I agree with this. What I like about Apple is that they don't try to be low end, and they don't try to sell low end as high end. For years, I avoided buying a Thinkpad because the screens were so shitty. "We're a Chinese manufacturer owned by the Chinese government, so we won't use Korean LCDs." Great. Now I can't see what I'm working on, making your computers completely useless. Apple doesn't pull this shit. They good components and don't try to convince you that a 1024x768 LCD with no backlight is a "high-end business laptop".

The good news is that Lenovo got their act together and my X220 has a great display (and great everything; it's much better than anything Apple can sell you). But buying is still a shitty experience. The most popular blog post I ever wrote was called "Lenovo Shipping Sucks". After navigating through their detail-less website and 100 similar product lines ("it's a Thinkpad, but it has a shitty keyboard and a non-removable battery. also, it's red, doesn't have a roll cage or keyboard drainage holes, but it does have built in Dr. Dre speakers. but we're calling it a Thinkpad, so there."), the buying experience is horrible. They have a different sale every day, so every time you look at the website, the laptop differs in cost by $400 and random options ("free hard drive upgrade!"), so you always think "today's not the right day to buy, maybe tomorrow it will be cheaper". Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're not. Fuck your fucking sales. Set a price and let me pay it. Make it cost the same at Amazon.

But the story doesn't end there. You've decided to buy the laptop. Now you have to navigate through the configuration. Do you want a screen with a 3x3 wifi antenna, or one with a 2x2 wifi antenna with camera? Do you want a "super LCD" or just a regular one (both at the same resolution)? Do you want an i7 with a USB 3.0 port, or an i5 with an always-on USB 2.0 port? It's insane. I sort of know what these options mean after googling and reading forums and asking people I know... but there's no information on their website. Just give me the goddamn 3x3 antenna. How much does an extra fucking 2.4Ghz antenna in every laptop cost? 1 cent? I'll pay it for the convenience. (Yes, I know 3x3 MIMO is. But why is the number of 802.11n streams I can run dependent on the resolution of the screen I buy?) Anyway, you get the idea. I doubt even Lenovo's engineers can confidently purchase the laptop configuration they want.

So now you have a laptop configured and you want to pay for it. Type in your credit card number or use Amazon payments. OK, I'm lazy and my wallet is over on the kitchen table and I never remember my security code, for some reason. We'll use Amazon payments. Oh sorry, we can't use your Amazon information because you have dashes in the phone number you gave Amazon. What the fuck? Fine, I'll go over to Amazon and remove your motherfucking dashes. Oh nice, now all my subscribe-and-save orders are canceled because my address has changed. And all I wanted to do is buy a laptop.

Ok, fine, I've fixed my 30 subscribe-and-save orders, and I'm back to buying my laptop. Click "pay with Amazon payments" again. Session timeout. Reconfigure (and check the wrong i5 processor among the 5 they offer), buy successfully. Get order confirmation email. Estimated ship date: 6 weeks from today.

What!?!?!?! They said it would arrive in 5-7 business days. I didn't pick any configuration options that "may delay [my] order", and they've already charged my credit card. And now I have to loan them money for two months AND not have a Laptop!?

Long story short, I did get my laptop in 4 business days. (Order Tuesday, receive next Monday.) But the process was terrible. Just god fucking awful. I felt sad, confused, unhappy, and stressed throughout the entire process.

The good news is that the laptop is absolutely phenomenal. (except that I got the i5 without AES acceleration, and use an encrypted filesystem on an SSD. wrong fucking checkbox.) Thinkpads are the nicest laptop on the market that provide the best user experience for someone like me. (One screw to swap the hard drive out. No screws to swap the battery. 8 hours battery life. 2x2 MIMO out of the box with Debian. Even the Sprint WiMAX works!) But that's the best user experience you can have buying a laptop, and it was so unbelievably shitty that my description here isn't even close to doing it justice. How can any normal person buy a laptop!?

(Now, why don't I buy a Mac instead? That's easy. They're like those cars where opening the hood to change the oil voids the warranty. I had a PowerBook in college and was taking my first computer science class ever, MCS494 "UNIX Security Holes". One day, I decided to run iTunes under GDB to see what it was doing with my private information (and to look for buffer overflows in order to receive a passing grade in the class). GDB segfaults. I run GDB under GDB. I see that it is dying because the OS is intentionally refusing to let me run the debugger on iTunes. Mac OS X is hard-coded to not let you do that. So that was the end of OS X for me. If Apple wants to run code that looks at my data and sends information back to Apple over SSL, then I should at least be able to take a look at what it's up to. But Apple says no: it's their computer and you are lucky to have it, so fuck you. That was the end of Apple for me that night. I deleted OS X, installed Debian, and never looked back. I was going to burn down the Apple Store just to teach them a lesson, but I realized that due to Apple's architecture choices, Apple Stores are actually impossible to set fire to.)

Anyway, the world sucks. Especially if all you want is a computer that fits in your backpack, can run off a battery, and has a viewable screen.

(Yup, I had a few beers. If it works for Steve Yegge it can work for me too!)