very expensive toys

Jim10000

I'm not trying to be provocitive or anything, I use a mac and it's great blah blah blah, but...

with the move into 'lifestyle' consumer products (with the success of ipod, and the dominance of things like ilife), and the emphasis on cool looking design, and peoples' use of often useless little freeware applications and so on, to what extent do you think apple products are just really really expensive toys?

DubTony

Jim10000 wrote:

I'm not trying to be provocitive or anything, I use a mac and it's great blah blah blah, but...

with the move into 'lifestyle' consumer products (with the success of ipod, and the dominance of things like ilife), and the emphasis on cool looking design, and peoples' use of often useless little freeware applications and so on, to what extent do you think apple products are just really really expensive toys?

It's not unusual to walk into somebody's house and see an iMac on a kitchen counter. I suppose the "cool looking design" of that particular computer meant that people didn't see it as just a computer anymore. It became a fashion item in a way. Also because it's an all-in-one computer it's also somewhat portable and can be used anywhere.

Most home users used to really only use a computer for email, internet surfing and games. "Lifestyle" products (iPod) and applications (iLife) are hugely successful because at this moment in time it's what people want.
The reason more people buy computers for home, be they Apple products or anyone else's, is so they can hook up the digital camera and camcorder.

There's no doubt that Apple has lead the market in this area recently. Music, DVDs, Photos, Movies. It's all the stuff that people want to do.

Although this isn't necessarily new. My wife's friend had an electronic organ connected to a 68K Mac ten years ago. Computers are expensive toys today. Apple just seems to have the jump on the rest of the market. As for the iPod? Well, that was never anything but a toy.

Tony

Hugh_C

DubTony wrote:

As for the iPod? Well, that was never anything but a toy.

...and an address book and a calendar and temporary storage & perhaps even an emergency boot volume...

Clank

To an extent yes they are, but pcs are the same again, to an extent.
Going on what DubTony said, yes they are 'lifestyle' now(macs)and thats a good thing I think as I believe Apple have bridged the gap of making a computer fit in your life, it never has a problem and automates its self to run scripts once you have a very basic know-how(or Onyx), etc, etc,
...basically Apple have made a "dumb-proof" computer that is unbelievably easy to use and also unbelievably powerful, that also fits into my life at least, the same cannot be said about Windows based pcs.

JustHalf

hughchal wrote:

perhaps even an emergency boot volume...

That has got to be painful. Those drives aren't renowned for speed!

Hugh_C

JustHalf wrote:

That has got to be painful. Those drives aren't renowned for speed!

yeah it's do-able though

SteveFE

Jim10000 wrote:

to what extent do you think apple products are just really really expensive toys?

Not at all.

1. They aren't all expensive - I use an eMac for everything and it was no more pricy than any other decent spec computer.

2. It's not a toy. It's replaced a lot of things I used to consider indispensable - hifi, photo albums etc. And it does it better.

I won't even start on freelance work and stuff.

deRanged

Jim10000 wrote:

to what extent do you think apple products are just really really expensive toys?

None. Well, speaking for the computers anyway. I've several years experience in software development and systems administration and I'm doing a PhD in distributed computing. At the moment I look after 3 clusters with 132 processors in total, several servers and have about 30 users to keep happy.. I also write papers, reports and so on. I used to use a dual boot machine with windows and various flavours of linux & unix, windows for the doc stuff, and unix for the sys admin. Rebooting was a real pain.
I never had any time for Apple products, then I got a G5 as an evaluation machine for a new cluster we were buying. I rejected it for the cluster but kept the machine as my desktop and have since replaced my laptop with an ibook and am seriously considering getting a mini or imac too!
I find the machines fantastic for my purposes - I need a rock steady OS, which gives me a blend of low level unix tools and high level authoring tools, TexShop/Office etc. The image manipulation software keeps on coming in dead handy too. I really bought for the OS, but I've been amazed by the hardware. The chips are way more powerful than I expected, even in the iBook. You can't beat 4.5 hours battery life and plug and play wireless.

So - toys? No. Expensive? if you want them to be - the "low end" machines are still surprisingly powerful.

In terms of the ipod - well I'm not sure you meant that. i've got one - I bought it because I wanted a small mp3 player. that's what I got.
(the usb storage, synch with my desktop etc are all bonuses).
It was no more expensive than competing products.

Jim10000

good points, cheers.

jimi_t

You can't forget that these things are fantastic for graphic design, music production and newspaper setting etc... (Quark). A lot of colleges won't use anything else for the more creative-orientated courses (e.g. mostly eMacs). Far from being toys, the proportion of business/utilty to games software is much larger than on the Windows OS.