Caught in Apple restart hell

Scoble,
It’s so obvious that your not a Mac user – go get a Vista machine quick.
Enjoy
Adrian

“The original retail price of the computer (Apple ][) was US$1298 (with 4 KB of RAM) and US$2638 (with the maximum 48 KB of RAM).”

What concerned me is I have been watching the RSS feed from apple, and since 10.5 Leopard has been released, there have been 15+ serious bugs and problems for upgraders. If you buy it bundled, great, but for the rest of us, it really concerns me. Microsoft does this all the time, but this time Apple seemed to rush Leopard for the Holidays. In addition, Leopard had all eye candy, no real functional improvements, just cool add ons. That is also what Microsoft does way too much. More feature glut than actual core enhancements or speed improvements. I will stick with 10.4 for a while. Maybe a long while.

Check Fake Steve Jobs. Er, now.

http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/scoble-throws-down-goes-berserk-on.html

The truth is that if you use one platform most of the time its hard to be objective in comparisons with another. Its like being from a different country. You know what’s good about OS and how to keep it running, its hard to evaluate an issue on another. If you’d really rather use Windows, by all means use it. I don’t see an issue with that.

I think if you like a certain software package, OS or device and you choose it, you are more inclined to invest time to learn it. Are Mac’s easier? Maybe not that much in real terms, but people really tend to like them and spend time investigating them. When someone hands me a BlackBerry I am a bit baffled by it, I just don’t see why you’d want to trouble with that UI compared to a Palm or better the iPhone. Clearly there are a ton of people who use them and depend on then and they figure it out well enough. I just don’t want to devote the energy when the iPhone works so well.

Mac people really love their experience with Apple products. I don’t think they are totally brainwashed. Either they are not having problems, they are not bothered by the problems they encounter or they simply on balance think the experience is better. And without comparative statistics its really tough to know 1) what the incidence of problems are comparatively for either OS and 2) the comparative severity that you would on each platform.

I know my friend’s computer took 10 hours to install Vista with several restarts. It seems really hard to use and maintain to me. I just don’t want to bother with that. Leopard took one hour install and has been great.

To be frank, the system problem described here did not seem that bad to me, it seems like it will be easily resolved. There seems to be no loss of data. You did not need to drop into any command line to fix it. That is not great but not that bad.

I don’t think its reasonable to expect no errors on any system you have, but I do have Mac systems with have worked that way. Also, the genius bars are pretty great. If you make an appointment from home, its really quite convenient when you do have an issue.

My Windows friends talk often about needing to rebuild their systems. After six months to a year, things get slow and they need to wipe and reinstall their system. That is pretty unheard of on a Mac. At most, on the Mac people will do an “Archive and Install”, which sounds like the same solution but is much easier, an simple overlay install of the OS.

Ain’t Karma a bitch…

Upgraded my 3+ yrs old PowerBook G4 on Leopard last week : everything works absolutely fine. Even Dashboard don’t swallow the memory anymore.
Got a regular/invisible/not-asked Windows update on my work’s laptop last week : it screwed up the whole Network settings (you know, things like WiFi’ WEP keys).
Oh, there is one more thing : my PowerBook encountered a 750°F fire in my home office back in early 2005. Guess what : each and every NON-Apple branded electronic equipment went dead. Each and every Apple product still work 100%, including the PowerBook itself.

John Dvorak admits to baiting Mac users for hits

Not very original…you even do a ‘flip-flop’ in the middle like he suggests (comment 11).

Robert,

Generally, the behavior you are seeing is the result of a disk / file system issue, though I have seen it happen a couple of other ways. The most frequent cause is the frequent use of he press and hold the power button method of shutting down, the system doesn’t get a chance to flush itself correctly, in this case it’s just like Windows.

If you boot to single user mode (command line) and run fsck -fy a few times until everything is cleaned up, the problem generally goes away. I couple of Safe Mode reboots can accomplish the same thing. On a Desktop, this really isn’t an issue, but for laptops, where we abuse the disk a bit more, I make it a habit to periodically FSCK the disks.

Another question to ask:

Is this a good time to do the upgrade? Do I expect to use this machine for important work immediately? If so, perhaps you should wait until a more convenient time for the machine to be unavailable, just in case.

We all know that computers sometimes don’t work the way we expect. Apple has a better reputation than M$.

Do you even know what ironic means?

Fanboy Frenzy!!

Sigh. Now my finder isn’t showing up.

No offense, but god forbid we should all live in a world where bloggers don’t get some kind of special shut up, or just to say nice things, kind of treatment through a PR firm… Computer problems suck (for you know, everbody) and I personally think apple has some serous hardware quality control issues (met a lot of mack books with dead USB ports), yet your gut reaction is to get pissy because the apple PR firm doesn’t help you? WTF man, get some perspective, everbodies time to valuable for this kind of shit not just yours.

But how can a kid save up more than $2000?

Of course it’s your decision how to be a parent. I just wonder.

Lars: he gets lots of gifts from grandparents and family members. I kicked in $500 for getting straight A’s on his report card, too and he gets allowance from us every week too. I’d much rather he saved all his money to buy a new computer than to waste it on candy, YuGiOh cards, or something else similarly stupid.

I never had that kind of trouble with Linux…

you do realize that a mac is still a computer, and its also a laptop, and laptops usually have more problems than desktops, so yeah the mac is not the panacea for all your windows problems, nothing ever will be, but im happy with my make, it has never shut off unexpectantly, and runs perfectly fine, so im fine and dandy with my upgrade from the blue screen of dead, all my programs not responding, and everything running slow. get over your selves, the commercial is just a commercial, its to sell products. when you buy Axe, you dont expect women to come running up to you and clamboring all over you, so u shouldnt expect apples to be the god of computers.

I chose MS/WindowsNT as the platform for a web company in ’97 for what MS called Dynamic HTML (ajax)and the $ Bribes from MS. The blue screen hell of updates to all the web and db servers was beyond description.

In contrast I migrated an entire mixed platform company to Apple OS 10.1 through 10.4. With OS-X I learned to embrace every upgrade and software update immediately with virtually no problems.

I watched in awe as each OS-X version installed and ran on all legacy machines eventually that were 8 years old!! AND EACH NEW VERSION RAN FASTER THAN THE PREVIOUS VERSION. There was no problem replacing Macs — just not necessary.

Compare that to the overall experience with Windows: delaying upgrades, crossing fingers if apply updates, not changing what ain’t broke for fear of disaster. A new Windows version? don’t bother upgrading an even 1 yr old. machine — just buy a new computer.

I knew the evangelists would be responding in droves to this.

Me – I felt glad that someone else is writing what I’m feeling – I can’t believe I fell for the “It just works” lines. I have a 17″ MacBook Pro. It has never been willing to turn on properly if any device – even a printer – is plugged in to it.

I’ve had it under six months, and at the moment, it won’t turn on past the grey screen, and the dark apple alternating with the no entry symbol and occasionally a symbol of a folder with a question mark. I’ve let it sit for ages, I’ve called Apple, I’ve tried quite a bit.

Apple said it’s operating system failure or a corrupt file on the operating system. I have to reinstall, losing everything I have on the computer. It might be the hardware, but they won’t explore that option until I’ve erased the whole system and reinstalled.
Apple said they’re closing in a few minutes – 6pm my time – and they all take the weekend off, so no, I won’t be able to get any technical support for several days.

I paid several thousand dollars for this. I had equal problems as a PC owner, for considerably less expense, and less abysmal customer service.

Don’t buy it, don’t buy it, don’t buy it.

‘It just works’?

It just works for a while.

Lisa

I suspect there will be a drove of ‘safe mode, stupid’ messages, so to cut them short, we tried safe mode, but it doesn’t work – still the grey screen.

We have no Apple story on Canada’s west coast. I did try MacStation, which I’m guessing is authorized to carry Mac’s because they treat customers badly also. MacStation says they are always so backed up it’s a week or two before they’ll even look at a computer. Interesting queue for a product that’s marketed as problem-free.