MacBooks are outdated, underpowered and overpriced

A choice Apple admits is desirable in iPads and iPhones.

Agree with you about the construction. A little over two years ago, I bought a Sony Vaio laptop for about $800. It was powerful enough, but I used it for about 5 months and had to go out and buy something else. It was heavy, the hinges started getting loose and creaking/showing wear. You had to really bang on the keyboard while typing, the entire thing was HEAVY, the trackpad would randomly freak out, and it was basically unusable without a mouse.

I went out and bought a $900 11" Macbook Air a few months later, and it was an absolute pleasure to use in comparison.

Now, I rarely use the Sony laptop -- the keys have started falling off (I gave up reattaching the 'z' key), the screen is "floppy," and I dread trying to right-click on things with the trackpad, but it's now a dedicated dev environment for my job, on days that I work from home. In comparison, my Macbook Air has gotten far more abuse. I toss it around, carry it in my purse, I've lost it under couch cushions -- it has a dent on the bottom from who-knows-where, but it still feels as nice to use as it did on Day 1.

The only time I've run into performance problems is when I'm running Eclipse + Tomcat + heavy MySQL load + some random Python scripts chugging away + ten billion tabs in Chrome. The baseline model 11" air is a little sluggish then :-p But really, I'd rather upgrade to a more expensive model, or pause execution on some things, or clean up my processes, and/or just offload processing to an EC2 instance than ever have to buy another crappy-feeling plastic laptop. It just makes an unbelievable amount of difference in day-to-day use that I don't think people give enough consideration to.

It really depends on the person. If you're not using the keyboard much and you have the laptop on your lap, rather than on a desk, it can be useful. I have a touchscreen, but I never use it. I forget I even have it until I get water on the screen or accidentally touch it, and things start freaking out.

Someone did once say I wasn't a real programmer because I use the mouse too much (and the argument's sort of the same: It's hard to move your hands from the keyboard to the mouse! Why would you do that?), so, since then, I try not to judge people or machines for their preferred methods of user input. There's a market for everyone and to each their own!

My 2004 Corolla is outdated, underpowered, and was "overpriced". It has 250,000 miles, and we use it every day without worrying about breakdowns. Likewise, I use my 2009 MacBook Pro every day without worrying about breakdowns [1]. Quality comes with a steep up-front price that pays you back with a long tail of value.

[1] The native Apple hardware has failed exactly once in the MacBook's lifetime (SATA cable)

As an Apple fan (but not a loyalist), I tend to agree. Over time, the lust for their products is starting to wane...

The lack of GPU power for the price is ludicrous. I love the OS and the design of the hardware, but it's such a trade off for graphics power. The CPUs don't seem to be all that bad, but probably could be better as well for the price.

They are too focused on thinness/lightness. I'd rather have a slightly thicker iMac or Macbook and higher-end parts.

Integrated GPUs (while much better than they used to be) have really overtaken Apple's lineup and it's disappointing, not to mention the inability to easily upgrade anything (not just an Apple problem, though)