One of the comments on that article made me wonder if the Reality Distortion Field turns a persons perception of life into pure gold in fields of roses…

gremme had this comment:

You should not buy it if you aren’t willing to pay a premium for good service and construction and a sleek look. Not only that, but you also are buying into the mac experience and lifestyle. If you don’t have the money then buy your dell, you get what you pay for.

A premium for good service? AppleCare in many countries (including Canada) doesn’t even offer mail-in service for MacBooks, which is pretty bad considering Dell, HP, Gateway, Lenovo, and Acer have been doing this for years (some even go above that by offering next business day on-site repair service and accidental damage coverage). Having to drive for an hour to drop a $2,000+ notebook off at an Apple Service Provider isn’t exactly the best solution.

Good construction? Need I mention the many issues with the Mini DisplayPort adapter and external monitors not working? I mean, using an external display with a notebook has only been possible for years… no reason for this not to work. How about those with scratches on the aluminum enclosure straight from the factory… dust under the glass screen covering… glass screen covering coming loose from the display unit… uneven lids… issues waking up from sleep…

As for “buying into the Mac experience and lifestyle”, this statement makes me believe even more that there’s some sort of cult surrounding Apple. Did I miss the memo where spending $2,700 on a notebook, leaving it on your desk and admiring it in all of its “premium design glory” was classified as normal?

As I wrap this post up, I just wanted to also point out a comment left by stephen which just made my day:

“Yes because we buy a laptop to stare at it all day and think about how good-looking it is. Macs are economically just as much as a lifestyle as Starbucks, and you can see where they’re going. Yeesh.”

For the purpose of full disclosure, I was a Mac user for the past year. I never have, and never will, agree with the Reality Distortion Field.

Editors note: This is a guest post by Kristan Kenney.

So, over the past 2 years, Apple’s user base has grown quite a bit (I’m really too lazy to look up the numbers right now, but I think it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 10% or something like that). With great power comes great responsibilty, unfortunately Apple seems to be lacking in that department at this point.

“Get a Mac ads” - These were cute a few years ago, when they actually made a point of what Macs can do compared to PCs, but it seems since Microsoft shipped Windows Vista, Apple decided to throw out any sense of logic that were in these commercials and go right for the jugular – straight up, unadulterated, product bashing. I’m sorry Apple, but John Hodgeman singing a blues song while Justin Long stands there doing nothing doesn’t make me want to run out and purchase a Mac. Neither does “Crashy-time Vista Chamomile” tea. The idea is dead, now stop beating the horse and move on to more relevant things.

The iPhone SDK NDA - The first rule about the iPhone SDK is not to talk about the iPhone SDK. Give me a break, Apple. In both the Windows and Linux developer ecosystems, everything is fairly open. Go download Visual Studio Express, load up msdn.microsoft.com or the MSDN Express Library, and you’ve got all the information you need to start programming. Need help? Go post some source code on a message board, talk to a programming-savvy friend, or go dig through tons of sample code to get started and modify it to your hearts content. In the Apple world, and more specifically the iPhone, not so much. How can you learn if you can’t get any help from others in the community?

The App Store is a joke – Apple, you have the iTunes Music Store. You’ve added Movies and iPod Games to it. With the iPhone 3G and iPhone Software 2.0 you decided to open the App Store. Which is great, except you’re alienating developers with the iPhone SDK NDA and the restrictions. Developers have to register and sign a one year, $99 subscription with ADC in order to be able to submit things to the App Store. And those efforts are being shot down – applications are being rejected because “they are too close to the functionality in iTunes” or “not useful enough”… and yet there are tons of useless, poorly coded (again, let’s look at Example 2) applications in the App Store as we speak. If you wanted full control over what goes on every iPhone and iPod touch, then you shouldn’t have opened the App Store in the first place. Keep it up, and your developers are going to start writing for Google’s Android platform.

Hardware revisions - Apple didn’t seem to think this one out too clearly: switching to Intel means keeping up with Intel. When Intel releases a new chipset or processor, you’ve only got so much time to bring a new product revision to the market before your competitors (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc) start pumping out machines that are more powerful than yours at a lower price. Unfortunately, this also means your Apple hardware is worth less over time compared to the PowerPC models. Listen, Steve… we know you’re addicted to the iPhone, but come on, show some love to the Mac for a while, would you?

Well, that’s pretty much all I have to say right now. Thanks for reading.