Best Build Quality?

[BunnyKillBot]

Samsung, Sony, Apple

Why do these three companies hands down trump the others in terms of beautiful design and build quality? Why, when these companies are churning out such exquisite designs is the market so saturated with cheap plastic-y tat?

The market is in a frustrating limbo at the moment where Haswell hasn't properly hit yet, Samsung havn't refreshed, Sony dont have a high build quality dedicated graphics chip model and Apple is Apple. You need to be the 'right sort of consumer' to go Apple.

Anyway, yeah, tick tock, exciting times ahead but right now the market is REALLY BORING.

 

[BunnyKillBot]

The rate of change in the industry is increasing; pretty much every year we are seeing significant new technologies (e.g. latest MacBook Airs now using mini PCIe instead of SATA for their SSDs, yielding some pretty significant speed improvements).

If you insist on having the latest, then you're never going to get a good deal, and you run the risk of buying something too early which has design faults. In my opinion, given the incremental nature of everything, in general people would be better off buying something really good from the "previous generation", especially when you can get really good deals as well.

Not saying it's not worth waiting, but by the time Haswell is stabilised in the market, the next generation will already be in the offing, and then "why not wait for that to come out and see what improvements that brings", and so on for ever and ever. Pointless and never-ending.

I agree, but thats what market discernment is all about. Its not that different from stock trading markets, purchasing in a period of strength to maximise profit. You have to stay synced with the market otherwise its pot luck whether you are making a smart consumer purchase. Then you have to factor in low/mid/high/enthusiast cost benefit/cost curve adjusted to time.

Haswell gives a slight performance boost but better powermangment/battery life. That is a significant enough development and entirely relevant to laptops/portable computing devices that my professional recommendation is right now not to buy. Equally, intels integrated graphic chip implementations is improving, but they are still so far behind the AMD/NVidia market leaders its almost irrelevant for anybody with a greater use requirement than 'surfing the web'. The high end market is currently in a slump, there is literally no product that ticks all the boxes.