't leave you much choice if you want a ready-to-roll UNIX box these days that has the backing of any prominent commercial software vendors like MS or Adobe.