pianowizard wrote:
I agree they look nice but I would rather own something unique. The fact that Apple laptops (and tablets and smartphones) are everywhere is one of the reasons I don't want to buy a Macbook or iPad or iPhone. Honestly, I am a bit disappointed that these days many young people just want to be like everyone else.
Around that time, I was looking for a good proper UNIX laptop to replace my FreeBSD/T41 setup. FreeBSD couldn't suspend/resume on dual-core processors (and still can't), and KDE was a mess, having just hit 4.0. The MacBook presented an aesthetically pleasing desktop with full hardware acceleration on top of a UNIX core, and I wanted the black one specifically to be as different as possible from the rest of the Mac cult.
Years later, I'm able to afford the MacBook Air for my wife. She is on her second machine now, since they are non-upgradable (soldered RAM, proprietary SSD connector). The high resale value of these machines helps subsidize the cost of the new one, so effectively, I'm just paying a two hundred dollar "upgrade" for a 4x larger SSD, newer generation Intel processor, backlit keyboard, new OS, etc. In turn, my desire to use a Mac has subsided, partially because Fedora + KDE is a pretty good setup on my Thinkpad, but mostly because I think Apple has regressed in the personal computer market. Lion was the "Vista" of MacOS releases, and with non-servicable parts and non-replacable batteries, the hardware has moved on to a different target demographic.