This article struck a note with me, so much so that I'll add a sixth item to the list of things to think twice about buying.Five Items You Might Think Twice About Buying:
"In my family, there's a grand old tradition in which we threaten to fill each others' Christmas stockings with coal -- the implication being that we've all been very wicked. But I'm starting to think that coal isn't a bad gift at all. For one thing, it lasts forever. And while it doesn't play mp3s or grate carrots three different ways, coal never requires obscure replacement parts available only through membership in a secret society.
Of course, what we're really talking about here is the frustrations of those perennial holiday gifts: gadgets and appliances. Lately, device makers seem to be outdoing each other in their creative approaches to planned obsolescence. Roaming store aisles, it's easy to come up with a list of gifts that qualify as the new lump of coal:"
I was going to purchase a new laptop and decided to splurge and buy a Mac. After a copious amount of research comparing the Mac Book against similarly specked PC, I decided to spend the extra bucks (almost 2X a PC) and go for the Mac. Fortunately just before I ordered it I saw an article about battery life and at the very end of the article, almost as an aside, they stated that you had to return the Mac to the factory to replace the battery. That was a deal buster for me.
Replacing a laptop battery is one the simplest things, next to turning it on, that a person can do in a PC world. The hassle and cost associated with sending a laptop back to the factory for something that simple is totally outrageous. Link to Apple price list for battery replacement.
Apple deserves a big lump of coal in their stockings for this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment