Apple has never cost less than most competitors. And its OS has always cost more than free alternatives.

When was apple ever does more cost less. It was always does less costs more. Up until their M1 series release where they actually started having decent hardware. Even then though im still pretty sure they only won in perf per watt and still lost in perf per dollar.

“Cost less” was never Apple’s thing. Maybe “Does more at great cost”?

I blame Apple for making the Zoomers as tech illiterate as the Boomers

The first apple device I recall was the Apple II.

Please help me out: I can’t recall a single thing where Apple ever was cheaper than the competition.

Their selling point was “works better” and then became “everyone be different (in the same way though!)”.

What set their devices apart was the smoothness in which everything worked. First the devices and later their ecosystem. I despise vendor lock-in and never went for them because of that but I can see the appeal.

Price though? This meme is the first time I’ve heard of that argument, someone please help me out.

It’s not controversial, it’s just wrong. Apple has always been more expensive. And it has always tried to block its users from knowing anything about the internals of computers. Part of their whole selling point was that it was easier to use. The way they went about it is IMO bad, but that’s a different discussion.

Having used a Mac in a professional technical field for almost 20 years these threads are always fun. “It’s locked down! It’s an OS for babies! You can’t do anything with it! Mac users are stupid noobs!”

Apple is a marketing company that by chance happens to sell smartphones.

This is real, teenagers lack basic computer skills these days

In the past, the things that Apple has done well has generally been good build quality and long support. There are exceptions, yes, but they’re usually better than their competitors in that field. Performance was always similar (or worse) for the price until Apple Silicon came around.

In modern times, all manufacturers produce laptops with excellent build quality (even smaller ones like Framework, Tuxedo, System76, etc.), all devices are generally supported for a while (+ can be extended with things like Linux), and performance is nowadays a race between the Mac and PC. You can do all the things on PC on Mac and vice versa.

What has always been the case and never gone away is Apple’s locked down ecosystem. They don’t support standard protocols, USB file transfer with iPhones is a nightmare on non-Macs (though it works fine for me on Linux right now, I imagine it depends on your distro and kernel, and it didn’t work for me a few years ago), all the iServices being closed and not interoperable with non-iDevices, poor repairability, setting the standard / trend for the worse, etc.

In terms of the operating system, it’s pretty different. For Windows, 2000 and XP were the golden age and it’s (mostly) been downhill from there, Windows 10 / 11 being the most egregious requiring an online account. CoPilot and broken updates certainly don’t help. MacOS is very closed and everything needs to be done the “Apple way”, and you need Apple hardware to run it (for the most part, see Hackintoshes).

Linux has always been an awesome alternative, though it doesn’t ship on many devices, it had excellent support on lots of hardware (unlike MacOS) and didn’t require any online crap (unlike Windows), app development is much more open than MacOS while being as convenient as the App Store (unlike Windows), and FOSS software are the GOATs. There are so many options for distros, desktop environments, depending on your hardware or preferences, and you can have full control over your system, or it can “just work” for grandma. It’s awesome! There’s recently been lots of development with Valve on the gaming side and there has been a drive towards Linux due to Microsoft breaking Win11 constantly and pushing CoPilot spyware (more users, more developers, more apps, more drivers, etc.!)

The Linux desktop has never been better, and there is no reason not to switch! You can even get Linux on a Mac if you wanted too, thanks to the team at Asahi Linux!

I’m running EndeavourOS (the easy mode Arch-based distro before CachyOS) with Niri (scrolling tiling WMs are neat!), but if you want to get started with Linux, I would not recommend either if you aren’t interested in config files and making something exactly how you want it to. Mint is awesome if you like Cinnamon, and Fedora is also good (though owned by Red Hat/IBM). The -buntus are also fine, but snaps, aside from using a proprietary and centralised repo, are often broken and not very user-friendly to fix. Debian is excellent if you have an older device and want stability, it’s been there since the beginning. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is fun if you want to try rolling release, and of course Arch-based distros like CachyOS (or standard Arch with archinstall) are also good if you are fine with the “scary” black text box (that’s all it is really).

If you want to experiment with an ARM device (laptop, tablet, or even phone), Nura is awesome! It’s not fully there on everything, but it’s fun to mess around in and try out apps that those devices were never intended to run!

Apple used to cost more compared to other brands. It’s only been recently with their in-house chips and the implosion of the industry that they finally priced things competitively.

So… basically they’ve always been the lower half of the joke. Or at least the people who paid those used to be ridiculous prices.

still certified Unix, tho.

Maybe Apple in like…1989 was the first image? When all computers were expensive?

True 💯

Apple has become the ultimate tech joke of modern Era.

we’re never getting rid of the ableist wojaks aren’t we