[Tichy]

You fell for the marketing. Apple shows all these amazing robots and processes assembling the iPhone. What do you think the competition uses, do they carve their phones out of stones with toothpicks? They have advanced production tools, too.

The N1 is a really nice phone - I prefer it to the iPhone 3G. The phone makers will continue to better each other, from keynote to keynote. Now Apple has the lead again (in some aspects), in a couple of months, there will be a cooler Android device, and so on.

Notice how a lot of the Apple marketing dwells on the production processes, which are completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the phone's body was hand carved by dwarves from middle earth out of Mithril, self-assembled by nano robots or cut out of aluminium in a single piece. What matters is that the end result works and looks nice.

[vidarh]

GP didn't mention production processes anywhere, but materials and build quality. Why are you going on about production processes?

[Tichy]

Because Apple displays the processes to signal the build quality. And some build processes that enable them to use special materials - which doesn't imply that the materials are superior.

[vetinari]

Apple's material and build quality are the same, as any other vendor in the same price category.

I have yet to own an Apple product, that does not need to be serviced during warranty.

[jonah]

I'm only talking about the physical exterior.

It's well known that Apple's laptop LCDs are average at best. I can only assume their PCBs are produced on the same equipment their foxconn et all use for their other customers.

[Tichy]

Still, the aluminium bodies are nice, but maybe other materials would be better (Magnesium)? The MacBooks are quite heavy, for example.

Granted, there is a lot of trash computers out there, atm I don't even know which ones would be nicer than Apple's (since Samsung has screwed up the design lately). But I haven't done the research, either.

[jonah]

>> You fell for the marketing.

I'm only going from my own experience.

Before my current MBP I had a T series ThinkPad - arguably one of the best built laptops. Awesome machine, loved it. There is no comparison in materials or build quality though.

Right now I'm using a borrowed iPhone 2G. Before that a high-end Symbian Nokia. The Nokia worked far better as a "phone". The fit-and-finish of the iPhone is far above.

[Tichy]

Not saying the iPhone is ugly. However, you are comparing old non-Apple hardware to new Apple hardware. Technology progresses fast, so after one year, the next generation of phones tends to be much better than the ones before.

Not sure about notebooks - theoretically there should be nice ones, but a lot of vendors seem to screw it up completely.