My brother wants to buy an Apple Mac. They are damn expensive. The spec is laughable. Worst of all, you can’t upgrade the damn things.
The main consumer machine seems to be the iMac. Like most consumer oriented PCs, it comes “complete” with monitor, keyboard, mouse and everything you need to plug it in and make it work. The only upgrade options available are more RAM (using laptop SODIMMs for some stupid reason) and HDD. No CPU upgrades, no graphics upgrade, not even any PCI slots. If you need a faster one, buy a new one.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the spec was okay, but for the money it’s a joke. Not even a half way descent graphics card so you can load up Windows and play a few games – just a Radeon HD2400 with 128MB RAM on the basic model.
The Mac Mini is just as bad. I suppose at least it’s the cheapest way to legitimately run MacOS, although price/performance it’s terrible compared to a Hackintosh.
This seems to be Apple’s modus operandi. Everything is an appliance, when you want a better one you just throw it away and buy the latest model.
Apart from being criminally wasteful, it makes buying Apple products a very unattractive proposition. They are expensive to begin with, and within weeks can be obsolete with no upgrade path. Take Mac Pro for example. The top of the line system, cheapest model £1700, and if you bought one in December come January and the availability of Geforce 8800 cards and they are not supported by your “old” system.
My iPod is in the same boat. It’s a 3rd gen model, and they never bothered to back-port gapless playback. Luckily Rockbox is now working okay on 3rd gen iPods, but it still sucks that Apple won’t support it.
