This is certainly true. However, I will point out that what many people do with their phones is a little different than what they do with their PCs. I don't keep any financial documents or stuff like that on my phone, for instance. This is especially true for a business or government computer.
The problem here is that the car competes directly with several other cars in its class: the automotive market is full of stiff competition. And not everyone gets a loan; they don't give you a discount when you pay with cash, the price negotiations are separate from that.
I think the "Wild West" got a bad rap. It was lawless in many places due to too little policing and too much open land, but in towns it wasn't that bad. Lots of towns didn't even allow guns; you had to check them with the sheriff's office.
For soldiers traveling via FTL starships and then riding horses, that really doesn't make sense to me. You don't need infrastructure to get around when you have that kind of technology and access to energy. We have lots of off-road vehicles even today; if you switch the diesel engine for electric motors, then you just need a source of energy to power them. If you have the technology for FTL, likely you've come up with some very potent energy sources or storage devices, so the whole "battery problem" shouldn't be a problem for you; it should be trivial to use off-road wheeled vehicles as well as aircraft. And that's being generous; if you figure out how to travel FTL, then I think it's also likely you'll know how to create anti-gravity fields so you'll have flying/hovering ships.
And, frankly, I need to leave the house and talk to other people, because even though I'm a grown adult, I have socialization problems.
Me too, but I've never done any socializing at a gym.
Of course, one gym I was at seemed like it was full of ex-cons.... That changed when I moved to YMCA.
You can go to a bar to be with other people, sure,
That never worked with me. I'm not much of a drinker though, which is a big part of the problem; Americans think you're "not fun" if you don't get sloppy drunk all the time.
If that's the case, why bother replacing an electronic device, or have any repair plans at all?
Because there's always the 0.01% that does fail from slightly defective components or whatever, even when the electronics are properly constructed. Nothing is 100%. However, history has proven many times that electronic systems are far-and-away more reliable than mechanical ones. This can easily be seen in cars: modern cars are full of electronics, and have far higher reliability than older models which had more mechanical parts and adjustments. (And no, your one anecdote about some electronic module failing is not proof of the opposite.)
What you're talking about makes sense if you pre-plan to replace your phone (or other equipment) after a set amount of time, no matter what. Leasing works for situations like that, where you have a company and replace your car/printer/whatever on a set schedule to avoid excessive repair costs. What if you don't, though? What if you get to the end of this term and it turns out you'd rather just keep the thing because it works fine? With renting, you'll keep paying for it, but if you had bought it you could just keep it and not have that extra monthly bill. The concern over resale value is like insurance: if things change unexpectedly and you need to unload it for cash, you can do that.
Honestly, I think the rental/leasing model works well for two situations: 1) you're the kind of person who just insists on having new stuff all the time, and is willing to pay for that. You want a new phone every year or two, a new car every 2-4 years, etc. Some of us don't do that. 2) you're a business: economics are totally different for businesses because of deductions and depreciation. Individuals can't deduct or depreciate their car or phone or computer (unless they're running a business of course).
The 60s-80s reference should make it pretty obvious I'm a fan of classic rock, and also metal (but not really extreme metal; think Iron Maiden, not whatever the latest Norwegian growling death band is), so obviously I'm not interested in anything playing on the radio these days (aside from the classic-rock stations where I can hear the same 5 Pink Floyd songs over and over and over), so we're talking about indie stuff here. I'm sure there's decent stuff out there somewhere, but good luck finding it. Record labels are no longer going out and finding actual talent and making and marketing albums any more like they used to; this sounds all evil-corporate, but it actually served a good purpose in being a quality filter. After all, look at how talented and influential Led Zeppelin was, which was a product of that system. There's lots of great bands that came about because of that system (and of course there's plenty of crappy ones like Poison...). I also think that it's quite likely the finished product from these discovered bands ended up being different because of input from the record producers. Sometimes this was a disaster or negative in some way, but other times it was probably quite positive, helping new bands get access to experienced professionals to help guide them (as well as sound engineers to help them with that aspect, before the advent of the Loudness Wars).
Nowadays, garage bands can record their own albums, but they don't have experienced people around to help them or give them feedback. They can post their music on YouTube, sell it on cdbaby.com, etc., but you really have to be active in a particular subculture to find out about them, and then you're going to spend tons of time sifting through a lot of stuff that's probably quite mediocre at best hoping to find a gem. And that's if you can even find any bands that play stuff in the genre you're looking for. It's like everyone has diverged far from the mainstream. I like a lot of classic metal for instance (Iron Maiden, Crimson Glory, Queensryche (first 5 albums), Scorpions, Testament, Dream Theater), but if I hang out in Reddit's/r/metal, while there's lots of activity and lots of new music, it seems that it's almost all from Europe, and frequently some kind of death metal which just isn't of interest to me.
Also, even if you do find some great bands on Youtube or wherever, that's nice, but what about concerts? If you're a fan of some Swedish band, you're probably not going to get to see them live when you live in the US. If you're a fan of some garage band, you're almost definitely not going to see them live because they don't tour. There's still bands playing to arenas, but they're all old classic-rock bands like Styx that are making the money they can (all their fans are middle-aged and have good incomes and can afford $50-100 for a ticket, and they bring their teenaged kids with them too) before they're too old to tour any more. Black Sabbath is already saying this is their last tour because Tony Iommi can't do it any more. These guys are getting old and touring is hard, and there's no new bands able to build up the fan base needed to support that. Things are a bit different over in Europe where they have regular metal festivals in Sweden, with lots of local bands you probably won't easily hear over here.
For anything played through corporate channels or sold on CD at Walmart, it's just like what Gr8Apes talks about below.
MS is the most egregious villian of this story.. To force a nearly 4GB download down EVERYones throat is so far beyond arrogance it isn't funny...
No, it IS funny, because no matter how much abuse they suffer these Windows users just won't give it up. It's funny to see how far MS can push it. People are whining about this stuff left and right, but are they actually voting with their feet? Hell no, they're sticking with Windows. So why should MS care about their complaints?
although I'm still gonna get asked to support it by my neighbors/friends who just can't get their lips off the Microsoft tit...
Why are you enabling them? Any time someone asks me for help with Windows I tell them I don't use it and don't know much about it.
How are they out of touch? Why shouldn't they do this? Why should they give a rat's ass about your data cap charges? What are you going to do, switch to another OS? No, of course you won't, you'll just bitch about it on the internet and continue to use Windows and pay for Windows when you buy new PCs.
Exactly. What's the downside of abusing their customers? None. No one's going to actually abandon Windows because of this, they'll just whine about it and continue using Windows with spyware updates applied, and scoff when someone suggests they switch to another OS.
Personally, I don't think they're going nearly far enough. They should sell users' personal data to the highest bidder, and publish private data (photos, etc.) on public servers so people can laugh at private photos (make sure everything is tagged so you can look up photos by someone's name and address). What would anyone do about it? They're not going to stop using Windows, that much is clear.
There's nothing crazy about it. MS can abuse its users however it wants, and they'll keep coming back for more. Just look at all the posts above ridiculing the idea of moving to Linux.
MS could push a required update which grabs users' private photos and posts them on a public website for the world to see and people wouldn't stop using Windows. They could openly push an update which grabs users' login credentials and any financial information it can find and then sell this info, publicly, to Russian hackers and people would continue to use Windows. Nothing will convince people to abandon Windows, nothing.
How do I print USPS and UPS postage labels for packages on Linux?
I can answer this one.
For USPS, you have two options: 1) Use PayPal. It has USPS labels built in; you pay out of the funds in your PP account. You don't have to pay for any kind of monthly service unlike Encidia/Stamps.com. 2) Use USPS.com. It doesn't let you print first class package labels however.
For UPS, you have two options: 1) Again, use PayPal like above. 2) Use UPS.com. Anyone can get an account there, so why would you pay for a 3rd-party service for it? This is the preferred method too, since you don't have to pre-pay for labels. Like FedEx, UPS doesn't charge you for shipping when you have an actual account with them, until you actually ship it. That means you can print out labels all you want, but until they are attached to a package and then scanned in by UPS personnel, you pay nothing. So you don't have to worry about, for instance, getting a refund for a label you never shipped. This also means that you don't really have to be accurate about weight: you get charged based on how much the package actually weighs, not how much you claimed it weighs when you made the label, so it's not a problem if you screw up and say it's lighter than it really is (which with the USPS can result in it being returned to you for "insufficient postage"). At the end of the month, you get a bill from UPS for all your charges.
How do I develop and test applications for non-Linux operating systems on Linux?
This is a problem with any OS and dev environment. How do you develop and test applications for MacOSX on Windows? Answer: you don't (not normally at least, Mac devs usually use Xcode). You always have to separately develop and test your application on the target platform. If it's a desktop GUI app, you could use Qt and do most of your development with that, and then compiling for other platforms is pretty easy, but you'll still need to test on every platform you target, just like with any kind of development. If you're into.NET and C# you can supposedly use Mono to develop, but again you'll have to do final testing for Windows users on a Windows box (and I have no idea how or if this would work for Mac).
That's like saying it's perfectly safe to have sex with a bunch of skanky women as long as you use multiple forms of protection, get tested regularly for STDs, etc. Or, you can just move to this tropical island where all the women are beautiful and diseases don't exist. Hmmm, which would I choose...
Why should a casual user need to invest that much time and effort into avoiding these problems, when they can just use an OS that doesn't have them? On top of that, the UI in Windows (8+) is completely unusable and they all spy on you too. What kind of moron would willingly use an OS that sends all their keystrokes to MS?
The indie scene these days increasingly looks like a toxic swamp filled with egomaniacs who don't have the discipline to pay their dues working for an established studio, but who want to grab some kickstarter funds to put out their oh-so-unique special artistic vision
Have you been living under a rock and missed all the stories about the horrible work environments at the established studios like EA? Who wants to get lousy pay and be expected to work 100 hours a week? On top of that, gamers seem to complain a lot that the games published by places like EA are all boring, buggy, and derivative. How many more Madden games do we need? Maybe most of these indie games are crap too, but I can see why developers would want to pursue that avenue instead of "paying their dues" working for a shitty, abusive company like EA. And personally, while I haven't tried any, I'd much rather play a pseudo-8-bit-retro-sprite-art game than any typical modern EA game; thanks for the tip, I'll have to check these out.
Then get a used one. It's not like computers are getting significantly faster any more. Why would you want some POS laptop made of plastic anyway, when you can have one with a magnesium frame? There's a reason business-class laptops cost more: they're made a lot better, and don't fall apart in a year with regular handling. My Dell E64xx laptops all work great with Linux, are made of magnesium and aluminum, can handle rough treatment, and look much nicer and have far better keyboards than that consumer-level crap. Consumer laptops are completely unusable because the keyboards are so bad; only Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes have usable keyboards.
Now, really think about what I just wrote. A new Linux distribution gave me that much shit to install, then update, then upgrade. Does anyone honestly believe it's ready for the 'general' user?
I don't think any OS is ready for the general user. Have you tried using Windows 8(.1) lately? That sure as hell isn't ready for the general user. Its UI is a complete mess, you have to switch between two totally different paradigms and looks-and-feels just to go configure something in the control panel, and even then you'll find there's not one but two control panels, the Metro one with almost nothing in it and then the regular one which is hidden away and has to be found with a search.
If I stuck Windows 8.1 on my wife's computer, I can only imagine the ranting she'd spew out when she finds out she can't figure out how to do anything. Right now, she's using Linux Mint KDE and the only time I need to provide her any tech support is when the cat sits on the keyboard (usually this just requires typing F11 or F12 to get out of the mode in Firefox the cat managed to get into with its butt). And after this happening several times now, she probably already knows how to do this herself as she hasn't called me to fix anything on her computer in quite a while now, cat-butt-related or otherwise.
Granted, I do tend to keep her computer somewhat up-to-date (she's running Mint 17 now, not 17.1 or 17.2). I did have to upgrade it because of the repos not working in 16 any more. I didn't bother doing a back-door upgrade, I just reinstalled. It's not a big deal; I always put/home on a separate partition on any computer I set up, so switching distros is easy. I don't know why every distro doesn't make this default in their install program.
How is their time up? I'm sure plenty of people here will agree that I'm a giant Linux proponent and MS-hater, but this stuff isn't new, it's just more blatant, but no matter what MS does to piss people off, it has almost no effect on their marketshare for PC OSes. The amount of abuse their customers will accept is simply astonishing. I wish it was legal for them to force even more onerous conditions on their customers as long as they willingly agree to it (by continuing to purchase and use Windows), because it'd be funny to see what they could get away with.
Face it, people are going to bitch and complain about these forced updates, the new telemetry/spying, and they'll still continue to use Windows despite all that. MS could put a clause in the EULA, backed up a Supreme court ruling, that all users have to agree to having their kids sent to indoctrination camps and they'd line up for this, rationalizing to themselves how this is better than switching to another OS because some random application doesn't work there or because their $30 POS inkjet printer doesn't work with it. The EULA for corporate customers could require all profits be paid to MS and CEO pay dropped to $50k and corporations would happily agree to this rather than switch to something else. There's simply no limit to what MS can get away with because no one will leave them; anyone who refuses their terms has already left, and probably did so long ago.
Most things that you buy are very non-liquid (hard to sell) and depreciate quickly to zero. If you go out and spend $500 on a phone, you *feel* like you didn't really spend that much money.
Phones, at least good ones, do not depreciate to zero quickly. Now, you're probably not going to get 90% of the retail value when you resell one, but they do hold their value to an extent, much like cars. Go try to buy a Samsung Galaxy S5 (which is supposedly "obsolete" because of the S6): the prices are about $350 right now. That phone probably only cost $600-700 new, and it's already at least a year old. I just got a Galaxy S4 for $130; obviously a lot cheaper than its new price, but again it shows it does hold its value to an extent. I imagine this curve flattens too: getting an in-demand phone that's 2 years old, and then re-selling it after 1 year, probably won't end up costing you that much, for instance as you'll be able to recoup much of its cost. Notice that, like PCs, phones have gotten to the point where they're pretty much "fast enough", so a 2-year-old model doesn't seem dog-slow compared to new models, and all you're really getting with a brand-new model is probably a higher-res camera and maybe some extra features like NFC. Honestly, I don't see that I'm missing anything with my S4, except the S5's waterproof case. And since the new S6 doesn't even have that any more, nor a removable battery or SD card slot, I really don't see how the brand-new S6 is in any way an improvement over my $130 2-year-old S4.
Of course, unpopular phones probably don't hold their value well at all. But that's not too different from cars. Just look at how poor the resale values on most GM and Chrysler cars are, compared to Hondas and Toyotas.
The problem with your analysis is that there *aren't* any good albums coming out every month. All the good music came out in the 60s through 80s; everything coming out now is corporate-produced, Autotuned shit, except perhaps for a handful of bands which started back in the 70s or 80s and somehow are still alive and kicking and touring and making music.
We have ultra-reliable software here on Earth too; what do you think powers our planes and car engine controllers? When was the last time your car's ECU or ABS controller "crashed" and had to be rebooted?
We accept it on our PCs because we're cheap and stupid and use Microsoft software there, and we consumers would prefer to have the tiled, flat Metro UI and "telemetry" sending all our keystrokes to MS rather than demand more reliability.
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This is certainly true. However, I will point out that what many people do with their phones is a little different than what they do with their PCs. I don't keep any financial documents or stuff like that on my phone, for instance. This is especially true for a business or government computer.
The problem here is that the car competes directly with several other cars in its class: the automotive market is full of stiff competition. And not everyone gets a loan; they don't give you a discount when you pay with cash, the price negotiations are separate from that.
I think the "Wild West" got a bad rap. It was lawless in many places due to too little policing and too much open land, but in towns it wasn't that bad. Lots of towns didn't even allow guns; you had to check them with the sheriff's office.
For soldiers traveling via FTL starships and then riding horses, that really doesn't make sense to me. You don't need infrastructure to get around when you have that kind of technology and access to energy. We have lots of off-road vehicles even today; if you switch the diesel engine for electric motors, then you just need a source of energy to power them. If you have the technology for FTL, likely you've come up with some very potent energy sources or storage devices, so the whole "battery problem" shouldn't be a problem for you; it should be trivial to use off-road wheeled vehicles as well as aircraft. And that's being generous; if you figure out how to travel FTL, then I think it's also likely you'll know how to create anti-gravity fields so you'll have flying/hovering ships.
And, frankly, I need to leave the house and talk to other people, because even though I'm a grown adult, I have socialization problems.
Me too, but I've never done any socializing at a gym.
Of course, one gym I was at seemed like it was full of ex-cons.... That changed when I moved to YMCA.
You can go to a bar to be with other people, sure,
That never worked with me. I'm not much of a drinker though, which is a big part of the problem; Americans think you're "not fun" if you don't get sloppy drunk all the time.
If that's the case, why bother replacing an electronic device, or have any repair plans at all?
Because there's always the 0.01% that does fail from slightly defective components or whatever, even when the electronics are properly constructed. Nothing is 100%. However, history has proven many times that electronic systems are far-and-away more reliable than mechanical ones. This can easily be seen in cars: modern cars are full of electronics, and have far higher reliability than older models which had more mechanical parts and adjustments. (And no, your one anecdote about some electronic module failing is not proof of the opposite.)
Are you married? That'll but a big drain on your finances....
What you're talking about makes sense if you pre-plan to replace your phone (or other equipment) after a set amount of time, no matter what. Leasing works for situations like that, where you have a company and replace your car/printer/whatever on a set schedule to avoid excessive repair costs. What if you don't, though? What if you get to the end of this term and it turns out you'd rather just keep the thing because it works fine? With renting, you'll keep paying for it, but if you had bought it you could just keep it and not have that extra monthly bill. The concern over resale value is like insurance: if things change unexpectedly and you need to unload it for cash, you can do that.
Honestly, I think the rental/leasing model works well for two situations: 1) you're the kind of person who just insists on having new stuff all the time, and is willing to pay for that. You want a new phone every year or two, a new car every 2-4 years, etc. Some of us don't do that. 2) you're a business: economics are totally different for businesses because of deductions and depreciation. Individuals can't deduct or depreciate their car or phone or computer (unless they're running a business of course).
The 60s-80s reference should make it pretty obvious I'm a fan of classic rock, and also metal (but not really extreme metal; think Iron Maiden, not whatever the latest Norwegian growling death band is), so obviously I'm not interested in anything playing on the radio these days (aside from the classic-rock stations where I can hear the same 5 Pink Floyd songs over and over and over), so we're talking about indie stuff here. I'm sure there's decent stuff out there somewhere, but good luck finding it. Record labels are no longer going out and finding actual talent and making and marketing albums any more like they used to; this sounds all evil-corporate, but it actually served a good purpose in being a quality filter. After all, look at how talented and influential Led Zeppelin was, which was a product of that system. There's lots of great bands that came about because of that system (and of course there's plenty of crappy ones like Poison...). I also think that it's quite likely the finished product from these discovered bands ended up being different because of input from the record producers. Sometimes this was a disaster or negative in some way, but other times it was probably quite positive, helping new bands get access to experienced professionals to help guide them (as well as sound engineers to help them with that aspect, before the advent of the Loudness Wars).
Nowadays, garage bands can record their own albums, but they don't have experienced people around to help them or give them feedback. They can post their music on YouTube, sell it on cdbaby.com, etc., but you really have to be active in a particular subculture to find out about them, and then you're going to spend tons of time sifting through a lot of stuff that's probably quite mediocre at best hoping to find a gem. And that's if you can even find any bands that play stuff in the genre you're looking for. It's like everyone has diverged far from the mainstream. I like a lot of classic metal for instance (Iron Maiden, Crimson Glory, Queensryche (first 5 albums), Scorpions, Testament, Dream Theater), but if I hang out in Reddit's /r/metal, while there's lots of activity and lots of new music, it seems that it's almost all from Europe, and frequently some kind of death metal which just isn't of interest to me.
Also, even if you do find some great bands on Youtube or wherever, that's nice, but what about concerts? If you're a fan of some Swedish band, you're probably not going to get to see them live when you live in the US. If you're a fan of some garage band, you're almost definitely not going to see them live because they don't tour. There's still bands playing to arenas, but they're all old classic-rock bands like Styx that are making the money they can (all their fans are middle-aged and have good incomes and can afford $50-100 for a ticket, and they bring their teenaged kids with them too) before they're too old to tour any more. Black Sabbath is already saying this is their last tour because Tony Iommi can't do it any more. These guys are getting old and touring is hard, and there's no new bands able to build up the fan base needed to support that. Things are a bit different over in Europe where they have regular metal festivals in Sweden, with lots of local bands you probably won't easily hear over here.
For anything played through corporate channels or sold on CD at Walmart, it's just like what Gr8Apes talks about below.
MS is the most egregious villian of this story.. To force a nearly 4GB download down EVERYones throat is so far beyond arrogance it isn't funny...
No, it IS funny, because no matter how much abuse they suffer these Windows users just won't give it up. It's funny to see how far MS can push it. People are whining about this stuff left and right, but are they actually voting with their feet? Hell no, they're sticking with Windows. So why should MS care about their complaints?
although I'm still gonna get asked to support it by my neighbors/friends who just can't get their lips off the Microsoft tit...
Why are you enabling them? Any time someone asks me for help with Windows I tell them I don't use it and don't know much about it.
How are they out of touch? Why shouldn't they do this? Why should they give a rat's ass about your data cap charges? What are you going to do, switch to another OS? No, of course you won't, you'll just bitch about it on the internet and continue to use Windows and pay for Windows when you buy new PCs.
Exactly. What's the downside of abusing their customers? None. No one's going to actually abandon Windows because of this, they'll just whine about it and continue using Windows with spyware updates applied, and scoff when someone suggests they switch to another OS.
Personally, I don't think they're going nearly far enough. They should sell users' personal data to the highest bidder, and publish private data (photos, etc.) on public servers so people can laugh at private photos (make sure everything is tagged so you can look up photos by someone's name and address). What would anyone do about it? They're not going to stop using Windows, that much is clear.
There's nothing crazy about it. MS can abuse its users however it wants, and they'll keep coming back for more. Just look at all the posts above ridiculing the idea of moving to Linux.
MS could push a required update which grabs users' private photos and posts them on a public website for the world to see and people wouldn't stop using Windows. They could openly push an update which grabs users' login credentials and any financial information it can find and then sell this info, publicly, to Russian hackers and people would continue to use Windows. Nothing will convince people to abandon Windows, nothing.
So you're OK with MS forcing telemetry updates on your PC which send all your keystrokes to MS servers?
Just how much abuse does it take for you to abandon that platform?
How do I print USPS and UPS postage labels for packages on Linux?
I can answer this one.
For USPS, you have two options:
1) Use PayPal. It has USPS labels built in; you pay out of the funds in your PP account. You don't have to pay for any kind of monthly service unlike Encidia/Stamps.com.
2) Use USPS.com. It doesn't let you print first class package labels however.
For UPS, you have two options:
1) Again, use PayPal like above.
2) Use UPS.com. Anyone can get an account there, so why would you pay for a 3rd-party service for it? This is the preferred method too, since you don't have to pre-pay for labels. Like FedEx, UPS doesn't charge you for shipping when you have an actual account with them, until you actually ship it. That means you can print out labels all you want, but until they are attached to a package and then scanned in by UPS personnel, you pay nothing. So you don't have to worry about, for instance, getting a refund for a label you never shipped. This also means that you don't really have to be accurate about weight: you get charged based on how much the package actually weighs, not how much you claimed it weighs when you made the label, so it's not a problem if you screw up and say it's lighter than it really is (which with the USPS can result in it being returned to you for "insufficient postage"). At the end of the month, you get a bill from UPS for all your charges.
How do I develop and test applications for non-Linux operating systems on Linux?
This is a problem with any OS and dev environment. How do you develop and test applications for MacOSX on Windows? Answer: you don't (not normally at least, Mac devs usually use Xcode). You always have to separately develop and test your application on the target platform. If it's a desktop GUI app, you could use Qt and do most of your development with that, and then compiling for other platforms is pretty easy, but you'll still need to test on every platform you target, just like with any kind of development. If you're into .NET and C# you can supposedly use Mono to develop, but again you'll have to do final testing for Windows users on a Windows box (and I have no idea how or if this would work for Mac).
Tax software has all moved to the web.
That's like saying it's perfectly safe to have sex with a bunch of skanky women as long as you use multiple forms of protection, get tested regularly for STDs, etc. Or, you can just move to this tropical island where all the women are beautiful and diseases don't exist. Hmmm, which would I choose...
Why should a casual user need to invest that much time and effort into avoiding these problems, when they can just use an OS that doesn't have them? On top of that, the UI in Windows (8+) is completely unusable and they all spy on you too. What kind of moron would willingly use an OS that sends all their keystrokes to MS?
The indie scene these days increasingly looks like a toxic swamp filled with egomaniacs who don't have the discipline to pay their dues working for an established studio, but who want to grab some kickstarter funds to put out their oh-so-unique special artistic vision
Have you been living under a rock and missed all the stories about the horrible work environments at the established studios like EA? Who wants to get lousy pay and be expected to work 100 hours a week? On top of that, gamers seem to complain a lot that the games published by places like EA are all boring, buggy, and derivative. How many more Madden games do we need? Maybe most of these indie games are crap too, but I can see why developers would want to pursue that avenue instead of "paying their dues" working for a shitty, abusive company like EA. And personally, while I haven't tried any, I'd much rather play a pseudo-8-bit-retro-sprite-art game than any typical modern EA game; thanks for the tip, I'll have to check these out.
Then get a used one. It's not like computers are getting significantly faster any more. Why would you want some POS laptop made of plastic anyway, when you can have one with a magnesium frame? There's a reason business-class laptops cost more: they're made a lot better, and don't fall apart in a year with regular handling. My Dell E64xx laptops all work great with Linux, are made of magnesium and aluminum, can handle rough treatment, and look much nicer and have far better keyboards than that consumer-level crap. Consumer laptops are completely unusable because the keyboards are so bad; only Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes have usable keyboards.
Now, really think about what I just wrote. A new Linux distribution gave me that much shit to install, then update, then upgrade. Does anyone honestly believe it's ready for the 'general' user?
I don't think any OS is ready for the general user. Have you tried using Windows 8(.1) lately? That sure as hell isn't ready for the general user. Its UI is a complete mess, you have to switch between two totally different paradigms and looks-and-feels just to go configure something in the control panel, and even then you'll find there's not one but two control panels, the Metro one with almost nothing in it and then the regular one which is hidden away and has to be found with a search.
If I stuck Windows 8.1 on my wife's computer, I can only imagine the ranting she'd spew out when she finds out she can't figure out how to do anything. Right now, she's using Linux Mint KDE and the only time I need to provide her any tech support is when the cat sits on the keyboard (usually this just requires typing F11 or F12 to get out of the mode in Firefox the cat managed to get into with its butt). And after this happening several times now, she probably already knows how to do this herself as she hasn't called me to fix anything on her computer in quite a while now, cat-butt-related or otherwise.
Granted, I do tend to keep her computer somewhat up-to-date (she's running Mint 17 now, not 17.1 or 17.2). I did have to upgrade it because of the repos not working in 16 any more. I didn't bother doing a back-door upgrade, I just reinstalled. It's not a big deal; I always put /home on a separate partition on any computer I set up, so switching distros is easy. I don't know why every distro doesn't make this default in their install program.
How is their time up? I'm sure plenty of people here will agree that I'm a giant Linux proponent and MS-hater, but this stuff isn't new, it's just more blatant, but no matter what MS does to piss people off, it has almost no effect on their marketshare for PC OSes. The amount of abuse their customers will accept is simply astonishing. I wish it was legal for them to force even more onerous conditions on their customers as long as they willingly agree to it (by continuing to purchase and use Windows), because it'd be funny to see what they could get away with.
Face it, people are going to bitch and complain about these forced updates, the new telemetry/spying, and they'll still continue to use Windows despite all that. MS could put a clause in the EULA, backed up a Supreme court ruling, that all users have to agree to having their kids sent to indoctrination camps and they'd line up for this, rationalizing to themselves how this is better than switching to another OS because some random application doesn't work there or because their $30 POS inkjet printer doesn't work with it. The EULA for corporate customers could require all profits be paid to MS and CEO pay dropped to $50k and corporations would happily agree to this rather than switch to something else. There's simply no limit to what MS can get away with because no one will leave them; anyone who refuses their terms has already left, and probably did so long ago.
Then don't get a shitty model. Any business-class laptop will work fine.
Try a Thinkpad.
Most things that you buy are very non-liquid (hard to sell) and depreciate quickly to zero. If you go out and spend $500 on a phone, you *feel* like you didn't really spend that much money.
Phones, at least good ones, do not depreciate to zero quickly. Now, you're probably not going to get 90% of the retail value when you resell one, but they do hold their value to an extent, much like cars. Go try to buy a Samsung Galaxy S5 (which is supposedly "obsolete" because of the S6): the prices are about $350 right now. That phone probably only cost $600-700 new, and it's already at least a year old. I just got a Galaxy S4 for $130; obviously a lot cheaper than its new price, but again it shows it does hold its value to an extent. I imagine this curve flattens too: getting an in-demand phone that's 2 years old, and then re-selling it after 1 year, probably won't end up costing you that much, for instance as you'll be able to recoup much of its cost. Notice that, like PCs, phones have gotten to the point where they're pretty much "fast enough", so a 2-year-old model doesn't seem dog-slow compared to new models, and all you're really getting with a brand-new model is probably a higher-res camera and maybe some extra features like NFC. Honestly, I don't see that I'm missing anything with my S4, except the S5's waterproof case. And since the new S6 doesn't even have that any more, nor a removable battery or SD card slot, I really don't see how the brand-new S6 is in any way an improvement over my $130 2-year-old S4.
Of course, unpopular phones probably don't hold their value well at all. But that's not too different from cars. Just look at how poor the resale values on most GM and Chrysler cars are, compared to Hondas and Toyotas.
The problem with your analysis is that there *aren't* any good albums coming out every month. All the good music came out in the 60s through 80s; everything coming out now is corporate-produced, Autotuned shit, except perhaps for a handful of bands which started back in the 70s or 80s and somehow are still alive and kicking and touring and making music.
We have ultra-reliable software here on Earth too; what do you think powers our planes and car engine controllers? When was the last time your car's ECU or ABS controller "crashed" and had to be rebooted?
We accept it on our PCs because we're cheap and stupid and use Microsoft software there, and we consumers would prefer to have the tiled, flat Metro UI and "telemetry" sending all our keystrokes to MS rather than demand more reliability.