Not true here. People consistently pay more for used Macs than they do for higher-spec PC hardware of the same age and condition. Panasonic toughbooks--the real ones--are the one and only exception to this. But that's a market Panasonic has to itself, pretty much.

Value is what people are willing to pay. Reputation may be the cause, sure. But the reality is that the five-year cost of owning a MBP is reduced (compared to the counterfactual of an identically priced Not-a-Mac) because of its higher residual value.

Learning new keyboard shortcuts doesn't bother me very much, for some reason. (Maybe I stick a new star on my mental achievement chart. ;-) )

Loud or whiny fans and bad trackpads, though.... Isn't it a good thing for manufacturers that people are different? ;-)

Kirabook reviews: Makes an annoying noise under load, fan grille on the bottom (which makes it a tabletop), and reproduces the main flaw in the MBP keyboard - half-height arrow keys. Apparently a very good screen, although I couldn't find any charts showing color accuracy or sharpness.

Still costs 20% more than the equivalent MBP, where I live. Well, that's down from 50% more. Perhaps PC manufacturers are starting to realise why their stuff isn't selling.

Thanks for drawing it to my attention, though.

NECs are hard to come by, here. For the good reason that some years back, they seemed to have terrible reliability. Rickety USB ports and power connectors, and loosely attached key caps. Display panels that went bung after a few months. Drivers that didn't drive, and caused problems with other software. All for premium dollars.

Somehow, no-one wants to distribute NEC, now. Reputation - years in the making, two bad products in the losing. For decades.

Asus, Samsung - where I live, models competitive to MBPs in most respects cost a third more than the Macs. Those with "excellent displays" used to cost at least twice as much, although in recent months the message from AnandTech and others seems to have started sinking in. I have my doubts about the durability of Asus frames and hinges, and the reliability of Samsung keyboards and ports, though... Time will tell.

Nine-hour battery life with reasonable weight? A battery that lasts five years with only 30% decrease in capacity?

Reasonably well color-calibrated screen pretty much covering sRGB, with reasonable sharpness, viewing angles and brightness, which doesn't wobble or develop faults in a couple of years?

Accurate, pleasant-to-use trackpad?

Backlit keyboard, typing on which isn't uncomfortable, annoying, or error-prone? And which doesn't lose key caps when you sneeze or develop unresponsive keys?

Good durability? Good resale value?

Windows laptops with these features, the features that make the difference between resenting your tool and enjoying using it and owning it, do exist. Granted.

But every time I've looked for one in the last four years, in the place where I live, matching a Macbook Pro in the Windows space seems to cost between 50% and 200% more. And no Windows laptops match MBPs on resale.

I don't think Mac users are the idiots. I think I am, for refusing to buy a good tool at a fair price.

This is just wrong. The UI would use a *lot* more power if it were all done in software.

Microsoft is behind the times. In this age of "fast enough" processors and "everything in the browser", which we reached in 2007 or thereabouts, people start to demand other things. Good keyboards and touchpads. Good screens. And mobility, which requires long battery life.

Apple realized these things back in 2007. Microsoft has *almost* figured them out, six years later. Give it another couple of years....

Have you installed laptop mode and powertop?

The full load. Seems plausible, doesn't it? I thought the same, until I did a little research.

It turns out that there are large industrial users that can work around power availability, provided that they have reasonable notice and that averaged over a week the supply is ample. Quarries, for instance. Solar power is quite predictable, and in most places wind is fairly predictable up to a week in advance--very predictable, four to eight hours in advance nearly everywhere.

Electricity demand seems to be declining, and not only because of the hidden depression. The trend started about a decade back. Existing fossil plant will be plenty, until enough wears out.

Eventually existing plant will wear out, though. For winter supply in the north, and for summer afternoon peaks, increasing electricity price just a little would unleash the enormous potential electricity saving from better insulation and building airtightness with active counterflow heat-recovery ventilation.

Finally, nuclear, hydro, and biomass can supply base load--say 25% of annual peak. (Nuclear and hydro currently supply 12%; with declining demand, the proportion will rise if they are maintained at current levels.)There's plenty of room in the base load supply to charge all those electric cars. In some places pumped-storage hydro is viable; in others, compressed air energy storage is.

So, yes, some standby NG plant will be needed. Not for 100% of current capacity, though. To make sure the plant is built, we need a market in capacity to supply as well as the one in actual production.

TL;DR: With reasonably judicious, fair regulation and reasonably fair markets, including a market in capacity to supply, there's no problem. In thirty years, people could end up more comfortable and healthy at less cost than now, with a 97% reduction in fossil fuel use. Deary me.

Missing some more obvious:-
3. Cost less to buy, insure, and operate.
4. Be more reliable and cost less to maintain.
5. Clean itself, inside and out. Stop corroding. Repair scratches and minor damage itself ("heal"). Keep itself looking tidy.
6. Be more comfortable and versatile.
7. Impress the neighbors.

All in all, a fairly interesting engineering challenge.

Forrester Research somehow always finds that the situation is favorable to their paying client. It is passing strange.

(That they are called "Research", that is. Truth-in-advertising should require them to be called "Forrester Ego-stroking".)

Base (the database component, filling the position that Access fills in MS office) uses Java, I believe. I also believe there are plans to fix that someday.

But what proportion of office software users use databases? 2%? 0.2%? Not a majority, anyway.

Version 4.1 (incorporating the "experimental features") that Oracle put into OpenOffice is good. In fact, I'd say it's on a par with Office 97 overall. (97 was the acme of Microsoft Office, in my nostalgic recollection).

A lot of bugs were fixed in LO 4.x, and it's possible to use styles effectively. It's still too hard to make, manage, and use templates, though. And there's still no outline mode. But apart from that, it's very good.

If you want wysiwyg markdown: on Windows, check out texts.io. On linux, Uberwiter. On Mac... there are probably lots of options besides texts.

If you write fiction, or any book-length texts (a Ph. D. thesis or academic papers, frex), you owe it to yourself to check out Scrivener. It's available for OS X, Windows, and in beta for Linux. Closed software and charged for, but worth it.

"A few dozen terabytes"? Is that per year? My computer is lightly used, imho, and dumpe2fs(8) says
Filesystem created: Mon Feb 1 08:50:40 2010
...
Lifetime writes: 87 TB
Not an SSD, of course. I want my disks to last a little longer yet.