[neonhomer]

Those some good points, but if some one is living paycheck to paycheck they still can't afford a new device. Also iCloud backup only does so much data before it costs something, so that could be another additional cost that some people are not going to be able to afford.

[Gorbzel]

But that's the problem: the good points about hardware quality are objectively true regardless of an end user's ability to afford a replacement or the article author's proclivity to get offended.

Things are improving, but many components in a PC are known to eventually give out — the metric for hard drive longevity is literally known as "mean time to failure," batteries have cycle counts, etc.

Nor is the gap between quality components and inferior alternatives bridged suddenly because someone heard Phil Schiller say something they didn't like. An $150 Acer trackpad is going to be significantly worse than a $1500 MacBook trackpad. I highly doubt this article gets published if the author had tried to use a 2011 budget PC laptop.

[brodney]

iCloud backup costs $0.99 for 50GB of space. It's basically free.

[craigc]

$0.99 a month I believe