The Web has been rife with bogus rumors of an Apple cell phone since 2004, and each ridiculous 'leak' or faked 'photo' sets off a torrent of fruitless discussion, speculation and hysteria. What does that say about current cell phones? That they're claustrophobic and oppressively complex. That the world craves a phone that conveys, like Apple's iPod, a feeling of beauty, elegance and instantaneous mastery. This week, a cell phone matching that description has finally arrived - but it's not from Apple. Its design comes from Bang & Olufsen, maker of expensive, hyperstylish stereos and cordless phones, and its guts come from Samsung.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Define "cheap crap". I have a system that is still going strong after three (nearly four) years with only two hardware failures so far - the onboard network card and the power supply
Yes, ONLY two hardware failures in (nearly) four years!
Let me make the distinction between "cheap crap" and "not crap". I had an Inspiron 8200 for just about four years. In that period, I had two hardware failures - the screen had to be replaced and the DVD drive started getting flaky. That's cheap crap. Power supplies that last only a couple of years (because power supplies are inevitably under-specced in cheap machines) are the epitome of "cheap crap".
"Not crap" is a computer that works for years without any problems. Apple makes lots of machines that aren't cheap crap (in a year, my PowerMac has crashed a grand total of zero times), but they're not the only ones. Dell used to make very solid machines back in the day. I've got an old Dimension D300, that has worked flawlessly from 1998 to when I finally replaced it this summer. That's over 8 years of pretty much always-on operation, half of that in a dusty closet.
If you dig up a late 1990's Dell sometime, you'll see exactly how they are different from their more crappy successors. The cases were simple, solid, and made of high-quality plastic. They had a rigidity modern Dells usually lack. The power supplies were, for a time when the top power-hog processor was the 40W Pentium II, overspecc'ed at 200+ watts. They weren't cheap --- the D300 cost $3000 when the equivalent Gateway would've run hundreds of dollars cheaper.
That is not to say that cheap machines are necessarily crap. If you're conservative with your specs, you can probably make a pretty cheap machine that is still high quality. However, there are way too many machines out there that meet low price points by using crap motherboards and crap power supplies. Machines that stick a GeForce 7800 in an ECS motherboard in a case with a freebie power supply. Those are, by and large, "cheap crap".
Edited 2006-10-29 00:17
Member since:2006-04-21
Member since:
2006-04-21
Define "cheap crap". I have a system that is still going strong after three (nearly four) years with only two hardware failures so far - the onboard network card and the power supply. After 3 years most people would be looking for a hardware upgrade - but the point is, the stuff still WORKS. Yes, I have low hardware requirements, and no, I don't use it for the kind of things I would use a MacBook Pro for, but then an Xserve would be even more expensive than an MBP.