Switch and bait

I would have wanted to take it home and marry it, if I wasn’t married already.

I imagine the legitimate owner was happy that you didn’t consummate the relationship. You didn’t, did you?

SAS for Mac stopped at like version 6. Which precludes me dumping Windows. (If my information is out of date, somebody let me know please.)

Quicksilver. Free and eventually indispensible.

http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/what_is_quicksilver

Here’s a collection of mac stuff I have stumbled upon. Enjoy a (mostly) virus and bug free experience.

BibDesk, Skim, NetNewsWire. Another vote for QuickSilver. And be sure to leverage the Unix goodness under the hood.

Am I the only one who was struck by the juxtaposition of a series of posts about reducing inequality followed by one extolling the seductive joys of a $200o-$3000 laptop?

Still, given that a MacBook Pro has been “carved from a single block of aluminum” and is “slim and streamlined with a soft-brushed surface and stunning contours” and that “there was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminum using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines — the kind used by the aerospace industry to build mission-critical spacecraft components” well, what can one say? The very same kind of machines used to build mission-critical spacecraft components? Say no more. How could a social democrat write a new book on anything less exquisite? I am lead to wonder, though, if there will be any discussion about discouraging wasteful spending on positional goods in the new book…

Is QuickSilver still being developed? I thought it had been abandoned, but I guess I was wrong. I use LaunchBar for much the same purpose. I find 1Password really useful, too. Other neat utilities: if you need to ssh to remote servers and would like to treat them as if they were just like a USB drive you plugged in to the computer, then MacFuse or its commercially-wrapped counterpart ExpanDrive are useful. DropBox is good, too, for convenient file sharing, and it works across platforms. SuperDuper is good for backups.

Is QuickSilver still being developed?

I dunno; seems unlikely. Works, though, and works well for free.

But any other recommendations for productivity software etc would be gratefully appreciated.

* OmniGraffle for creating graphics – accept no substitute.
* VLC for most media files (Perian & Flip4mac to give more codecs to Quicktime.
* NetNewsWire for RSS feeds.
* Handbrake for video encoding.
* Little Snitch for application firewall.
* OpenOffice for exchanging documents with most other suites.
* VoodooPad (desktop wiki app) for documentation.
* Winclone for backing up Bootcamp.
* Skim for PDF annotation.
* Elgato TV hardware (with EyeTV) for TV and DVR duties.
* Path Finder as well, Finder replacement.
* Toast for disk burning.
* MenuMeters for keeping an eye on system resources.

The Quicksilver developer is now at Google, and his first release is Google QuickSearch for Mac. Not as arcane as QS, but nice enough. And the QS source has been released, though development has (understandably) slowed to a trickle.

Evernote is fun and cloud-synched, though I haven’t used it seriously. DevonThink is pricey, but if you use it the same way Steven Johnson does, it probably pays for itself. I’m a fan of the old Notational Velocity for snippets, though I lost a load of notes on a re-install because of where it stores them; other people seem to like Yojimbo for that kind of ‘bucket o’notes’ thing. InstantShot is a vast improvement on the built-in screen-capture software. Adium combines all your different IM accounts.

I know it’s going to sound a bit cult, but I have to back iWork as the best word processor going if you want WYSIWYG. NeoOffice (at least on every machine I’ve had it on) is slow and unreliable.

This is a useful compilation of “academic” software. I also have to second the recommendation for anything by Omni.

I love Quicksilver as well; it’s a great program. My advice is to look at Lifehacker’s guide to the program. It’s got a minor but definite learning curve. After about fifteen minutes of tinkering you won’t believe how you went without it, even if you never knew anything like it existed.

As for other Mac programs, I get by just fine on Google Documents, and I run Firefox with about forty different Add-Ons, and I think you should too.

I’m not sure if it would be of much help for the books you write, but check out Jer’s Novel Writer. Also, a ton of good suggestions above, a few i use multiple times a day would be netnewswire and 1password.

I just want to add two:

Skitch is brilliant for screen capture and image annotation (which is more useful than you’d think); it even quickly and gracefully crops, resizes and posts your images online.

Textexpander – lets you store snippets of text and images that will be automatically inserted when you type a certain abbreviation. I use it for a lot of things, but I particularly like the way it lets me access characters you can usually only get to through the Character Palette:
type: `uq get: ∀
type: 4//5 get: â…˜
It also lets you do clever things with applescript, like automatically calculating dates; eg for next Thursday’s date:
type: ‘nth get: 04/23/2009

One little gem of a Mac program I have recently discovered is “Freedom” (http://macfreedom.com/). Speaking as an admitted procrastinator, the fact that my work environment gives me immediate access to the internet with its streaming videos and fascinating blogs (such as CT) can prove devilishly tempting when the creative afflatus flags. (Oh my God it’s happening now!) Freedom severs your computer’s connection to the internet for a number of minutes you select, and once it’s set you can’t interrupt it without rebooting the machine. It won’t disturb your connection to a local area network, so you can still print to a network computer, etc. When the minutes (up to 480, I think, but I usually go an hour at a time) have passed, Freedom informs you that it has reconnected you to the internet. And it has. For those of us plagued by cybernetic akrasia, Freedom, like Kant’s manservant Lampe, is an indispensably merciless assistant.

As a switcher myself, I recommend that you buy no software at all until you have found out what your machine can do with what came with it. That will save you a fortune.

Windows users are accustomed to expecting that their new machine is useless until they install tons of stuff. For example they have minutes to install and update their anti virus defences before their machine gets deflowered over the ‘net. Poor saps. Don’t install the software that comes with kit like scanners and printers either. Usually (unlike the frustrating experience when you buy new peripherals for a Windows machine) they just work.

A year after switching, I went through my machine and deleted a lot of stuff I had installed from Windows-using habit that was a waste of time. The only thing I don’t regret buying (because I have to use Windows at work) is Microsoft Office for Mac.

Most of all, don’t buy any of the software that runs Windows on your Mac. You may think you can’t live without that stuff, but you will be amazed how wrong you are.

Oh, and don’t buy VMWare or Parallels or any other VM environment for running Windows or Linux under OS/X until you’ve tried the free alternative: VirtualBox.

Slocum you must be a hoot at parties.

You’ve got the wrong idea. I’ve got a good friend who’s a prof here and as lefty as…well, not as lefty as academics come, but lefty enough. He just got a new MacBook Pro. It’s his second one (and he had a 15″ Powerbook G4 before that). When he got it, I had a beer with him and oohed and aahed appropriately over his new toy (which is cool and shiny), and obviously did not point out that it’s totally f**king absurd for this cash-strapped state to be buy a new $2500 laptop for professors every couple years. Especially for professors who use their machines for web access, email, and word-processing, where even a current, $500 laptop encased in plebeian plastic is already massive overkill, and could quite easily be replaced only every 4 or 5 years — or however long before it breaks (which I can say with confidence, using a 5-year-old laptop myself that is still overkill for those uses–which is why I haven’t replaced it). The same guy and his wife believe they are dedicated environmentalists (boy do they recycle!) and very worried about global warming, but fly themselves and their kids all over the country and the world many, many times a year. Of course, I also don’t point that out–I just enjoy seeing the pictures and hearing the stories of their lovely trips.

If I knew Henry personally, I’m sure I’d take the same approach, but I don’t. Should I really be using the ‘polite friends and neighbors’ model for discussions on CT?

There is a nice LaTeX implementation called TexShop. I use it alot and it works. Out of the box it runs pdflatex but it can be configured to your favourite setups.

The productivity benefits of an operating system which is more intuitive can surely be defended on purely rational grounds

But one invariably hears such rationalizations for luxury purchases. A $75,000 Mercedes could be defended on practical grounds of, say, ‘needing’ absolutely THE most advanced safety features for one’s family. Those little windshield wipers on the head-lights could be the difference between life and death, you know.

But the intuitive operating system is available in a $999 plebeian plastic model, too, isn’t it?

Assume you use it for three years, and they really do last longer.

If you’re only using it for 3 years, it’s definitely not lasting longer.

Assume you spend at least eight hours a day working with it at least powered up and displaying useful stuff. That is around thirty cents an hour.

But it’s still $2000 at the margin every couple of years that could have been spent on something else. After living expenses and taxes, at lot of people don’t find an extra $2000 of discretionary money to be a trivial sum, and it doesn’t become trivial by dividing out by the hour. Which is why they don’t tend to buy $2500 items when $500 items will serve the purpose. Unless they’re rich enough not to care…and can afford a product that they not only will want to use but will also want to marry. Or unless they’re not spending their own money, in which case, well…why not?

Academic institutions prefer Macs, and pay well for them, IIRC, because they’re much, much, much cheaper to support than Windows systems. When I was back at StateUniversityOnATightBudget, the IT department found they were about three times cheaper to support than comparable Windows systems. Ease of use and quality design save money, and so does having current systems which run current software.

But penny-wise and pound-foolish is a conservative watchword. Krawk!

Note that the stripped-down free version of BBEdit is Textwrangler. It’s probably not for Henry as he’s got more complicated things to do, but it’s got grep and searching and replacing across multiple files.

Mac at home, Windows at the office …

Earlier comments regarding SAS having been abandoned are correct. However, JMP, which the SAS Institute developed first for the Mac is still being upgraded in parallel to the Windows version and is much more capable than the original. Unless you’re dealing exclusively with monster files, try it. It will open SAS files along with numerous other formats. It has a very nice journal function that enables very simple saves to Word or RTF format. And I like the scripting capability for analyses that I do repeatedly on updated data. I’ve used it since V.1 and think it’s superior for exploratory analysis.

I also use and like NetNewsWire as my aggregator. You should also take a look at MarsEdit for your blogging.

SuperDuper! is a good supplement to Time Machine for your backups.

Enjoy yourself.

“BBEdit is by miles the best choice for—what to call it? what I do when I want Word to get the hell out of the way, composing for html, and so on. ”

It’s called “editing.” For raw editing power, EMACS is to everything else as a Mac truck is to a shopping cart. The learning curve is cliff-like and the peak is in the clouds. However, the latter is a feature, not a bug. Recommended for all day every day programmers or others who process raw text, as opposed to using an IDE or a word processor, and for nobody else.

I just tried Tofu. I love the idea. But, SERIOUS problem, at least reading PDFs it hacks up equations with a dull knife. Anyone with a workaround (for Mac OS X 10.5)?

for maintaining databases and carrying out statistical analysis, there’s a really useful program produced by Microsoft, called “Excel”. The same company also makes “Powerpoint”, which is the best way of summarising your research for presentations.

dsquared, Excel is no substitute for a stat package, as you yourself know. Or should I mentione your previous involvement with STATA? :)

Dsquared doesn’t want to admit it, but Excel is responsible for the financial crisis and the collapse of the world economy.

Don’t feed the trolling.

MB Pro’s are extremely powerful computers,
equipped with better software for humanities & social science academics than,
more reliable than,
less $ to maintain than,
and more eco-friendly than

their cheaper-t0-buy Windows-running competitors.

Or to put it another way, let us suppose that Henry chose a MacBook Pro for purely pragmatic reasons (his account of lustful feelings notwithstanding). Lefties who are concerned about positional goods, should be just as worried as ever about Henry’s MacBook Pro. Nobody, I think, can deny that Apple markets its products as expensive aspirational goods and that many people perceive them that way. Or that there are many people who lust after MacBook Pros but cannot afford them. Or that many would (justifiably or not) recognize Henry’s machine as a marker of wealth or status.

Because, if I’ve got the theory right, the problem with privileged people owning and displaying positional goods lies in the negative externalities — the effects on the people of lesser means who feel diminished by being unable to compete. Well, the negative externalities are just the same, whether or not Henry acquired the machine for purely pragmatic reasons — are they not?

So Henry should be worried about the effects on poor grad students and hand-to-mouth non-tenured lecturers seeing his exquisite new machine (which is certainly a status indicator — the University doesn’t buy them for everyone) and feeling bad about their own inadequacy and lack of status. But perhaps it’s all OK if Henry makes a point of never taking his beautiful new machine out in public. Or scratches it up badly or covers it in poorly applied, stick-on wood-grain vinyl.

As it happens, Slocum, I did pay out of pocket. This is the ordinary language meaning of the word ‘bought’ (as opposed to the words ‘got my university to buy for me’, which I did not, as it happens, use). So I’ll accept your apologies when you are ready, thank you very much.

Also, if your Photoshop needs aren’t those of a pro or serious amateur, check out SeaShore, a native implementation of (at least some of) GIMP. Free.

Incidentally, on the Pro vs. ordinary Macbook front:

I bought a first-gen Macbook Pro three-plus years ago, and solid it hastily a few months (and two motherboards) later. (It ran hot enough to fry eggs, among other ailments.)

Last November I bought one of the new Aluminium unibody Macbooks. Lovely machine … until my desktop decided to blow up a month ago, while I was in finish-the-book death-march mode. After a week of staring at the 13″ screen, I bit the bullet, set fire to my credit card, and bought a new 15″ Macbook Pro.

The screen — I could feel my eyeballs unkink, just looking at it. If you do serious work on a laptop, then the Macbook Pro screen is definitely worth having (as opposed to the ordinary Macbook, unless you have an external monitor for it, in which case it ends up costing more than the Probook). It’s like going from a cheap Office Despot typist’s chair to an Aeron.

You only get the one pair of eyeballs. Why torture them with less-than-perfect display panels?

Finally, for Slocum: if the prof you’re obsessing over has replaced a 15″ G4 Powerbook with a unibody Macbook Pro, then they got at least three and a half years work out of it — more likely 4-5 years. The cheap Windows machine on a 18 month replacement cycle (because they get crudded up with malware) is a disastrous false economy.

As for me — I’m self-employed and I spend 60 hours a week on this machine. It’s a chunk of my business, and I’d no more trade it for a cheap Windows laptop than I’d choose to drive a crappy Chrysler Neon instead of a Mercedes. Your mileage may vary, obviously — taste isn’t objective — but if it makes my working life less uncomfortable I’m all in favour of it.

I have an expensive road bike. Not only does it cost way more than a good conventional bike, it is unusable for commuting, running errands, etc. Maybe it’s a positional good. But I’m also an age-group racer, and the point of racing is to go faster, and hence the exotic qualities of the bike matter for that purpose. In the way that guitarists buy expensive instruments to produce better sound. I’d defend my ownership of a 17″ MBPro the same way.

It seems crazy to think that the problem with positional goods is the goods. Isn’t it a problem with the positions, or perhaps the way we value the positions?

Why shouldn’t everyone be able to have luxury, positional goods? We don’t have sumptuary laws anymore reserving the high status stuff for the aristocracy. Arguing that only the super-rich, or members of some technocratic god class, or perhaps nobody, should be able to visit Paris is just puritanism, and in a particularly ugly form.

Henry may have decided to go for a fancier model. Maybe he will push its limits, maybe not. So what? Let him spoil himself a bit. He’s earned it.

Someone pretending to be dsquared (who is far too intelligent and perceptive to have written this) posted:

“for maintaining databases and carrying out statistical analysis, there’s a really useful program produced by Microsoft, called “Excel”. The same company also makes “Powerpoint”, which is the best way of summarising your research for presentations.”

Excel’s inadequacies for statistical analysis have been mentioned above and well documented; no comment from me is needed. Also, Excel isn’t a database program, and using it as one can be hazardous to your data. There are plenty of real ones around, although they do need some intellectual investment to use properly. If you work with data sets of any scale and complexity either you or someone else helping you needs to make that investment.

But the real point of this post is to slam powerpoint. Everything I might want to say about this has been said more elegantly than I could, and with supporting data, by Edward Tufte. Visit his site and look up “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.” It’s not free, but the cover alone is worth the price.

And if you haven’t read his book The Graphical Display of Quantitive Information you’re missing an experience both enjoyable and informative. The passage of time has not lessened its relevance; everyone who presents quantitive data is doing themselves a grave disservice by remaining ignorant of its contents.

This isn’t just me; I have legions of co-signers. Nor am I in any way associated with Mr. Tufte.

Old-Timer, are you trying to directly stimulate the “contrarian” center of dsquared’s brain? Don’t think he won’t defend Powerpoint. The man is capable of anything.

Giampaolo … oh, I mean Slocum left out the most importante feature, it’s sexy

This message typed on an upgraded, but never repaired cutting edge desktop G4-400 – 1.8…

As it happens, Slocum, I did pay out of pocket. This is the ordinary language meaning of the word ‘bought’ (as opposed to the words ‘got my university to buy for me’, which I did not, as it happens, use). So I’ll accept your apologies when you are ready, thank you very much.

I think I did say apologies if you’ve paid out of pocket — but I’ll say it again — sorry that I assumed the U was paying for your machine (as is the case here for the professors I know). Although, as a libertarian, I have no particular problem with people using their own money to buy luxury goods for whatever reason they like, but I did not think that belief extended to those on the left — I am pleased to discover that it does.

Just to clean up some of Slocum’s (real or pretended) confusion, positional goods are those whose value depends on the fact that other people don’t have them. Mass produced computers are obviously not in this category…

Oh, c’mon, please, let’s be honest. OF COURSE MacBook Pros are positional goods. They were designed as positional goods. They are marketed as positional goods. They are priced as positional goods (at 4X to 6X the cost of a basic machine). Many people, especially at universities, feel a desire for them but cannot afford them (or cannot justify the expense).

Nobody would deny that a Mercedes or Lexus is not a positional good simply because it is mass produced, would they? Many, many luxury/positional goods are mass produced (sub-zero refrigerators). And many priced much less than a MacBook Pro (e.g. designer handbags for women) but are still considered status marker and are desired wanted by people who cannot afford them. In fact, goods priced in the range of MacBook Pros may be worse in the sense that poor people could never afford a new Mercedes, so seeing a Mercedes drive by may make them feel worse–but it won’t help bankrupt them. But if they really stretch out their credit limits, they might afford a designer handbag or MacBook Pro.

Do you really, seriously, honestly think that nobody feels a desire for a MacBook Pro who doesn’t have $2000 handy to satisfy that desire…or envies someone who does have the means? I’m a little boggled here — the desire for Apple products combined with a feeling of being unable to afford them is commonly acknowledged (everywhere except here, it seems). It was recently parodied on the Simpsons, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRwRfYDzeqg

(Keep watching at least until you get to the ‘My Phonies’).

The denial here that MacBook Pros should be considered position goods, while frustrating, is interesting, though. It suggests those on the left don’t really take the idea very seriously (at least not when inconvenient). I should (and I suppose I do) consider that encouraging.

Why should the monetary cost of a laptop be of any concern from an environmental perspective? The issue here is surely the resources that went into producing the laptop.

Let us grant for the purpose of argument that Apple is selling, through marketing as positional goods, $2000 laptops that are not functionally different to laptops available for $500. If that assumption is true, then it’s likely that the production, shipping, etc. of the $2000 laptop has similar environmental costs to the $500 laptops… So I fail to see that people purchasing $2000 laptops are committing any kind of social offense, rather than just making poor purchasing decisions of only personal significance.

There’s obviously a clear environmental advantage to retaining older computers for longer, but that’s got nothing to do with the whole debate about positional goods.

Randolph, I agree about the animation factor or writing on the board, although perhaps it is really a passivity factor in presenting via Powerpoint.

And if memory serves, statistics sur Excel are best served with Budweiser.

I’m late to the party here, but this is a list of (mostly) free software.
Try some of the utilities and Papers. Download anything else that you might need. Get the others as you need them – or for amusement. I’ve left out links because with all the great free software it’s too easy to get sucked into trying new programs, even if you have to search for them.

I’ve divided my choices for apps into categories. (all freeware except where noted)

widgets – nice to have at a keystroke
PEMDAS – a nice little calculator
qwikConvert – minimalist units coversion
Translator – interface to web translator
ResearchInMotion – for weather
Character Pal from taco widgets – quick reference to key combinations for special characters from keyboard, or in HTML (Donations Encouraged)

Utilities
Perian – lets QuickTime play back more formats
TinkerTool – let’s you tweak some aspects of OS-X that are normally hidden or difficult. Try it.
Onyx – similar to Tinker Tool but accessible from System Preferences.
Lingon – interface lets you schedule programs or scripts to run at regular (or even somewhat irregular) times
Handbrake – Convert video formats
ServiceScrubber – That “Services” menu is useful, but it becomes cluttered with items you no longer want. This let’s you fix that.
CarbonCopyCloner – backup. Not nearly as necessary now that Time Machine is readily available. Still not a bad idea, like a belt with suspenders.

Apps
Firefox

R – for statistics – it’s the best, if you need it.

JabRef or BibDesk – good reference managers for BibTex ( there are other good payware solutions, BibDesk and Sente. Pick your poison)
Papers – Search for papers and organize, read and annotate pdf’s. Doesn’t connect refs with any word processor. Who cares. You can export to BibTex or RIS (or EndNoteXML or CSV or…) If the papers in your field are accessible from its interface, try it. Try it anyway. I find that it has dramatically improved that part of my workflow. (Shareware mekentosj.com, unrestricted 30 day trial)
(Zotero does similar things, but Papers really seems to work _much_ better for me, Skim is good for annotating pdf’s if you don’t use papers)

Scrivener – (+ Multi Markdown)
Journler – more generalized note taking and scrapbook
Yojimbo – similar with decent storage for passwords and support for synching with me.com (Shareware)
Evernote – similar but not as good as Yojimbo on passwords. synchs everywhere. has surprisingly good OCR
(Circus Ponies Notebook and NoteTaker are both good with a somewhat different user interface)

Bean – nice minimal word processor.
OpenOffice (or NeoOffice) – to deal with the omnipresent MS-Office stuff.
Magic Number Machine – nice calculator

CocoaMySQL – good MySQL interface (if you need such a thing)
Sequel Pro – successor to CocoaMySQL.
MySQLGui – to the previous two, but not as powerful. Occasionally useful.

Smultron – good text editor
TextWrangler – excellent text editor – good multifile search and replace, good grep
TextMate – my favorite text editor at the moment (Shareware)

VLC – very flexible video playback
Audacity – audio recording and manipulation

Games & Graphics
Quinn – (aka Tetris)
Google Earth – better every time I use it
Intaglio – good way to assemble, create and tweak graphics of several kinds (Shareware)
Blender – only if your need 3 D video
Gimp
SecuritySpy – monitoring web enabled or hard wired cameras. Good interface. (Shareware)

Another way that Slocum’s attack is off-base is that it really has nothing much to do with apple, per se, but it’s worded that way.

There are $500 laptops, and there are $2500 laptops. They really aren’t interchangeable. Apple doesn’t happen to make any $500 ones, but in the $1000-$3000 range they are very roughly comparable with windows based machines at the same price point. If you want approximately the class of machine from another major laptop retailer, you aren’t going to pay much less than the mac (you will typically, but not always, pay a little less). In a TCO sense, you may well pay more for the windows laptop, but this of course depends on you usage and how much software you have to buy (or can avoid buying) for your use, and how much time the machine eats on non-productive work (virus/setup/install/reinstall/etc. issues). If you do the numbers properly (and I have, several times) the “apple tax” as they put it, is pretty small. Somewhat higher if you make the mistake of ordering a memory upgrade from apple.

So I found it interesting that while you could perhaps make a case for the use of more expensive laptops being a luxury (I don’t think it would hold much water, we’re talking about typically less than $1000/yr here on a machine facilitating the work of someone who costs a lot more than that), it’s really inept to state it as an apple vs. pc issue.

[As an aside, the idea that typical state universities are buying many professors macbook pros is laughable. I’m sure there is an example or two around, but treating this as a concerning usage of taxpayers money is at best an expression of ignorance.]

Honestly, AcedemicLurker, the last time I ran the numbers it was more like a $2700 m-b-p compared to a bunch of roughly $2300-3000 windows laptops that were actually comparable once you look that the details. I couldn’t find a comparable one for less than that, and the lowest of them were very much offbrand. Of course, all those numbers are pretty time sensitive, and these ones are a generation out of date. In that particular case, the $400 potential savings would have been mostly eaten immediately by a need to buy a development environment on windows that we could avoid on the mac…

Sente which is fantastic for bibliography work and keeping a database of downloaded papers. Much better, much faster, much less buggy than EndNote.
Skim as a pdf viewer. Much better than Adobe
Pages to replace Word. (keynote is ok, but not quite ready for general use) Pages renders on the screen so much better than word, much less eye strain for me anyway. Also faster boot and its never crashed.

That’s a fair point, Henry. Apple doesn’t have anything equivalent to dial-a-Dell going on. I’m not sure how often this is actually an issue, but I can see someone wishing for a machine somewhere between a macbook and a macbook pro or whatever, and having no option.

ppm:
Skim as a pdf viewer. Much better than Adobe

What do you need from Skim that preview doesn’t do, these days?

Apple doesn’t compete in all segments of the market. It’s as simple as that, really. If you do head-to-head/feature-to-feature comparisons, Apple is generally competitive, even without considering stuff like build quality, customer support and the OS. But you will always be able to find cheaper computers, and also always find cheaper build-to-order hardware with some particular combination of features that better suits your specific needs, while leaving other things out.

And as wikipedia and several other links that I have kindly googled for you note, a positional good (as defined in Fred Hirsch’s book, where the argument about positional goods was first articulated), is one whose value to its owner primarily or entirely rests on the fact that other people can’t have it.

But that’s not quite right — Here’s sentence number one from the Wiki article:

Positional goods are products and services whose value is mostly (if not exclusively) a function of their ranking in desirability, in comparison to substitutes.

Of course, it’s always a matter of degree to what extent the value of a product is a function of it’s position in the status hierarchy of like products. And that varies from person to person and situation to situation.

If you could have pointed to any evidence whatsoever in my post that this was why I valued the laptop.

I thought your jokingly expressed feelings of matrimony suggested something other than pure pragmatism. But the point is that even if a $2500 Mac Laptop is not a positional good for you — it is perceived that way by many people (who own but don’t need them or who want but can’t afford them). That this is common knowledge is pretty obvious in the humor of the Simpson’s clip. I find your denial that a $2500 laptop could be considered a positional good in any way, shape, form, or situation to be, well, disappointing in that it seems like a denial of the blatantly obvious.

And are people always fully aware of their motivations for buying things? Do they never engage in self-deception when explaining to themselves why they ‘need’ something that they want for emotional reasons — which reasons may be related to status? I try to avoid deceiving myself that way, but I’m sure I’m not entirely successful.

…you are quite right in suggesting that you won’t be missed if you take yourself to other parts.

I can’t say an exchange like this raises my blood pressure exactly, but I do find it intruding when I ought to be focusing on other things. So yeah — let’s call it a day.

I thought your jokingly expressed feelings of matrimony suggested something other than pure pragmatism.

Where on the appreciation scale should my vice-grip fit? I really like it because it’s useful in a lot of circumstances, but, you know, should I like it less because I can go out and buy another with pocket change?

Shorter threadjacking…If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?

Sorry, I thought I could hold it in.

This is a classic case.
“If you go Mac, you never go back”

Having LiquidCD for free CD and DVD burner software will be a lot helpful when you want to burn data CD or DVD.

Enjoy.

JulesLt 04.21.09 at 1:46 am

“As for Slocum’s posts – I found the first one funny, and more gentle teasing, rather than insulting. It’s a fair enough observation, and I’m sure it actually applies to most things bought by anyone on the Left earning over the average wage, right down to organic or Fair Trade food, or cultural consumption.”
It’s common, but it’s rather falacious – in the discussion on inequality, Henry was not trying to introduce New American Socialist Man, with everybody earning the same amount of money and wearing the same fatigues. Nobody was. The issue was how large a share of the GDP does a very small minority get. The analogy would be if Henry was against meth or crack, and Slocum was ragging on him for talking about a nice new brand of wine he’d found, under the grounds that they’re all intoxicants.

” Ironically, the only way to escape that accusation is probably to shop only in Walmart, etc.”

At which point one is open to accusations of being driven by the lowest price, so how does one criticize Wal-Mart for providing the lowest priced goods?

In the end, it was all a pile of BS.