Surprise of the month: Macs crash?

My first Mac was a used, ebay-bought ’98 Powerbook… still the most reliable computer I’ve ever used, and it never had a system crash. I was so pleased with it, I happily shelled out for a shiny new G4 shortly after they came out… only to be entirely dissapointed. The system on it went down regularly… and the warranty-covered checkups provided a temporary fix accompanied by comments such as “This is so strange… Macs never act this way.” After 6 months of this (and the loss of a few key presentations in the process), I ended up switching back to Windows. It’s a clunky, annoying OS… but sadly it’s also cheaper and more consistent than my last Mac.

I don’t use Macs, But I’m surprised to hear all this talk about OS X crashing just as much as XP, or XP rarely crashing.

XP *does* crash, and it’s not hard to bring down the whole thing. One of my last XP crashes? Had two Firefox windows filled with tabs I was moving between, with some drag-n-drop action. Locked the sucker up.

I still crash Firefox occasionaly, but I’ve never had Ubuntu freeze up. I’m sure I’m one of the lucky few, but all my Linux lockups have been related to misconfigured hardware and bad drivers.

I worked for 10 years for a company that exclusively used various Mac products and I’ll tell you this – Oh yeah they crash. And when they crash there is nothing to do but restart it. At work either giggled or rolled our eyes whenever we heard “Macs Never Crash”.

okay, so we all agree that no matter the OS (yes, even Linux) machines crash.

So, how about this?…let’s compare the frequency of “crashes” between Windows, OSX, and Linux. Ready? Go!

I’ve had problems with my MacBook kernel panicking… it seems it wasn’t taking too nicely to my 2GB of third-party RAM. That Grey Screen is one ominous sight to see.

So yeah, Macs can crash when all is not well. I still dig ‘em and I’m not going back to PC land.

Well the worst crash I ever personally had was on a MAC (I did have a Pr1me disk that had been gouged down the aluminum but that happed before my time at that company)

It was one of the Mac quadras – it made the Car crash noise and died totally and thats the Only time I have a computer crash so bad I cant get it going.

Hold the front page: “A-list blogger states the bleedin’ obvious!”

I’ve only had a Mac for 6 months, various apps have crashed occasionally, and it’s locked up completely twice I think, but generally OS X seems a lot more stable than Win2k or XP. Many of the apps I use are open source, which helps when it comes to getting fixes.

The Linux kernel and core tools seem even more stable, I’d say popular apps for it (like Firefox and OpenOffice) tend to be at least as stable as their MS/Mac counterparts.

Perhaps the reason the blogosphere doesn’t seem as geeky as it used to be is that all the serious coders have moved to Planet Ubuntu…

It’s amazing how many Mac owning commenters have seen XP BSOD , even though a) they’re using Macs and b) the default behaviour of XP is to reboot rather than blue screen! Most be that darn Steve Jobs reality distortion field causing it… Yes Macs crash. And all OS have their share of application hangs. Believing otherwise is ridiculously naive.

But buying a whole new computer just to avoid spending less money on a App that would work on your current machine? Clearly your new job in paying you far too much Scoble!

Not sure what Winer’s point is (maybe “no matter what, the Mac shouldn’t crash because they say it doesn’t”?), but I find it amusing that he chooses to just put up with it (and marvel that his Mac crashes so much) rather than figure it out.

Bad RAM, for instance, is platform-independent. And the Mac version of Office is notorious for freezing and unexpectedly quitting.

AndyC:

“It’s amazing how many Mac owning commenters have seen XP BSOD , even though a) they’re using Macs and b) the default behaviour of XP is to reboot rather than blue screen!”

Let me be another of those. My 4-month-old Dell has BSOD’ed on me three times.

But continue with your implied theory…?

I really hate Macs, but our schools have them all over, it sucks.

visit me please

http://snipedout99.wordpress.com/

Whoa Boy! Two Quick points:

Sony VEGAS Rules! XP, HD, format agnostic, Resolution Independent…

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/products/vegasfamily.asp

Macs crashing? check out this vid…
http://www.happynowhere.net/mac_parody.php

Macs do crash. This is no surprise to anyone who’s used enough of them. It’s purely a myth that they don’t crash. Perhaps it’s a myth propagated by those who have never had their personal Mac crash, but there are people with XP who have never experienced a crash, either. The vast majority of my own crashes on XP are of my own doing for using beta drivers and beta programs all over the place. Other than that, I find it very stable. Macs are very stable, too, but the belief that they’re far less prone to crashes is a myth.

BTW, who buys a whole new laptop just for one built-in app? I would’ve bought something comparable (like Vegas Movie Studio) for ~$100 instead of throwing $1200 or whatever at a new laptop.

Dude, get a mac.

I always thought it was a straw man argument used by anti-Mac people. “Macs DO crash. They’re not so great.” As though that was the reason why we use Macs. Never mind the much-more-civic shareware/freeware community, comparative lack of spyware, viruses, rootkits, etc., general ease of use, freedom from Microsoft spying and “checking on your license,” etc.

This is news to anyone? In my old uni almost all the Macs (almost always iMacs) crashed regularly. You couldn’t even get anything STARTED; it’ll just hang at bootup. The Windows machines weren’t as bad. Indeed, this happened so frustratingly often that now any of us who’s ever been to that uni has a universal hatred of Macs.

I can’t speak for the people who are saying that their Macs crash more often than their Windows machines; I have NEVER seen example of that, and I have extensive experience with both.

I was a hardcore PC user for over ten years. I was a web designer, hardware builder, network administrator, and more. I lived for Windows and hated Macs.

Then I went back to school and started working on Macs, and I was instantly converted. Now, I’m not going to say that Macs never crash, because they do – any computer can crash. Of course Macs crash… But not NEARLY as often as Windows boxes do. Period.

Since I switched to Macs, I have become so accustomed to getting work done instead of working on my computer, that I want to pull my hair out every time I have to work on a Windows machine now. I can’t stand them. It seems like every task is so god-dam•ed complicated to accomplish on a Windows box. Macs just work. Period.

Out of necessity, I have both Macs and PCs in my studio. I am a professional photographer and cinematographer/editor. I can tell you this as FACT in my experience: The Macs that I use give me functionality problems once for about every ten times the Windows machines do.

And, I can say this: The problems on the Macs are usually APP related, as oppposed to OS related on the PCs. If we just count OS problems, then OS X just plain leaves Windows in the dust.

Hope this testimonial helps.

It seems that whenever you state that it will never crash it does but the good thing about mac is that thought the apps may crash once in a blue moon the framework holds strong

if i could afford a mac i would have one

I love reading post like this after the experience I just had (and that I bet that everybody has had). My Windows XP rebooted (after an update) without saving my open work, without warning or anything. I guess Microsoft doesn’t call that a crash, but to me is an admission that XP doesn’t even pretend to be reliable. People know they have to live with it. For all its faults, at least the Mac is trying not to crash!

*Wrings hands together*
Where do we start? I’ve crashed Linux, Windows, Dos, C64s, Speccies and of course I made a Mac hang once.

On modern PC hardware the usual suspect for an OS hang is quite often the network and that’s what happened when I made OS X hang for the first time. A few shares were open on the desktop, I was helping them set up their networking so I removed the network cable. *Poof* hung machine. It probably would have come back if we had waited long enough but that’d ruin a good story! Now that I have a Mac laptop, if I use it at all I’m positive I’ll be able to use my destructive abilities sooner or later.

Same story with Linux and Windows in the past. Haven’t had much of a chance to play with or tear apart XP or it’s ilk but the network cable is always a good way of bringing down a Windows/Mac/Linux advocate a peg or two!

Everything crashes, but lately Macs annoy me the most.

some background, I am an IT troubleshooter/consultant at a small company, they run about 20 Macs and 5 XP PC’s hooked up to a MS 2003 small business server +Exchange server (Side note: much hate for Dell).

I’ve been in charge of updates for all the machines and the most surprising thing I found was, unlike the Win Xp Machines (which get a ton of updates grumble reboot and are fine) Mac Security Updates can blow away the whole system.

During the update to 10.4.7 2 of the 20 Macs got locked into looping on the login.app or some such nonsense and refused to boot after the restart. After exhausting every tool I had (running disk repair and permissions, fsck etc) I had to format and reinstall both of them. Granted one had only 3 gigs free, however the second had 60 gigs free and same error. Also I had disconnected all 3rd party devices and disconnected them from the network during the update so It bugged me a lot.

But yeah I dual boot xp and linux at home so from my experience working here.

All 3 freeze crash and hang. And while I wasn’t expecting an OS security update to blow away whole computer’s I can’t any of the 3 have been a joy to work with.

oh and HP Printers +Mac OSX have also been hit or miss arround here Sometimes its software sometimes its just the os

Dave Chapelle explains why people buy Macs for:

Not safe for work.

Never had a crash because of the Mac OS. Most of the “crashes” I’ve had was because I had faulty memory (or little memory) and was running the G3 at maximum, with most RAM hungry apps open.

Now, even reluctantly, I got myself a Mac Mini 1.66 Intel Core Duo. No OS X crashes so far, even with iMovie.

As you mentioned, it was the App that “crashed.” Don’t blame OS X.

Maybe it’s you…

My MacBook Pro never crashes, so, I don’t know what to say.