haha. well, good news! $2k-$3k is NOT a poor man's budget! here i thought you're trying to cram down all the bells and whistles into a $500 machine. you can get a pretty powerful machine that can handle even the tougher number crunching tasks like video, graphics, CAD, etc. with that budget. even if that computer blows the specs off the roofs of a mac, you'll prob still not be comfortable adapting to the OS though (and then prob blame the computer). as in my
conversation with
@Sir Squirrel, people have to remember the computer is just a tool. a more expensive machine doesn't necessarily make you more productive or creative!
haha, a best buy employee once tried to tell my friend asus is a gaming company. well his first mistake was thinking i was the helpless damsel and my friend was there to help me shop for a new computer when it was the other way around, where i played the role of the nerd pitbull. i called BS and he doubled down to say they only make gaming rigs. i was like dude, they have a line called ProArt, you know like it says in the name that it's for "professional art" creatives THAT BEST BUY SELLS ON THEIR ONLINE STORE!!! no joke, the dude still didn't believe me and looked it up on his phone before finally changing his tune. needless to say, my friend felt like we just encountered a snake oil salesman and chose not to buy anything so we left. i was like, "hold me back!" there's plenty more where that came from!
asus is one of the manufacturers that was an ODM for apple in the past. they made the ibooks and powerbooks i believe. as far as innovation, i think they're currently way ahead of the curve compared to apple. even microsoft's surface line is doing more pushing the limits of re-imagining the laptop. besides the chip that they're bringing in-house, what has apple done in laptop innovation besides the poorly received emoji bar (hahaha) and removing all ports so they can charge overpriced dongles galore to bring in easy buck? most of it is just higher res camera and faster processor, in case you need to enlarge your photos to cover the side of skyscrapers.