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3-Way Price War On Black Friday: iPad, Nook, and Kindle
destinyland writes "Black Friday has touched off a three-way price war between Apple, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Kobo readers dropped their price to just $99 to compete with the Nook, only to discover that Barnes and Noble was lowering the price on their touchscreen Nooks to $79, to compete with the new $79 Kindle from Amazon. And meanwhile, Apple has announced aggressive pricing on all Apple products for Black Friday, reportedly including $100 off on MacBook and iMac products, and a $61 discount on the iPad 2."
The ads are fullscreen as a screen saver only... The rest of the time it is a little banner on the screen, except when reading, then the ads are not seen at all. You can also disable the ads anytime you want and Amazon will debit the amount to match the price of an unsubsidized model.
Squaretrade made statistics with over 30,000 laptops
http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/laptop-reliability-1109/?ccode=bs_war_buyerblog
Asus came first, followed by Toshiba, in terms of reliability. Sony came better than Apple. HP was the worst. Even worse than Acer and Gateway.
Apple did slightly better than the average, but given that what they call "premium laptops" (those over $1000), which include almost all Apple laptops, also did better than the average, Apple didn't score any better than the competition.