Why I’m buying another Mac…

I bet you $20 that the folks at the Apple Store give you a backup to use while yours is being fixed. I took my Macbook in for repairs, and they gave me a MacBook Pro to use while mine was being fixed. It even had Logic Pro on it, which was a big sticking point for me because my laptop runs my studio.

If all you guys got together, you could use the money you would spend on your next upgrade of final cut pro and fund open source development of a video editing program that would meet your needs. Put your money where yur bitchin is, if you will Seriously, you have the media reach to put that effort together Robert. Start a fund for it on one of those sites where you can collect money for things and promote it w/ your contacts and see how fast you can get to 50k. Hey Dave Winer and Doc Searls what are your thoughts?

It’s too bad I moved back east from there, I’d have been happy to come down for half a day and help you sort things out on the Macs. One of the things that I respect is that the internals of the OS are a lot more accessible than with windows, so unless it’s hardware, you can fix a lot of things yourself. If you come visit New york, I’d be happy to help you out.

Everytime I walk into a Apple Store there is a long line of people waiting to get their MAC’s fixed…..

Computers are a tool of the devil

It is all in the odds of having an issue with your computer.

No computer is perfect. You are going to have an error rate no matter what. After all, computers are made by humans and we aren’t perfect, yet we build these machines and write the programs for them. There is always going to be a bad hard drive here and there or a bad motherboard or whatever. There is always going to be a software bug of some kind.

In my experience, Macs tend to have less issues then PC’s. Probably some combination of better quality control when selecting the hardware, less variations of hardware to support, one vendor in control of every step, better design decisions for both hardware/software, etc.

In my experience, Macs are more reliable and more likely to “just work” compared to PC’s. But they are still designed by humans and are still used by humans. They still use mechanical parts. Mistakes and flaws can still show up.

Just like any car (or heck, human body), nothing is going to run perfect forever. It is just a question of the odds and when your unlucky number comes up.

So I do think you are a tad unfair on Apple about this. No one claims that Macs are 100% reliable and will never have issues. It is all in the odds. And for most people, they are more reliable then PC’s by far.

Does anyone know why Microsoft hasn’t entered the Final Cut/ Avid market with a professional video editing package of their own?

I get incredibly frustrated when I have problems with my apple stuff too. I think it’s because apple’s prices are higher, so I expect more out of it in EVERY way. Usually, once I’ve calmed down, I realize that I’m paying for the benefits that I get out of using apple products every day that they do function.

The reason why Macs are so much more expensive then a Windows PC. You ave to buy so many just to replace the last one that stopped working.

Good Luck

Being a designer, I am expected to have all things Mac, especially since my “ecosystem” is probably 90% Mac. And years ago I was (I owned a frickin’ Lisa.) But after my Powerbook died, I momentarily switched over to my Windows system for everything fully thinking that I would hate Windows and run back to the Mac. Guess what…. I never returned. I could never find a reason to go back to the Mac. And everything on Windows was 10% to 90% less expensive (or free) with vastly greater selection. It’s amazing what competition does. I learned everything you’re currently going through 5 years ago. There was once a time when creatives had to use a Mac – you simply couldn’t do the same things on Windows. But that is no longer true. I can argue that I can do EVERYTHING that you can do on a Mac and more on Windows. I am humored that the fans of the famed “1984″ commercial have become the audience IN the commercial. Mac/iPod/iPhone buyers are the victims of the greatest hidden monopoly in business history. Remember, cigarettes were once marketed as being good for your health….

Heh, Apple hardware is basically a scam if you ask me.

Good luck Robert.

What symptoms are you getting when you boot you Mac up ? Are you getting the Apple logo with a spinny thing beneath it ? If you are, then I had that problem too. I can let you know what I did to fix it.

Have you tried bookting form the install DVDs (I think you press C when the Mac boots up), and try doing an ‘Archive and Install’.

I’ve had one foot in both worlds since 1984: I have owned nothing but Macs, and my employers have almost always required me to have PCs (except for about 7 years of doing Mac development and a year or so of Linux).

I won’t say the Apple experience has been flawless: I have had disks fail or get corrupted, displays go bad, etc. But I prefer the Apple experience to the Wintel one for several reasons:

- By and large, Apple backs its products. They have replaced batteries, power bricks, iPods, and one iPhone with a minimum of fuss (no receipt? no packaging? no problem).

-Over the long haul, they have lasted and stayed reasonably current. My 1998 and 2001 iMacs are still doing daily duty in my wife’s classroom, currently running Classic apps under OS X 10.4.

- Granting that some expertise is necessary to know how to exploit it, Macs have flexibility that makes diagnosing them much easier. In your case, Robert, I would propose putting your non-booting machine in target disk mode and connect it to another Mac, then see if the disk can be mounted and repaired. I have fixed several non-booting Macs over the years (since about 1993 or earlier) this way, and I know of no comparable capability that has been applied to my dead Wintel machines over the years.

The net of it all is that my 24 years of experience with Macs has been, overall, way more satisfying (or less frustrating) than the same interval using MSDOS & Windows. That is not to say that there haven’t been times I wanted to put my fist through a screen or a keyboard, but a lot fewer times than when sitting at my Dell or HP at work.

The “Apple Brand” promises that the experience will be better, not perfect. It’s advertising; surely a little hyperbole is not unexpected?

Argh. That should say: ‘you can almost certainly use Apple’s…’

Scoble, you fool. You most likely don’t need to buy Final Cut Pro – if you’re shooting with a single standard-def camera then you can use Apple’s sub-$200 Final Cut Express. That would pay, for instance, for the soon-to-be-useless Kindle you just bought.

No offense, mate, but thank God there isn’t actually one of you born every minute.

Aaaargh!! That should say (snarkily), ‘Assuming your production values are what I expect, and your audio needs as limited as they seem…’

I appear to have forgotten, um, how to type and stuff.

It’s a pisser that you’re in this kind of jam but I’m sure if you explain yourself to the guys at the Apple Store they’ll come to some kinda compromise. They may even be able to fix your machine inside a day too – from what you were saying the other day about the ‘restart hell’ it sounds like the OS is just borked on it. The darkened ‘please reboot’ message is basically a fancy coverup for a Kernel Panic. It’s the OS spitting it’s pacifier out. The guys at your Apple Store can likely boot it from an external with Leopard on, suck the info off, flatten and reinstall it and have the data back on the drive in a couple of hours if that’s the case. I have had to do it myself before now on a PowerMac G4 that decided it was gonna sick up it’s lunch following an update way back in the 10.2.x days.

Remember the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – DON’T PANIC!

>> Off to the Apple store I go.
Why don’t you wait for the big sale on Friday!

Yeah, FCP Express 4 is going for $199, the FULL PACKAGE is nice and has extra apps however, but only a real must-have need if doing film work. But very nice that Apple reduced it, now all the iMovie toads can upgrade.

But with Vegas 8 and Premiere CS3, I predict, the FCP juggernaut will start to slow. Still use FCP daily, but Vegas and VASST always seem to win the day (week, month) for me — in terms of workflow. Avid is power but pure hell, even after a few books and a class, it’s still a royal chore, but things it can do, that no one else can touch, just wish not so painful.

soon-to-be-useless Kindle

Well, all the bloggers who are getting them, will create a fan community slash blog, and they will forever talk to themselves, smarting themselves that they are of an elite order that really “gets it”. Scoble gets a ticket to that club, so it becomes not a device to actually use or to hack up, but a device that all the “cool kids” are using, photo op time. It’s real functionality lies in the “networking” potential, easily discarded for the newest shiny thing when the network-effect wears off. Just deconstruct the Scoble slash blogger-nose-level worldviews, easy as pie.

Computers go wrong every day. I don’t see what there is to get your knickers in a twist over.

Computers going wrong every day is one reason I trust my sound recording to a 702T rather than a Mac or PC. Of course, at its heart the 702T is a computer, but a highly specialised one.

People don’t get angry at Microsoft. They get angry at Steve Ballmer being a prick and Bill Gates lobbying for TRIPS. Ray Ozzie …. you can’t polish a turd. Sell the sizzle not the sausage. Microsoft is all out of sizzle in my opinion. Nothing left to sell. I’ve got an old Lotus 1-2-3 disk if you’re interested?

I own a MacBook and had boot problems for awhile. Turned out that my RAM wasn’t seated properly – took ‘em out, plugged ‘em back in and haven’t had a problem since.

Oh, and there’s some good advice here too:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464

Good luck.

So, maybe some directory damage caused this computer to not boot, and will the poster come back and say wether the techs at the store fixed it for him even though he could have done it himself?

Probably not.

Apple makes some fine products, But you can do everything you need for cheaper on a Windows machine.
And if you want to spend two to three grand on a Vista machine, your going to get Dell XPS/Alienware specs.

Not bad at all

“But you can do everything you need for cheaper on a Windows machine.”

Joe, it’s not the fact you can do it that makes people use Macs, it’s HOW you do it. The vast majority of stuff is just more painless on a Mac than a Windows machine. In the long run when I count the number of hours it saves me in swearing and high blood pressure alone it makes the extra price worth it – but then again you do get odd moments of swearing and high blood pressure like Robert’s with a Mac too, but they are far outweighed (at least in my case, I dunno about Scoble ) by how well it all works *most of the time*.