4. The Worm In Apple? Its You Guys

Writing about Apple products is worse than opening a can of worms. We know what we are going to get when we write these articles, but still, we maintain hope that our readers will try to "think differently" and imagine other reasonable perspectives than their own. Hey, blame us for trying to broaden your horizons. On Tom's Guide, we don't spend a lot of time on performance issues--and a lot of readers can't handle that and resort to name-calling. But occasionally we get a few comedians. This article, about one man's reasons and explanation for buying the newest model MacBook Pro, resulted in 15 pages of mostly angry comments.

You guys loved this one-liner from LeJay: you voted it up 20 times.

LeJay

I know...
I just heard a starving town in Africa just skipped water for the next ten years just to get a macbook pro.

Don't brag about wasting money, dude

And you equally hated this guy V8Venom, you voted him down 20 times. Granted, he didn't serve his cause very well.

Ahh, the Micro-humpers are at it again. Talking about a computer they don't own, and have never own -- yet they envy it. Why else would you Micro-humpers post about comments on something you don't have?

Where do you go when your PC doesn't work? Or for that matter, where do you go if you have a question about it? Would that be no where? Oh wait, that's right you can call Microsoft's India hot-line and be told to "wipe everything, re-install, and pray to Ala"

Oh that's right, you Micro-humpers don't value your time, you enjoy the pain that is Windows. Let me whip you with another user context ignorant security prompt, just in case you didn't get enough.

Go add up the amount of time you spend trying to resolve your PC problems vs. time you spend resolving Mac problems ... what's the REAL cost of ownership of that Microslop based PC? Time is money -- at least it is for me.

I bet 90% of you didn't even know you can get an ATI 4870 video card for a MacPro. Oh that's right, "Mac's can't be upgraded" myth that most of you die hard Micro-humpers cling to. One of these days you'll understand and might actually become multi-platform so can have a meaningful qualified opinion rather than diarrhea of the keyboard.

Grifonik got clever when I called him out on how engineers have difficulty designing light-weight laptops.

Grifonik

I don't think I said they can't! Use titanium and drill lots of holes in it. Done. If Steve is reading, he can steal this idea. However, I do think they've targeted a very niche market as 17" and "light" are not generally considered in the same segment. So, even if they could, would it profit?

If weight is a highly valued performance metric (top 3), the product would probably find no competitors. I'll grant them that. Maybe they should sell a drilled titanium one for about $1K more? Call it the MacDaddy Warbucks edition! ;-)

 Reader Solymnar and I got into a discussion about what makes an interesting opinion article. He seemed to think that the perspectives of individuals don't merit articles, while only the needs of large groups of people should be addressed in our articles. What do you think?

Tom's Guide Rachel: But I commissioned this article because I think it is interesting to hear the perspective of someone who used his own logic to make an expensive technology purchase. It is a different point of view--one that is rarely represented on the Toms sites. I wouldn't describe Bill Lake's decision-making process as purely "I like SHINY THINGS!!!1omglol". That is very dismissive. He thought about his own priorities, and came to a rational decision for himself.

Solymnar:

To be fair though Rachel, you also seem to have a bias towards trendy stylistic things which makes you prone to identify strongly with choices that mirror that bias.

The not so tactful arguments against the validity of the article though aren't completely wrong. If the focus was on making a the best "logical choice" then the 10 reasons could be accurately and clearly defined and measured and then compared without bias.

This clearly isn't the case. It doesn't mean that bill made a bad choice. But some of his reasoning and evaluation of value IS pure opinion or close to it. Which makes it utterly futile to argue and not overly useful to a given reader. Its like me buying a something that was a gorgeous shade of green that I may have paid a little more for because green is my favorite color and then explain why its more valuable because its green as one of my points of reasoning in an article.

Its true that its more valuable to me for its color...but it contributes nothing of use to the reader and should at best be something mentioned in passing or specifically noted as opinion.

Its not that his reasoning is wrong or that it doesn't make sense any more than it does for me to like the color green.

When I help people buy laptops, I focus on what they are going to use it for and then ask questions and show them different models to get a feel for what things matter to them within the options for that general type of laptop. So I totally dig where bill is coming from when he's writing. These are things important to him and apple filled that criteria the best for him.

That said I wouldn't write an article rating the value of a laptop based on my or my mother's personal values and bias.

Perhaps bill should have written a strait up review of the laptop comparing it to similar models (which he most likely did when making his decision anyway) and break down the stats leaving his personal weight out of the equation. He could easily tag his own comments and note them as "from a personal point of view" x,and y are important to me so I went with z product and have been pretty happy with it so far. (see some of the other laptop reviews on toms for reference)

Which would be notably more useful to readers, and probably wouldn't have earned nearly the amount of heat. Most of which was over the top and unwarranted imo.

Tomsguiderachel:  I'm glad you picked up on the fact that this isn't a straight review, and IS listed as an Opinion piece. That said, a good editorial doesn't just say "I like it because it is green." A good editorial explains why "green" has utility for certain users, and is more than just a pretty color. If we use this analogy, I think Bill's piece succeeded. There's no doubt that only a small percentage of the population gets "utility from the color green" (this analogy is getting lame, huh?), but I wanted to expose the rest of you to a different kind of user--the kind that likes green (aka MacBook Pro 17-inch) for a specific list of highly-niche, specific, and yes--logical--reasons.
You said you wouldn't have published an article about why your mom's laptop is perfect for her. Well, I would. That's what we're about here at Tom's Guide--examining the gadget wants and needs of a wide swath of consumers, including, but not limited to those who only want the best *bang* for their buck, or only want a top-performing machine.

I thank you for allowing me to air this point of view.
As for this comment: Rachel, you also seem to have a bias towards trendy stylistic things which makes you prone to identify strongly with choices that mirror that bias," I'll admit that is probably true, but I do my best to not allow my personal preferences exclude other voices on Tom's Guide. I really do try to be as inclusive as we can be.

Solymnar: I wasn't clear enough again. I know that logic was employed in the decision. Its employed in nearly every decision. Its just felt that it was (in some of the reasons) not included in a way that that catered to a full understanding of where the author was coming from or missed details that would have been useful to have. Like explaining a reason to someone with incomplete context. They don't get the full benefit/impact of how you arrived at your conclusion, personal, statisticle or otherwise.

When I say "I wouldn't write an article rating the value of a laptop based on my or my mother's personal values and bias" I mean that I litterally wouldn't rate the value of the laptop itself by personal standards or someone else's personal standard. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't explain or theorize situations/occupations/personalities/etc. where aspects take on stronger than normal values or fill particular nitches very well. But it means I would add in the neccesary context and details so that someone else that doesn't know me or my mother can hopefully get a clear understanding of why that reason matters for x nitch.

To me "examining the gadget wants and needs of a wide swath of consumers" implies focusing on providing information in a way that lets a wide array get tangible information to make their own informed decisions. In that sense I feel this article could have been written better. It wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't nearly as useful to a wide audience as it could have been with a little extra detail. Some added context and actual figures and values would have gone a long way to remedy that. As I said before though it didn't deserve the level of heat it recieved I felt.

Of course we may simply agree to disagree on this one, and ultimately I have little say in the matter.

But I do like to get to the root of where a misunderstanding occurs and figure out where I misspoke, or could have worded things better. The downside being long posts.

Quantumrand is back, and couldn't resist asking to write for us, yet again. Bring it on.

Quantumrand: Hey Bill, since you so love to throw your money away, would you care to buy me a MacBook pro? I'd love to write an in depth review about it. I'll even return it to you afterwords secretly, so you can still brag about throwing your money away without really being out any (got that bragging part from an earlier comment...thought it was cute, lol).

 Christop speaks for all of us when he sums up how this conversation is getting old, and the Tom's readers never get tired of this argument.

Christop: This has been fun reading post... I am not a huge fan of apple but they do make nice laptops... I have used both pro books and standard laptops.. It IS SOOOO PLAYED OUT THE BATTLE BETWEEN PC AND MAC... Some people are hardcore mac fans let them be.. Some people are hardcore pc fans let them be... Or maybe we need a mosh pit of nerds fighting over whos better.....
Thanks for the laughs.. Peace