My Macbook PSU finally gave up after 19 months of undeniably hard wear. The cable frayed enough near the little magsafe connector to render it completely useless. Ah well, c'est la vie. I've just been to the Apple store and picked up another one. £54.12 if you please.

This got me thinking. One of the criticisms levelled at Apple is that you can "only" use Apple parts in Macs, and these parts are expensive. This is absolutely true, aside from the falsehoods (e.g. 3rd party RAM and hard disks). But the fact is, you actually can buy Apple parts for it. I just popped into my local shopping centre and walked out with a new laptop PSU as part of my normal shopping. I can't think of any other laptop brand that has the same level of availability of parts or accessories.

Of course, if your Toshiba laptop PSU explodes for some reason (manufacturing faults occur in all brands, Apple included. No fanboys here, ta) you could buy some 3rd party "universal" adapter from your local electronics retailer. These will probably work as well as 3rd party mobile phone chargers; adequately for a while but with half the working lifespan of an original. Or, of course, you could call the Toshiba spares line and buy an original, but that won't be cheap and you'll have to wait for it.

I don't have any particular deep or philosophical point to make here. It's just that somebody actually said, when my laptop PSU died, that I'd "be stuck buying an expensive Apple replacement." And yes, I did. But it has a full year's warranty and it took 30 minutes to drive over and pick one up. I like that.