Wall Street Journal 2014 Laptop Guide: Get an Apple MacBook Air

12 years ago

“I can rely on a few things in life. The sun rising in the east, my overpriced morning Starbucks latte, and people asking me, “What laptop should I buy?” as summer winds down,” Joanna Stern writes for The Wall Street Journal. “I can also rely on my usual four-word answer: Get a MacBook Air.”

“No other laptop in its price range has yet to beat Apple’s masterful mixture of speed, endurance and design,” Stern writes. “In fact, a few months ago when Apple lowered the starting price to $900, I declared it the best laptop ever made.”

“But that would be a very short, not to mention narrow-minded, laptop buying guide,” Stern writes. “A MacBook Air is not the answer for everyone. For some, a Windows laptop is a necessity and, let’s face it, $900 — or really $1,000 by the time I recommend the larger 13-inch MacBook Air — is potentially far more than some hope to spend on a computer.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Macs run Windows, too, Joanna. They also offer far greater resale values and vastly superior Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Not mentioning that major fact and then proceeding to plod through a list of forgettable Windows and Chrome craptops while obliquely suggesting that people waste their money on vastly inferior wares does a huge disservice to your readers as does your failure to mention resale values and Total Cost of Ownership vs. sticker price.

Over their lifetime, from purchase to resale, MacBook Air is less expensive than a $400 Windows POS laptop.

Anyone who’s buying a laptop needs to be informed upfront that (1) Macs run all of the world’s software, (2) Macs offer far greater resale values, and (3) Macs deliver vastly superior TCO. Armed with that information, only those who don’t have enough money on hand for a real personal computer or are too stupid with which to bother will settle for some piece of crap PC. Anyone purporting to guide people to laptop buying decisions who fails to mention these three salient facts has failed miserably.

Otherwise, Joanna, great article!