>Firstly as for your MacBook Air. OSX runs fine with 2GB and shouldn't be swapping constantly for browsing

What the hell are you smoking. Safari with multiple tabs will eat all the remaining memory. The whole system itself took 1,4 gb, there was only 700 mb left after startup on a CLEAN system, formatted and reinstalled without a single program running in the background (Mountain Lion).

> And not sure why you are complaining that you got 200 euros for a 4 year old machine.

Two years old actually. It's a late 2010 MBA. And I'm not complaining, I'm actually saying that I could have sold it for more but didn't bother and sold it myself for 200 euros to get rid of it faster AND to avoid the feeling of ripping off someone (which I would have felt if I had sold it for more, because I consider it a DEAD machine. A useless machine. You can't add ram and the base system is already overloaded with its 2gb. Selling it for what I could have gotten from it (you should look up what people can actually get from selling Apple devices even when they suck) would have been ripping off someone else.)

>Secondly you seem to be really bitter about not buying the cheaper and arguably nastier laptops. Why not buy them ? Clearly the only thing that concerns you is specs so why not buy an Apple ?

I just did that, right now. Am I not free to speak my mind on Apple just like you did when you called those laptops "nasty" ?

> Thirdly a LOT of people thought the iPad was an incredibly feat of engineering to get all that it did into such a small form factor. Seems to be a lot of revisionist history there.

Putting mobile phone hardware inside an iPad's case is not a great "feat of engineering". I would have agreed with you if you called iOS a great feat of (software) engineering, and its user interface revolutionary for the time. But there is nothing special about the iPad's hardware. We got mobile phones today that are far more powerful than the first iPad and many mobile phone at the time had hardware similar to the iPad, it's not like Apple did anything special there, they just put a big screen and battery inside an aluminum case, where in the flying fuck do you see a great feat of engineering ? the bullshit, it hurts.

Ultimately, what's attractive about apple is what their software engineers do. And what's pushing me off is their business practice, closedness, cheapening out on specs to create planned obscolescence.

iOS was what made the iPad great and possible, as it did for the iPhone. And OS X used to be a great OS, until they added so much bloat it couldn't run on 2gb of ram.
No apple fanboy here is going to admit it, but the iPad had 256mb of ram to ensure that people would upgrade to the next iPad, end of the line. Just like the first iPhone didn't have 3g even when top of the line phones from competitors had 3g, to make the early adopters spend even more money the year after.

Apple has been ripping off its customers since forever, it's just the last straw. Do you remember the days of the cd-writer/dvd reader combo you could find on many Macs even when the cheapeast PCs had DVD writers ? I do. Apple is a cheap company, that sells cheap hardware with an expensive case. It's hard not to think so, I can recall so many examples of them behaving that way. Do you know the price difference there was even back in the days of the combo drives in the mac between a combo and a dvd writer ? Nothing, it was practically nothing, a matter of a few euros. But to get a mac with a dvd writer inside you had to buy the one that cost much more in the lineup with a better processor and so on. Ridiculous. I can't believe we, as in the collective of Apple customers around the world, put up with so much shit for so long.

The only thing that saves Apple is the software, and it won't last for long, because the competition is getting much better at this. Windows 7 is stable and really nice to use, Android Jelly Bean runs as smooth on my Nexus 7 as iOS did on my iPad 2. Goodbye Apple, it was fun while it lasted.