Letters to the Editor
encognito
Published Letters: 21 Editor's Choice: 1
-
Ladies, aim your complaints at your man not me!
[Read the article: Are our husbands really so helpless?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Some women need to stop enabling these “helpless” men and some women really need to stop extrapolating their statistically insignificant relationships with a fraction of men to ALL men! I can't tell you how many times some idiot at work has copped an attitude towards me because of something her “helpless” man did or didn't do in their personal relationship. Her husband didn't wash the dishes last night so she in my face making snide comments about men as I wash my dishes from the meal I prepared and brought from home the night before. Her boyfriend doesn't help with the children or doesn't change the baby's dirty diaper so here she is bringing her kid to work clucking her tongue when I don't drop everything and play with her kid. It doesn't matter that this is a place of business and not a day care center. It doesn't matter that she doesn't even work here. It doesn't matter that I have cooked and cleaned for myself and my family since my teens. It doesn't matter that I, at seven years of age, cleaned, changed and feed my little brother for years because my father wouldn't touch him because my mother cheated on my father and conceived my little brother. It doesn't matter that as a teen I took care of a newborn child for at least fifteen hours a week for at least nine months straight. The child in question was one of my aunt's children on my father's side of the family. This aunt got pregnant in her forties by a foreigner abroad. She worked a swing shift and couldn't afford day care. And of course both of my parents worked so that left me to take care of the child after school, as a teenager. Based on what I have just revealed, you have to forgive me when I say some women need to STFU with all the bullshit sexist complaints about “helpless” men. You are not the only one making sacrifices.
-
Fuzzy math doesn't add up to me
[Read the article: Once and for all, proof that Macs are cheaper than PCs]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know where Farhad Manjoo is getting his numbers from when he talks about a $100 dollar price premium for Apple hardware versus PC hardware. I am in the market for a new notebook, my first notebook in fact, and having purchased an Apple computer back in my Stanford days (an LC II aka “The Pizza Box”) I was leaning hard in Apple's direction. However, what I discovered was not a relatively paltry $100 dollar price difference but a supreme $600 dollar price difference. Moreover, Apple notebooks have some glaring hardware deficiencies. For example, I can purchase an ASUS F3 series notebook with the exact or better hardware specs for $1400 dollars at Newegg while a comparable Apple MacBook Pro costs me $2000 dollars. And the Mac lacks the following:
1)Extended battery option
2)VGA port (don't lose/forget that DVI-to-VGA adapter on presentation day)
3)Card reader (can I at least get a basic 3-in-1?)
4)V.92 modem (wireless isn't everywhere you know)
5)S-Video
The ASUS notebook as well as almost any Dell, HP, Gateway etc... have these basic, sometimes essential hardware I/O ports. Apple forces you to buy and/or carry around adapters from them for items 2-5. This is called vendor lock-in. And anyway you slice it, there is no way that resale value is going to recoup a 43% price premium for Apple hardware at the time of purchase. And thats without adding the cost of the USB adapters for items 2-5. Look, I know that the computers are more aesthetically pleasing than most and have better hardware/software integration but that isn't worth a 43% price differential. If Apple wants my hard-earned money, they need to fix the above mentioned items AND lower their prices significantly. And don't tell me it can't be done, we all saw what happened with the iPhone.
Personally, I believe Apple is being greedy about its hardware profit margins and snobbish about its products although they lack basic features. They make up for it with eye catching design and marketing a culture instead of a product. This new revived Apple reminds me of the old Apple and why I left the platform a long time ago.