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• Wednesday, November 7, 2007 02:39 AM

  What's the sound of one point missing?

  Roughly 3 out of 4 letters so far offers a variation of this:

  I don't WANT to resell my computer. I want to keep it until it dies...

  as a "rebuttal" to Farhad's main point. And fair enough. But then the question becomes "How much use do you get out of it, then, on average, until it dies?"

  I'm typing this on an iBook I bought in 2002. It's running the latest version of OS X. It's running it very fast. It's had a hard life and been around the planet 4 times. It's produced tens of thousands of words, hundreds of business plans, and stores all the music I own, and all the photos I've generated in 5 years.

  Imagine a hypothetical "PC" laptop purchased in 2002.

  *It wouldn't be capable of running Vista (not that you'd want to!)

  *It would run very slowly, with loads of crudulous registry/spyware/hidden process issues, unless I'd wasted hundreds of hours "cleaning up" after it.

  *It would probably have had major-part replacement at least twice (if you go on the regularly published averages for these things)

  So think of another excuse, Mac-haters, because "I don't care about resale I use my machines until they die" still leaves you somewhere in Western China with a bad case of the latest Outlook Express social engineering virus meaning you just ain't gonna hit that deadline... or maybe that's just me...

  —shannonr Read shannonr's other letters
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