Twitter reactions to Apple’s OS update

I think its pretty stupid how before the update you were all “I love Apple”, and now its “Screw you”… reinstall tiger! go back to windows! I dont care!!

I have to agree here with scoble, something weird is going on.

If vista fails, usually other people react like: sure vista sucks, everybody knows. Or, microsoft is a bad company, or something similar.

If osx fails you get one of the following reactions from other users:
* don’t blame apple, vista also has failures
* it’s your fault, you’re not doing it right
* it’s not a problem, if you tell us what’s wrong, we’ll help you
* it’s ok for an upgrade to fails, everybody knows you have to reinstall
* don’t complain, because for most people it works (is this any different from vista/xp?)

Why not admit it: apple makes mistakes, just like microsoft. It’s almost like steve jobs is the next saviour, and if you say anything bad about him or apple, it’s blasphemy.

#13, I think the point here is that Apple markets their products as being bullet-proof, and that’s just not true. Not because the products are bad, but because NO computer is 100% trouble-free.

If you use a computer long enough, sooner or later you’re going to have problems. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Mac or Windows. Any Mac user who says they’ve NEVER had a problem is either lying or hasn’t been using a Mac for very long or doing much with it.

And FWIW, I too had problems with the 10.4.11 upgrade. It didn’t “kill” my Mac…but it wasn’t feeling well for 1/2 a day (like Robert, wouldn’t start up afterwards).

#13, I think the point here is that Apple markets their products as being bullet-proof, and that’s just not true. Not because the products are bad, but because NO computer is 100% trouble-free.

If you use a computer long enough, sooner or later you’re going to have problems. Doesn’t matter whether it’s Mac or Windows. Any Mac user who says they’ve NEVER had a problem is either lying or hasn’t been using a Mac for very long or doing much with it.

And FWIW, I too had problems with the 10.4.11 upgrade. It didn’t “kill” my Mac…but it wasn’t feeling well for 1/2 a day (like Robert, wouldn’t start up afterwards).

Since updating to 10.5.1 yesterday, my wireless in my MacBook gains and loses signal (goes from 0 to full signal) in rapid fire succession from time to time. I even get banned from AIM because it says I’m disconnecting and reconnecting too quick.

After I installed 10.4.11 on my iMac, the restart didn’t work (got stuck on a white screen with a spinning circle. I held down the button for 10 seconds to shut it down and again and restarted and it works fine.

#23 – I don’t think I have ever heard apple market themselves as bullet-proof, just ‘better than the competition’, which in my opinion is true. I guess that opinions are subjective though!

> I have to agree here with scoble, something weird is going on.

Then one day you wake up and you realize that Chomsky was right, there really ISN’T that much difference between Democrats and Republicans, or between Coke and Pepsi for that matter.

Here is what Oscar Wilde said about absinthe: “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

When you wake up on that dread morning and you see “things as they really are,” that it doesn’t matter which party gets your vote, that “Wild” Cherry Pepsi tastes like Cherry Coke, that your Mac is really no more reliable than a PC, “that is the most horrible thing in the world.” LOL

It is at that point many people switch from absinthe to Kool-Aid.

> I have to agree here with scoble, something weird is going on.

Then one day you wake up and you realize that Chomsky was right, there really ISN’T that much difference between Democrats and Republicans, or between Coke and Pepsi for that matter.

Here is what Oscar Wilde said about absinthe: “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

When you wake up on that dread morning and you see “things as they really are,” that it doesn’t matter which party gets your vote, that “Wild” Cherry Pepsi tastes like Cherry Coke, that your Mac is really no more reliable than a PC, “that is the most horrible thing in the world.” LOL

It is at that point many people switch from absinthe to Kool-Aid.

@23 “I think the point here is that Apple markets their products as being bullet-proof,”

They do no such thing. If they did they would be hauled in front of the FTC. Apple markets their products as an alternative to Windows and suggest that the user experience will be better and the product easier to use than a WinTel product. They aren’t just marketing against Microsoft, they are marketing against PC’s. NO WHERE in their ads to they specifically say their product will never fail, they are bullet proof and they you will never have hardware problems. They fact that naive people (Scoble) may draw the conclusion that the product will never fail are the same type of people that are convinced the US went to Iraq to retaliate for 9/11.

> Actually, Rosyna’s company, Unsanity, is
> responsible for most software problems on the Mac

Rosnya’s comment reminded me of that Indiana Jones scene where the huge bad guy with the turban comes out and starts whipping around a scimitar…

…and Podesta’s comment reminded me of when Indiana Jones just pulled out his gun and shot him.

@36

Apple’s use of 10-year old BSOD icons to display Windows network computers (yet not using 10-year old System Bomb icons to repersent Macs (and 10 years ago, System Bombs were much more frequent than BSODs)) certainly *implies* that Macs are perfect. Even if it doesn’t imply that (which it does), such an act of sheer hubris makes them a big and justifiable target for a huge amount of bashing whenever anything goes wrong. It’s called, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Apple casts huge boulders, so they’ll be called on not being sinless themselves, and rightly so.

And you simply cannot, with a straight face, maintain that there is no double standard, as was stated by Andrej (post 28, as I write this).

Newbies make the switch (another OS) thinking their days of crashes are over. Disillusion sets in when they discover they need to do a bit of troubleshooting themselves. A bit of effort is all it takes, and ANYTHING can be solved on open source OS/apps (to a lesser extent, MAC OS). I prefer having a trillion developers working on fixes in the netiverse, rather than being exclusively dependent on closed source people (at Apple) to do it. Amsuing. These comments look like a Linux newbie forum where the newbies eventually get ignored until they realsie how silly they were to overlook a simple solution. “Seek or knock, and the solution will find the door itself”;-)

Wow. I wonder if Apple is going to address this, officially…

@10: ‘Disaster’ is a little bit of an overstatement.

@13: After all the shit the fanboys gave him for his first post about problems, he’s definitely allowed to defend himself and provide evidence that he’s not the only one with issues.

My advice: Ubuntu. It’s definitely not made for idiots, but it never claims to be, at least do the 30-day trial, and have it on a separate machine so you can test it out.

(Wow I sound like a fanboy too. Aren’t OS wars fun?)

@16: First of all, your first two paragraphs are not very useful in this context, because in Robert’s original post (http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/caught-in-apple-restart-hell/), he was very descriptive about his problem: he loaded the update, and now his computer won’t start up. The next part of your comment describes how to diagnose his problem. While this is very good, you’re just further proving Robert’s point that Macs are idiot proof. I can’t imagine any of my more technologically knowledgeable friends ever having heard of a kernel panic or the kernel panic log file. And finally, #37′s (Karim) analogy was perfect.

I’m not really sure I understand #39′s (clothier) point, but I think he might be suggesting to switch to Linux as well.

@38 Maybe they do imply. But it appears many are making the mistake of inferring something, based on their advertising, that is not reflective of reality.

I’m not sure you understand the strategy behind advertising. Why in the world would Apple use System Bombs in their own advertising? I don’t ever recall a Microsoft ad using BSOD’s to advertise their products. Not quite sure the point you are trying to make. To reiterate, no where in Apple’s advertising do they state that their products are infallible and users will never have problems.

Heck, Honda used to “imply” that their cars were much more reliable than US built cars. Should Honda owners have been outraged when they had to take their cars in for warranty work or unscheduled repairs?

The reaction by Apple owners when their products are criticized is not really relevant to Scoble’s overall argument that Apple ads state their product never fail.

Karim, we all need to ‘shoot’ Rosyna. He goes all over the Web posting comments trying to mislead people about why they have problems when APE-based software is installed. Would have folks believe their problems are caused by Apple, Microsoft or Mother Nature. It is APE, which Unsanity is the primary proponent of, that is the culprit. Rosyna is too irresponsible to wake up to reality and rewrite Unsanity software not to require APE. If that cannot be done, it is time to start writing programs that are APE-free, period. Like many former Unsanity customers, I have voted with my feet, despite still having valid licenses.

“I’m not sure you understand the strategy behind advertising. Why in the world would Apple use System Bombs in their own advertising? I don’t ever recall a Microsoft ad using BSOD’s to advertise their products.”

MS never used BSODs to “advertise” their product, but then again, they never used Mac System Bomb screens to advertise Windows either. Microsoft doesn’t spend dozens of minutes at their dev conferences trashing Apple. Jobs is about such childishness, but MS isn’t.

The point was that System Bombs happened much more often on Macs 10 years ago than did BSODs on Win9x. Apple’s childish use of the BSOD icon implies otherwise (and a lie by implication is still a lie). And any criticism Apple gets is well deserved by such antics. They bring it on themselves so if you want to blame someone because you think Apple is being criticized unfairly, blame Jobs.

FWIW, and hopefully this helps someone, I’m experiencing the boot-crash problem after installing the 10.4.11 upgrade as well; after tiring of this and booting into single-user-mode to see what was going on, I found the following interesting tidbit repeated frequently in the logs:

“Login.app respawning too fast”

Now this suggests to me (though I freely admit to not developing binaries for Mac OS) that there may be a problem with one of the libraries Login.app is linked against that may have been upgraded (while Login.app was not?). Hopefully, someone more versed with the software architecture of the OSX gui can take this, run with it, and find the fix….

I have “killed my mac” problems on my G4 (1gz)powerbook:
The apps I’m commonly using are: mail 2.1, safari 3.0.4, azureus v3406. I have had
1. the clock freeze on 2 occasions and some of the items disappear from that bar – time connected,and other icons.
2. finder repeatedly crashing trying to look at finder windows. after a restart.
3. some webpage I loaded wiped out the tabs (several opened) so couldn’t clik on the close button for any tab (killed with apple-W)
4. Finder doesn’t show all firewire disks (one occurence)
5. One grey screen
6. Misc safari problems.

Safari has never been very reliable – freezes or dies – but I’ve never had the finder issues before.

10.4.11 put my system in a coma. Blue screen frozen progress bar.
I went through all of the steps, restarting 3x Rebuild desk top zap prams,
The only thing that I could open was the console. I was able to fire wire to my other Computer in target mode and save most of my information and files.
I did a clean install and the upgrade to 10.4.11 again. I have not loaded any of my large programs like adobe suite. I am keeping my system lean. It is operating very sluggishly and freezes and crashes a lot just running Safari or firefox or Thunderbird. It really stinks.

Lots of food for thought here but the funniest comment is Rosnya’s “taking one for the team: we’re used to it” line. Now I’m an Unsanity customer and like their stuff and also had a fully updated version of APE so missed out on the BSOD but forgive me for not buying the martyr position from a company that hides the way they do. No updates or information on 10.5 compatibility, no responses to customer comments/requests unless you get lucky and the freedom to post anywhere and any time without having to face the music is not exactly painful. I’m another person voting with my feet when it comes to their products but have to admit to being totally irked by the company and in the developers.

My co worker had the same experience after updating her mac yesteday.