All Apple technology is a joy to use …but I’m fed up with rip-off pricing
I have a love-hate relationship with Apple. I love the company’s products but hate its prices. And, increasingly, its money-grabbing attitude.
I hate using Android phones and tablets (translation: I can’t use them).
I tried buying a Windows laptop a few years ago, but it seemed slow and clunky.
Like most other laptops it was also made of plastic (ugh!), which to my Apple-centric sensibilities just seems plain wrong. My laptop is my life, used for work all day long, and then for play too. To my mind, it should be made of sleek, shiny aluminium, not cheap, tacky plastic.
After two weeks of disgust and frustration, I traded in the PC for a second-hand Apple Macbook Pro through CEX.
This chain sells second-hand computers, phones, gaming devices etc, which is obviously cheaper than buying new.
But if you trade in your old stuff too at the same time, you get a much better price.
Even though the Apple was then over five years old, I was happy to pay €400 for it – even with the other awful yoke included as a trade-in.
Since then, this 2010 model Macbook Pro did Trojan work until a couple of weeks ago when it started to crash.
I went through various ‘fixes’ like cleaning out old files and apps and rebooting the whole
operating system, but nothing worked.
I accepted that I had had my money’s worth and I looked into buying a new one. I was in for a shock.
The latest model seems to have a similar Intel processor (i5) despite costing €1,549.
And what new features it does have are annoying.
Its 128GB hard drive means it has a minuscule memory.
If you want more memory, you gotta pay more. But you still don’t get much bang for your buck. An extra €250 buys a 256GB hard drive, still only half the size of my 2010 version.
An in-store assistant explained somewhat smugly that apparently everyone who’s anyone nowadays stores everything ‘in the cloud’ (online) and doesn’t clog up their computer with data. Well maybe they do – and I do too. But I still want more than a tiny hard drive to store stuff if I need to. Apple has much bigger hard drives and more up-to-date processors. But they won’t share it with those ‘pennypinching’ customers who are prepared to fork out a mere €1,549 for one of its products. The other ‘innovation’ is that Apple has done away with those old-fashioned but still very handy things – USB ports. Instead you get two Apple-centric ‘Thunderbolt’ ports for which you have to buy pricey adaptors if you want to plug in almost anything. I recently had to buy an Apple iPhone charging cable – for €30! And it was ridiculously short. Under founder Steve Jobs, Apple changed the world, for better or worse. He introduced the smartphone, tablet, mouse and lots of other cool stuff. But since he died, Apple seems to have more in common with Gordon Gekko, the unscrupulous trader in the movie Wall Street played by Michael Douglas who declared: ‘Greed is Good!’
It is pushing the premium it can charge – and how it charges it – too far.
Imagine you walked into the showroom of a ‘quality brand’ like Mercedes and BMW with €50,000 and were told it would only buy you a 2014 model – and the boot won’t open unless you pay thousands more.
There was no way I was forking out €1,800 for a new laptop. Instead, I bought a whoppping 2TB new hard drive for under €100 and banged it into my old laptop.
It is now working perfectly as I type this article, is faster than ever and it now has an elephantine memory.
I can upgrade such an old machine because Apple’s quality, longevity and advanced technology is so good. This also creates a strong second-hand market for its products up to, and even over, 10 years old.
This, ironically, is contributing to a fall in sales at Apple as loyal customers like me buy second-hand products, or upgrade their old ones.
Greed wasn’t good for Gordon Gekko – who ended up in prison – and it looks like it might backfire badly on Apple as well.