Comments on: Apple Myths

By: My New Year’s Anti-Resolutions for 2010

My New Year’s Anti-Resolutions for 2010 — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:42:51 +0000

[...] already find most Mac vs. PC discussions irritating (they both work, they both have problems, IMHO). But a split like this will inevitably encourage the disturbing trend that splits the world [...]

By: Don

Don — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:45:25 +0000

What he is talking about here has little to do with the fact that he’s had problems – It is that the mac is so confident in their perception of being a system that “just works”, they have completely forgotten the concept of an error message that is meaningful. Additionally, they hide the tools needed to self analyze problems behind layers of prettiness that do not help solve the problem.

Your suggestion to “go to the genius bar (BOOK FIRST!)” is one that I frequently hear from Mac users, and it always gets a chuckle. What if it is 5pm on a Sunday, and you have something due at 10am on Monday? What if *GASP* you don’t live within reach of an apple store (most of the country/world)? The answer in Windows or Linux is to fix it yourself. The Apple answer is, invariably, “hunker down and hope for help” – Alternately, it is “call third-rate phone support”.

By: Why does anyone care about operating systems?

Why does anyone care about operating systems? — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:21:37 +0000

[...] (Windows Vista), might be less ho-hum (Windows 7), supposedly just work (MacOS X — although I disagree), or just sound really cool (Google [...]

By: Ant Allan

Ant Allan — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:04:13 +0000

I have a strong preference for Mac OS X over Windows. Absoulutely, Macs are not infallible, but the foibles and failings are easier to live with…

So far, I’ve transferred stuff between machines (green iMac to Intel iMac, and the latter to MacBook Air) without any trouble… all apps, all downloaded music work fine. (Apart from one app that realised it was running on two machines where I had a licence for only one!)

If you have problems, take your machine to the Genius Bar in an Apple Store. (Book first!) I and others have always found them very helpful.

Although they can’t fix bad error handling in iChat! You’ll need to “Provide iChat Feedback” (in the iChat menu) to address that…

By: Jeffrey Mann

Jeffrey Mann — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:18:30 +0000

I agree. I really am neither a PC nor a Mac. I don’t believe that Windows or Linux is better, but after too many experiences like this, Apple has lost its aura of mystical easiness.

BTW, I think I figured out the camera problem. The diagnostics show that OSX has decided that we don’t have enough bandwidth, even though there is enough to run a webcam just fine on my Windows machine and video works fine on the Mac.
If that is why it doesn’t work, why does iChat tell me that there is no camera on this machine rather than tell me that there is not enough bandwidth to run the camera. Grrr!

By: Brian Prentice

Brian Prentice — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:17:36 +0000

When a Mac works it’s great. But when it doesn’t, well…

Having had some similar experiences on my Mac with bouncing useless application icons, system rebuilds and lost data I know what you’re talking about. But whether that experience was any more painful then the one I went through trying to extract the mountains of spyware that had infested my previous Windows machine is debatable.

I think Apple is less prone to having problems but not impervious. But the underlying problem is industry wide – the minute anything goes wrong the user is jettisoned into a very ugly and very expensive fix cycle. I’d be more than happy to forgo a bunch of new features in upcoming versions of Mac OS X and Windows if they’d put their attention on those issues instead.