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The Ten Worst Products of the Year
WaZiX writes "Not sure what you want to buy for christmas? Well me neither, but PCMag has an interesting article on what they consider to be the 10 worst products of the year, so at least you know what not to buy. Helpful article that picked out products from different categories such as PDA's, Notebooks and MP3 players."
His reviews mostly made sense except for the eMac rip. I'm not a huge Mac fan (nothing wrong with them, just not my cup of tea), but I thought he seemed to be targetting a different audience with his review of the eMac. 40GB would certainly not fill up quickly with the type of things my parents do on a computer, and I think anyone wishing to play "this fall's hottest games" wouldn't be considering an entry level computer. Finally, $800 seems to be about right for the price of an eMac. Sure, you can get a dell for $499 with a monitor (please don't correct the numbers), but Macintoshes cost more because they provide more value for their target audience. And when he said, "buy a Dell", does that mean if I pick an entry level Dell it will play "this fall's hottest games?" Although IANAG (gamer), something tells me you're not going to get stellar HL2 performance on an Intel 810.
Long loading times, scratchable screen, bad battery life, a lousy UMD drive that ejects disc in midplay, the button that doesn't press...
I can go on all day...
Worst Magazine Reviews of the Year, at number 1 we have ...
you get the picture
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
They should, that article was horrible. While there may have been some technical facts hidden in there I couldn't see them.. my eyes were rolling from the awful attempt at comedy.
Heck, I'm amazed PC Rag is still around.
My motto when it comes to buying hardware, especially when it comes to hardware that I'm recommending for other (usually less technically-adept) people is to buy a decent product from a good brand.
No-name modems, video cards, network adapters, etc might seem like a bargain but when you run into any kind of problem, or when you come to changing OS, then a no-name product is going to leave you up shit creak without a paddle virtually every single time.
Providing tech support to friends and relatives is one thing, providing tech support for a cheap, near-unsupported part is another thing altogether. If for no reason other than I don't want to piss off people I care about, I always make sure that I have them buying with reliability rather than false value in mind, and if that means I take the extra time necessary to research exactly what they need and handpick the product that they should buy then that's what I'll do.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Eight hundred bucks for a thin client? Seriously?
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
Nothing but a plug for their 'best of' articles.
Seriously, why waste the time to write an article about 10 things you don't recommend?
how come there is never a list of the 10 worst cars? Never saw an article in Car and Driver saying don't buy this - it sucks.
Items 1-10 would all be the PT Cruiser.
Ugly, overpriced, underpowered, inefficient, and shockingly unsafe. It's the Corvair for the 21st Century.
Now watch this get modded into oblivion and "Flamebait" by angry Chrystler owners who are living in denial, and you will understand why there's never a list of 10 worst cars.
It is fairly common knowlege that the eMac is apples lowest end System. No one ever made the impression that it wasn't. The eMac was primarly made for educational usage. Which normally means that its useage would be Running a Word Processor, Browsing the internet. Running low end Sciencetific tools, that could probably run quicly on a 486 as well and some Educational Games. It keeps the CRT Screen because it is easier to clean up from pencel marks and takes scratches better. The extra price over say the $499 Dell is usually due to 1st Apple is getting a larger % of the profit, (Most PC manufacturars make there Low End system and sell it at very low margins so they can advertise the lower end PC and then most people will go to Dell.com then look around and order a higher priced one), Secondarly the eMac is build to be a little more solid then a Dell W. Monitor Which is part of the Educational Need for a computer, thridly because of Supply v. Demmand the supply for part to make an eMac is much smaller then the supply of part to make a low end PC, so the price is higher.
I find it disapointing that PC magazine decided to choose the eMac as its bad system to buy not because they chose an Apple computer but because there are so many Windows PC that are of very poor quality and are advertised as much more then they are. But it is no secret that PC magizene is no Fan of Apple anyways. Back when the PowerMac g5 was released their "Glowing" afermation of the G5s power was saying it was just as good as the top of he line PC.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What exactly more do you want for a low-usage-user?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
no its flat out illegal many times, but no one is enforcing any sort of law.
secondly, PC Magazine should not be recommending that sort of garbage.
if it's going to be slashdotted.. it'll get dotted anyways(or mirrored). it's not like there's much point in refreshing slashdot constantly anyways.
and if you're NOT a subscriber.. then hopefully some of the dupes get filtered away before you see them.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In the MP3 section anything by RIO, with the amount of spyware they add to your machine and the inability to veiw the item as a usb drive makes these units mostly unusable.
:)
I find it funny, they guy gigs a mac product and the mac 'ButButs' are all out for a party.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
It's not about the number of viruses. It's the NUMBER OF INFECTIONS. As recent common experience should have made you painfully aware of, vast parts of the planet can be infected by a the work of a single developer.
In a highly connected environment, it only takes ONE virus writer to cause havok on a planet of billions.
Viruses exist on any platform because they can. If they can be made, SOMEONE will make them.
These things don't require army divisions to pull off.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
800 bucks for a Desktop PC that wont get virus infestations, can be directly hooked to the net, wont get spyware, and doesnt crash that my grand parents can use? Or a 300-400 dollar PC I spend hours building and setting up that any moron who comes along can trash?
Don't assume that just because the eMac is the crappiest mac it is useless and overpriced. peace of mind and keeping people from being dependant on techies to use their computer is worth a lot imo.
Sleep is for the weak.
The review made no sense,and shows no concept of what is needed in an average k-12 classroom. To add, and eMac is not the consumer or commerical model. It is the K-12 educational model.
My school had Macs, which we learned on, and later on I realized that it was a very bad idea. We learned on Macs and then got out into the "real world" where Mac skills were nearly useless. 95% of the market was IBM-compatibles. If you wanted to get a job where they called for "PC skills", they didn't mean knowing how to use a Mac. They meant knowing how to use Dos and Windows 3.1
If you were to teach something, would you teach something that 95% of people could use, or teach something that only 5% of people could use?
I'm not saying that Macs are bad, but we must face reality and admit that they're only a tiny percentage of the market, and when teaching subject matter that would help the majority of kids in school, learning on IBM compatibles would have been the smarter choice that helped more people in all practicality.
Please note that the original read "...output quality that redefines GIGO (Good In, Garbage Out)...".
...'.
Then it should have read, '... redefines GIGO as 'Good In, Garbage Out'
Not the acme of [grammatical construction].
Quite. The way that it is written certainly implies to me that 'Good In, Garbage Out' is the current definition, which it isn't.
I am not a Mac fanatic, yet I do not like that eMac made the article. It is a solid machine for somebody who wants to have a stable client for checking e-mail, using a digital camera, surfing the web and being somewhat secure. Especially for $800.
Please do not give me "my Linux box can do the same for less" crap because there is no fucking way in hell I am going to recommend a Linux box to any of my relatives or non-techie people. Currently, I still see Linux as a great system for servers and desktops owned by techies who know the differences between kernel 2.4 and 2.6. Dell is okay, but as long as they run some sort of Windows, I am not touching them.
A couple of months ago I spent 2 days cleaning my friend's computer from every goddamn malware program out there. Then I cleaned my aunts computer, then I helped my mom because her box was extremely slow due to all the "addware" that she managed to install. Being a naive and a non-experienced user sucks, especially when companies do not want to be on your side. That is why I strongly push my mom toward an eMac because as far as I am concerned it represents a solid machine for beginners who do not want to spend all their free time maintaining it. Let's face the facts: not everybody enjoys configuring their computers whenever they have free time.
Here is why I like eMac:
It runs Mac OS X. This eliminates tons of malware available for Windows users. It is also easy to upgrade and maintain. I can enable SSHd and login to my mom's computer whenever she has a problem that needs to be fixed.
It is relatively cheap for what it is. Because I do not have to spend my time maintaining the computer, I can do something else. How much does your free time cost?
It has enough disk space. Believe it or not, 40GB is enough for any normal person. So far, all my software on my computer takes up 20GB. A person who does not download movies or music does not need a large hard drive to begin with.
eMac is pretty damn compact. I do not want my mom to deal with tons of wires, so a single box seems to be a perfect solution.
And that is just the beginning. Granted, I am a little biased towards Macs because since I got one, I noticed increase in my productivity. Now I can actually spend my time on writing code and doing fun things that do not involve system administration 24/7.
It's ridiculous to put a computer marketed and priced for the entry level in this list and to call it "pathetic." The eMac isn't made for 3D gaming, it's made for running Office and web browsers, etc.
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What happens if you don't patch a Mac? Possible intrusion is what happens, Same as on Wndows.
Two things of note - if you don't patch a Mac, right now you have a working unpatched Mac. If you don't patch Windows (or even if you do), you PROBABLY have a comprimised computer for the majority of users. You are confusing two possibilities with the reality of the situation at hand.
Which leads me to my second point. All Macs come set up to update weekly, so issues are patched quickly - AND because of the security setup in OS X you'd have to have the administrator password from the user to be able to disable this process. On Windows it would be a lot easier for some spyware to stop Windows Update, or even redirect it to install more unpleasant things!
Macs may not be an unbreakable fort, but at least that have a fence and are in a good neighborhood!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No way the Slashdot subscription is the best way to read the article before it gets slashdotted
See the star next to my name? It won't be there for long since I discovered that I have already read 5/6ths of the stories before the ever get on Slashdot, much lesss gett Slashdotted.
My last subscription at Slashdot for sure.
And the fact that they recommended Dell, then across the to the right of the screen I see Dell is a partner.
Not quite go so far to totally discount them, but with knowledge of what they are about one can gleam some nuggets from them
Worth a subscription to PC Mag? No.
(Disclaimer: This is just a knee-jerk cynical joke. I have no first hand knowledge that HP and Apple have declined PCMag advertising. And as Linux Magazine has been good enough to explain to us, advertising money never influences a responsible news source. I'm sure that PCMag is not dominated by multiple pages of Dell ads.)