APPLE COMPUTERS - RIP OFF!!
Apple, despite selling shedloads of product, still seems intent on milking the people for as much as possible. Their products are well-made, I’ll give them that, but their greed is unbelievable.
Take my situation. I had a 2015 27” iMac which was getting a bit long in the tooth and having lots of issues. OK, eight years seems a reasonable lifespan for a computer, so let’s go and buy a new 27” iMac, since this model serves my purposes perfectly.
Oh, what? They stopped making it?
That’s right. You can either downgrade to a 24” iMac that would look good on the desk of a fashion boutique, or you can go for the new Mac Studio, great for creative professionals. So, OK, I did a quick costing for the Mac Studio and seperately sold Mac Monitor (or whatever it’s called). My 2015 iMac cost ¥250,000. The new rig - with the add-ons I require - ah yes, that’ll be ¥600,000, please. ¥220,000 is just for the screen. WTF?
So that’s where they wanted to funnel me. And I had no choice, really, seeing as how I’m locked into the Apple world and can’t escape.
The new rig : ASUS ProArt monitor and Mac Mini M2 Pro
After a bit of research I discovered that a souped-up Mac Mini M2 Pro would do the same as the Mac Studio performance-wise, and I went for a third-party monitor. The total bill - ¥370,000. Quite a bit more than my old iMac, but way below what those mothers in Cupertino wanted.
This company seems to have duped us. They’ve brainwashed us into thinking that, for example, it’s fine to spend $600 on a watch that will be obsolete in a few years. Or that we need to keep getting a new iPhone because of all those massive enhancements that come with each model.
Massive innovation ceased with Apple years ago. These days each phone has a tiny pointless upgrade that you would barely notice. My new computer does exactly the same as my old one, only without overheating or getting “System Overload” messages. Wow! The new operating system allows me to pin a weather report on to my desktop - wow!!
And at the same time they rip us off by charging a fortune for extras in their computers - I had to add ¥80,000 to the cost of my Mac Mini to get a 2TB SSD drive, while an external third-party one of the same size costs about ¥16,000. Base models of their latest laptops come with a paltry 8GB of RAM and adding more will cost you dearly. All of their accessories cost an arm and a leg.
Come on Apple, give something back to the people who made you, FFS!