Do you buy Apple and fly Virgin because you think they're 'cool'? Grow up, for God's sake

The concept of “cool” is, appropriately, like a snowball. Just when you think you’ve got a grasp of it, it melts away. Still, cool is the most resilient of slang words. While other terms have become cringeworthy from overuse, cool has stayed firmly within the lexicon. Cool is put in service to describe a galaxy of objects and incidents – from fleeting moments to multi-billion-pound brands. It's the beatnik's curse.

Whole industries exist to tell us what's cool now, what will be cool next and when the cool evaporates. The annual CoolBrands survey, published this week, is just one small outcrop of the cool industry, a pseudoscientific barometer of the brands the British public considers desirable.

The problem with apportioning cool rankings according to the whims of a panel of 39 experts and a 200-strong sample from the general public is clear when you dig into social networking data. Figures supplied by the social media monitoring agency Brandwatch reveal Apple's "cool" is a more complicated concept than you might think.

On average, 10,000 people a week tweet about Apple and its products being cool, compared to just 4,000 saying the same for Samsung. But closer inspection reveals that the percentage of positive tweets about both brands is roughly the same, while more negative sentiments are expressed about Apple’s products. Cool can only get you so far.

Similarly, Virgin Atlantic – which came in at number eight in the top 20 –is at the heart of a disconnect between its apparent cool and the public’s response. Brandwatch’s analysis suggests Twitter users are more likely to discuss it in negative terms than rival carriers British Airways and Emirates.

True, but apple is on the Nasdaq. though I guess it all plays off each other. I’d hate to give up more free money.

Also, Obama will raise the capitol gains, so I want to get out before then too.

If your iMac died - take it to Apple and walk out of the store with another one. Apple is probably one of the top end stores in the Customer Support arena

It didn't die. It just had a substandard GPU, even though it was the upgraded GPU. It's a mobility card in a desktop. Couldn't deal with it.

$3,000? Really? iMacs in the 27 inch range start at $2,000. Upgrading to a 2 Gig AMD HD6970M takes you to $2,299 (including the upgraded i9 Intel Chipset). It would be foolish to buy the additional memory from Apple, as they are 2-3x more expensive for the same DIMMs from Amazon.

Keyword: Starting. You can't blame it on the extra memory, as that was only $100. $200 for the better processor, $100 for 8gb of mem, $100 for the upgraded GPU and $600 for a SSD.

The comparable Windows machine has better specs including a 512gb SSD, and was still cheaper, and smokes the iMac in every way. The Mac was pretty. That was it's only strongsuit.

FWIW, the NV590GTX that's in the Windows box, is faster than two HD5770's by far.

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