No I mean if YOU were to be on a SIM-only contract.
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No I mean if YOU were to be on a SIM-only contract.
Excuse my ignorance, but I aint getting what ya mean :( :p :
You go to the phone company and say "Hi it's 555-04Q2, you're bestest ever customer. Listen, I don't want a new phone this time around, let me keep my old phone and give me a cheaper rate".
Certainly with phone companies in the UK you can get a significantly cheaper airtime contract (often half the price) if you don't have a handset with it.
Now why didn't you just say that in the first place :p :
No, I cannot get a cheaper rate, even if I keep the old phone, as I already have the lowest rate possible. They have been threatening to up my rates for the last few years, but I have countered their threats by saying I will cancel the 30 odd company contracts I have with them if they try and pull that sh!t with me :p :
Every success or failure has a "what if" or "if only" somewhere in the story. The very same would be true of Microsoft had Apple chosen a more open strategy in the late 80's and early 90's. At best, Microsoft would probably be nothing more than a bit player in the OEM software market now. But MSFT's OS strategy proved to be the more successful of the two and so it remains the dominant player. Microsoft laughed off the iPhone (more than once) and saw it go on to revolutionize the smartphone market. Now they find themselves years behind iOS and Andorid in smartphones and tablets. The RIM Blackberry had been the dominant smartphone platform here, and now it's hanging on for dear life. "What if" and "if only"...Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel
I think that's oversimplifying things a bit. While some people do buy Apple products primarily because of the brand name (successful marketing adds to success), others buy because you tend to know what you're getting with an Apple product. And the engineering and build quality always tends to be quite high. But with that said, there is no such thing as a defect free manufacturing process. It simply does not exist. It's just that certain brands (Apple being one of them, Lexus being another) have reputations for delivering products with very low defect rates.Quote:
Buying an Apple product somehow seems to empower people to be able to hold it up in the air and say "This is the best <whatver> that I could buy!" even if it's missing quite crucial features that other phones have. That is of course the reason why Apple products have been so successful.
I'm really not sure that there are very many people who expect the Mac to provide a "magical" experience. I think that's something that Mac critics tend to impart on Mac owners by way of hyperbole. It's a computer. To someone like me, that just makes it a tool to perform necessary and recreational functions. I'm sure a cheap Taiwanese wrench will do the same thing that my Proto wrench will do... for a LOT less (until it snaps in half). But I buy Protos. My uncle's new brother-in-law is a retired software executive. His former company designed and built software for a great many platforms and applications. He builds his own computers and probably works in Linux more than he does anything else. All of his home built and purchased computers (as far as I know) run Mac OS, as well as Linux and Windows. He offered to build a Hackintosh Mac for me, but I'm opting to go for a company model. I have no idea what your friend uses his computers for. So his needs and uses may be a world away from mine. But if he's happy with whatever it is that he has, then he should keep it. I just don't have the time or desire to tweak and play with settings and components. A comparable Sony model (with Windows 7) to what I'm looking at is right around $4 grand. So I'm going for the MacBook Pro, which will run Windows and Linux, in addition to Linux.Quote:
That said I think there are a lot of owners of Apple products who aren't so easily fooled. A friend on Facebook has an iPod, an iPad and iPhone but he will not buy a Mac because he's intelligent enough to know that it's just a fancy looking PC. He's a web designer too and considering his Apple purchases, you'd think he was a prime candidate for a Mac. He posted a status update on facebook saying his homebuilt PC had died and that he'd fixed it and someone started preaching about how Mac's never crashed :laugh: He's very christian so there was no swearing but for an Apple fan he did slag Mac's off :D
One has to be careful to weigh the facts, and not get caught up in anecdotals and predisposed notions if one is going to make a truly informed purchase.
That's cool. But that's hardly the experience of the average phone purchaser, is it? So going back to your point about profit margins, Apple and RIM don't seem to be taking wildly different approaches. It's just that the iPhone's price, as sold by carriers, is higher due to a higher customer demand versus the various Blackberrry phones. One of the reasons that RIM's stock is under pressure now is because they are having problems maintaining their profit margins.Quote:
Originally Posted by 555-04Q2
RIM is hardly holding on for dear life ;) They've still got the business market and they've also got BBM which is hugely popular with the teen market due to the fact that it's free.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jag_Warrior
Of course, but you generally don't see Lexus owners blogging about how freaking great their Lexus is, or telling people "oh my you've got to get a lexus! They're perfect!" when someone mentions that their Honda has broken down. You have to admit that there is a vocal population of Mac users who are almost religious about it all ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Jag_Warrior
I'll tell you what, next time you're in the market for a new desktop Mac, give me a yell via PM and I wil spec you up something ridiculously good for quite a significant amount less than a Mac. I won't spec you a Rolls Royce, I'll spec you a freaking Bugatti Veyron and your buddy can build it and do the whole hackintosh thing. It will make a Mac look pedestrian and it'll run OSX like nobody's business :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Jag_Warrior
My main problem with Mac's has always been the bang for your buck ratio. If I accept that they're better than PC's (I don't! but for the sake of the argument I will) then you could just build a PC with quicker bits and it'll be quicker :) Or if you really want OSX you could do a hackintosh build and have the best of both worlds.
Actually Apple salvation came with the iPod. They were looking into the abiss before that. The iPhone helped them boom after that. But the marketing is great and relentless. Their failure rate must have jumped a lot since they started using off the shelf components but I still see people saying that apple products dont break down.Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel
I am in my 3rd year at TAFE for photography and the vast majority of people use macs. From teachers to students and the equipment in the studios. At least 1 or 2 will always have something being fixed or tying to get fixed by apple, but they are all saying how good the product is even though they are getting screwed by Apple tech support.
I am looking at replacing my current PC at home, and this will be with another PC because I can get more for my dollar. I can get what I want in a PC for around $1700 or I could downgrade and get a mac for around $2300.
1700 Will get you something really nice if that doesn't include the monitor. What specs you aiming for?
Just the box. Need a better monitor later on for photo work.Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel
This is most of it. I will probably change the two ATI's for a single GTX580. I might also change the SSD to a Crucial M4.
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K
Mobo: Asrock P67 Extreme4 B3
RAM: Kingston 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1333
SSD: Corsair Force Series 60GB
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB
GPU: 2GB AMD Radeon HD6950
GPU: 2GB AMD Radeon HD6950
Case: Silverstone Raven RV02-E
PSU: Silverstone Strider Plus ST75F-P 750W
ODD: LiteOn DVD burner
CPU HSF: Coolermaster Universal Hyper 212+
Whoever puts the deals on the Orange website messed up last week. Two of our friends managed to get 32GB iPhone 4's in white on 18 month contracts paying £21 per month after their friends and family discount was taken from the £25 per month tariff. Price of the iPhone....just the £3.99 delivery charge. The same iPhone 4 in black was left at full price but was ironically out of stock anyway so you automatically would have checked the stock status of the white version on the tarrif. Sadly the website mix up had been rectified by Monday. Jammy gits.