This image encapsulates everything I dislike about the PC industry. On the bottom is the Acer Aspire 1700. On top is my 17″ MacBook Pro, which is a fairly intimidating machine. It’s completely dwarfed by the Acer, though. The Acer weighs around 7kg (versus 3.1kg for the MBP), and contains a desktop Pentium 4, desktop-sized RAM sticks and a desktop 3.5″ hard drive. The fans run constantly, it’s hot, heavy, and doesn’t take a battery. It’s utterly, utterly pointless and stupid, taking the worst aspects of desktops (large, heavy, non-portable) and notebooks (lack of expandability, bad keyboard and ergonomics) and creating a hideous turd that I suspect even the designer would be ashamed of.

But it’s cheap, and that mentality - “Sod practicality, looks, reliability, user experience, everything… as long as it’s cheap” - is what makes me hate the PC.