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Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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 My
first computer, purchased by my parents after nearly a year of begging,
was an Apple II+. That was 1982. I was a Windows user for the next 20
years, but went back to Mac when they switched to Intel chips a couple
of years ago. Since then I’ve bought seven Macs for myself, as well as
at least one of every iPod and both iPhones. A lot of these were test
devices that I’ve passed on to friends and family.
My obvious enthusiasm for Apple products
is fairly evident to readers of this blog. But recently I’ve had a
string of bad apples come my way, so to speak. It’s time for Apple to
stop screwing around and start paying attention to product quality.
I’ll excuse the one hour of battery life I seem to be able to get
out of my iPhone. An arrangement of extra power cords (USB, car, wall)
and external batteries gets me through the day. I’ll also excuse the
fact that iTunes seems hell bent on not syncing applications from my
desktop to my iPhone, and inexplicably removing apps from my phone
without any notice. I love that damn phone, and it will take a lot more
than lost apps and dropped calls to get it out of my hands.
But I don’t have the same blind dedication to other Apple products,
and a string of costly problems has left me more than frustrated.
Mac Mini, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and Macbook, All Failed
I was pretty excited about my Macbook Air, which packs a ton of
hardware into a slim and elegant case. But it was unable to stay
connected to Wifi for more than a minute or so, even on the brand new
Apple Time Capsule router we’re using at the office. I took it into the
Apple store - they kept it for a few days and said nothing was wrong. I
argued with them and they did nothing. And since I waited more than two
weeks after buying it to bring it back in, I couldn’t simply return it.
That $1,800 piece of hardware has now been dismantled for parts for a
project we’re working on here.
A high end black Macbook made it through one meeting before having
some sort of hardware problem that shut it down for good. I still have
a few days left to return it for a refund.
The one year old Mac Mini I was using to drive my living room
television failed a month ago. It turned itself into a brick. Parts of
it are on my coffee table.
My main travel computer, a seven month old Macbook Pro, had a
keyboard failure two weeks ago. Apple repaired it and I’m using it now.
That leaves three other Macs in good working order. One is a Macbook
pro that my dad now uses. The other two are iMacs that have never had
any problems.
But having major issues with four out of seven computers is, um, unexceptable.
MobileMe Has Screwed Up My Work Ecosystem
I have Macs in my main office and my bedroom, as well as my travel
computer. I have spent years getting .Mac, which syncs calendar,
contact and email data across machines and in the cloud, working
properly. It tended to break a lot, but if you kept the OS constantly
up to date and were willing to tinker with it, it was a great way to
keep synced across any number of computers. I didn’t really care which
one I picked up to access email, write a post, etc.
Then came MobileMe and the Apple’s automatic transfer of .Mac
customers over to that ridiculously broken new service. I had a
suspicion it wouldn’t work at first given how touchy .Mac was, and so I
didn’t touch anything on my old computers. But I have never gotten it
working on the new Macs I purchased, and now .Mac has failed on all of
the synced machines. No more calendar access, contacts syncing, etc.
Apple keeps giving customers free time
on the service as a way to apologize for the problems. But that isn’t
good enough. I’m not price sensitive to the $99/year they’re charging
for the service. But I need it to work, and I need it to work right now.
The failed computers could just be a coincidence, although the wifi
problem with the Macbook Air is well documented. The MobileMe debacle,
though, is affecting everyone. Apple shouldn’t have merged the
services, at least old .Mac customers wouldn’t be enraged today. They
need to get their house in order or they risk alienating all these new
customers they’ve added over the last few years. The new buyers aren’t
Apple fanatics and won’t sit quietly as they try to access broken
services via failing hardware.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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You want to know why? Apple makes their stuff in China now. That's why. Well, except MobileMe, but I dunno anything about that service.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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This is totally true. I've definitely noticed that the newer Macs have a ton more hardware problems. I have a 2000 iMac G4 that still runs great, and I haven't had to reinstall the OS or anything. My laptop is a MacBook Pro, which so far I've needed to get my disk drive replaced, my battery replaced (I need to do that), and reinstall OSX & XP about 3x each.
The newer iMacs are total crap. I've used them in classes/school and they have so many problems. Sometimes they make a high-pitched beeping sound when you turn them on. Other times, it took me 10 minutes to turn them on because of a problem with the power button.
iPod quality is a lot worse too. I've gone through 2 iPod nano's. The first one suddenly turned off when I was listening to it and never turned back on. The 2nd one constantly would randomly shut off and delete all of my songs, taking me hours to out them back on. The iPod software has an insane number of glitches too.
I want to buy a MacPro, as I've heard they're pretty reliable. Apple needs to get their shit together though..
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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The HDD died in my Mac mini and needed to be replaced. It was only 9 months old.
Die Zeit ist jetzt. Der Platz ist hier.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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admin wrote
You want to know why? Apple makes their stuff in China now. That's why. Well, except MobileMe, but I dunno anything about that service.
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Where was it before? Do other companies make their products anywhere else? I've heard of some companies with factories in Mexico.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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Cube, while still technically China, a lot of stuff was made in Taiwan before the mainland went all crazy on cutting prices. The problem with mainland China is that they are a lot more corrupt than Taiwan, so a lot of shoddy materials are used.
The first Xbox (Which was built like a tank) was made in Mexico and Poland. The only part known to fail was the DVD drive laser, which was made in China.
The Xbox 360 = Made in China. PS3, on the other hand, was originally made in Japan and is now made in China. And the PS3 is a tank.
See, sometimes it's not the part itself, but the process. For instance, I have a Ford Freestyle that is based on the Ford 500 sedan. About a year after manufacturing, Ford stress tested the Ford 500 and drove it on a test track with bumps and water and what-not for over 100,000 miles. And then the gas tank almost fell off.
Ford conducted an investigation, and found that the straps that held the gas tank had failed. The reason, was because the manufacturer of the straps (A third party parts company) had switched to a lower quality metal that Ford hadn't approved. They thought they could get away with it, and only because Ford stress tested the car a year after initial manufacturing had begun, did they catch it. They then issued a recall.
So, when your hinge breaks on your laptop case, or your paint chips away, etc. That's the result of someone, somewhere, cutting a corner. And in my opinion, China is all about cutting corners everywhere they can. And that's why their stuff always falls apart after solid use. It's good enough to pass inspection, but fails later on down the line.
Eventually China will improve quality, but it'll take a long time to root out corruption. In the meantime, stuff made in China (In general) is shitty.
Chinese people like to buy American cars because they say they are known for good quality. Go figure.
K
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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America still makes cars? Surely, you jest.
Sadly, my joke will probably be true within a few years. Poor GM and the economic downturn... :(
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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yeah i remember lots of mac users were upset that it was leaving the PowerPC arch behind because at the time an iMac was the fastest possible home computer. i remember they mentioned that intel would be a bit wonky. i think the issue is that its not being tested as much by intel and apple as the PPC chips were.
to be honest, i use mobileme and i'm not certain what the problem is. i know there are people out there with issues and mobileme but i seriously don't see them. i use mobileme all the damn time. it pushes data to my iphone at regular intervals, i make backups to it, i have a website with them, i share videos and other files over mobileme too.
but the cause of the problem is very clear, they shouldn't have launched the new mobileme (formerly known as .Mac) service at the same time as the iphone because it just divides resources. jobs has been pissed about it too. i can only hope that apple will learn from this like they have in the past.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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You keep believing the PowerPC made the iMac the fastest possible home PC. Apple stopped using the Power PC because Intel is faster. The Intel Macs are way faster than the Power PC macs. The power PC was getting blown out of the water in terms of speed and performance by the time Apple had starting to make the switch. Apple lied when they said The PPC was faster because as soon as they started using Intel they started talking about how much faster Intel is.
Die Zeit ist jetzt. Der Platz ist hier.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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In regards to the original article . How does it change anything . The guy still wants to lick Job's balls at the end of the day . I rarely seem to understand how mac users manage to convince themselves day after day that it's a good product . Is the high derieved from being pretentiously chic and hip really worth an overexpensive box which promotes with the tag line "You can see you photos now !!".... I got something for Mac users : 
"Everyone is judgemental, just that most are'nt honest about it... "
---------------------------------------------------
"To destroy is to challege man .
To create is to challenge god ."
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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@kolop01
no, i'm basing that on independent benchmarking results between the fastest CPUs of the time. which was the quad core G5, its closest PC rival was an AMD back then. i think it was an opteron or maybe it was an intel xeon with four cores.
@Deus
i think you're forgetting that macs and pc's are not the same thing. there are many many things i wish windows had that the mac has. if they adopted these changes, there is a good chance i'd switch back. i only switched 2 years ago when my school switched and i was open to the idea of leaving windows behind for good.
here are a few good features:
universal zooming - you can just hold control and zoom on anything, anytime
Quick Look - previewing docs that doesn't stall like the "flashlight"
Spotlight - instant search results for the entire computer, address book, email, fonts, external drives, networked drives, etc
Expose
Temporary guest accounts that wipe themselves after logging out
Printer drivers for thousands of printers come bundled on the DVD
no driver issues
built-in services like VNC, SSH, FTP, HTTP
deus, if you simply ignore the mac haters and mac gloaters and be open minded to the facts you'll find there is a big positive difference to macs.
i'll cite Chris Pirillo. he runs a very big windows site, i think he still does a convention and still has a windows newsletter. but he made the switch too. then theres the case of ComputerWorld's editor switching to the mac as well. PC World's declaration that the Macbook Pro is the best laptop for running windows vista. tom's hardware clear breakdown on pricing. i think the general public is starting to become more receptive to the truth and are beginning to see through the many myths now
then you get into the programming side of things like having better frameworks such as Core Data, Core Image, Core Animation, etc which make writing apps much easier. there is of course more coming down the pipe: Open Computing Language or Grand Central are two very important technologies coming in 10.6
i'll admit that the recent surge of apple-products is due in large part to their marketing. however they are clearly marketing a very good product. they aren't tricking people into buying something, all they do is popularize the feature set of macs. the very features that windows lacks.
now look at microsoft's marketing angle for vista. they compare rejection of vista to rejection of a round earth. they have been outed for paying ZDnet bloggers to write good articles about vista and to slam apple. they have also paid for research to be done that "proves" windows is far safer than all other OSs. yet when they do this, they fail to include products like Office or windows scripting or even IE7 as being part of the windows OS yet include Firefox/perl/php/clamAV vulnerabilities as "Linux and mac security problems" despite the fact that they exist on the windows version of the same software as well. not to mention that apple has no input on those other things as they are owned and developed independent groups.
do you see the subtle differences? one is based upon a campaign of fear, uncertainty, doubt, lies and distortions while the other tries to sell to you, basically the same product but tweaked to be more user-focused, with an image of users using the distinctly unique features of the mac to get things done. do you see why mac haters can tend to lie rather than tell the truth? because their entire product is based upon those principals and without them they lack any real facts to prove any of their points and it ends in a thread like this where i'll introduce facts, cite my sources and obey the laws of physics and mac haters will resort to repeating old myths and lies that that even a 9/11 conspiracy theorist would reject as being false.
some good reads on the philosophies on being finding the truth about all things are The Socratic Method by Socrates, The Scientific Method, Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, Aristotelian Ethics by Aristotle especially his treatise called Nicomachean Ethics and if you have the time then check out the broad works of Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes. Also of interest is the realism VS antirealism debates of the 19th and 20th centuries. You'll find that fact is often far more amazing than fiction :) I'm done with this thread but I'm always up to discuss philosophy, ethics and science with anyone at anytime.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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K, most of your arguments are wrong. I'm not going to write a giant Mac vs Windows debate again, but the Apple IDE needs a lot of work. It's based on Objective-C and it pales in comparison to the Windows IDE in many ways. The reason people don't develop for Macs in any serious capacity (especially business) is the weak Apple development environment. Like any programming language, you can do everything with it, but it has many missing features that more modern languages and frameworks incorporate to speed development and reduce error. Which is extremely important when cutting costs. Apple is far, far, far away from catching Microsoft in this regard.
Most of the features you list are in Vista, as well as XP. Only SSH is missing. You can do the CTRL-Wheel to zoom thing in Vista. You have Telnet, FTP, HTTP, etc. You have complete printer support out of the box. When was the last time you used a Windows PC? 95? 98? Not only does Vista have the drivers built in now (As did XP btw) but if it can't find them (Because the printer came out after the release of the DVD) then it fetches the proper ones over the Internet for you automatically.
Anyway, I'm not gonna go on, but really, the problem with these arguments is that people on both sides aren't familiar with the other's product of choice. And instead of trying to argue about it, just accept that you made your choice because you're comfortable with it. Because if we all wanted an OS that did everything, was free, and secure, we'd be running Linux.
But there's a reason we're not.
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Re: Apple Is Flailing Badly At The Edges
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I'm not even annoyed with Macs . I'm pretty open minded to accepting them AS computers . Thats it . It's supposed to help you do your work , or communicate , get you entertained , etc .
With Mac's , the way the marketting campaign and the users talk about it , it's like it does your laundry, fetches your kids from school, cheats with your wife when your not around, etc . I really never get that .
It's not so much as the product . I'm a graphics guy . I know perfectly well why people would use Macs (I'm not interested in your zoom feature though, it's something I'd never think I'd use . Extra toys doesnt not a good computer make.....) .
universal zooming - you can just hold control and zoom on anything, anytime
Quick Look - previewing docs that doesn't stall like the "flashlight"
Spotlight - instant search results for the entire computer, address book, email, fonts, external drives, networked drives, etc
Expose
I have never even used the search feature to find a file unless it was some kind of .dll trojan or something which i had to delete, or when i wanted to do something like a .psd where i wanted to parse through all of those type of files over the computer . What is the deal with all these features people talk about which are hardly usefull for normal computing . Do you need to find your web-browser's program file everytime you start the PC ??
I'm just tired of the fact that ;
1. Everytime I go to digg, I see an arcticle about people in poland crying about not getting iphones and writing letters to steve jobs BEGGING to get them there .
2. There's always an "Ah-ha !!!" arcticle about how much windows is 'teh suck' because it doesnt have that one useless feature compared to the mac .
Lastly, I'd never understand why you'd have to bring it down to some sort of life ethics/sociology/anthropology/law/biology etc. arguement, to prove uninterested and dumb guys like us, that macs are the holy grail of computing . You guys just end up proving me right . The condescending attitude that gives an image that mac-users are fighting a losing battle of truth while windows users are like butt ugly ogres which have been trick by microsoft or something, promised treasures they will never get or something . Your spending so much time defending a soulless product/company whose purpose should be just enhance your life, that it ends up looking like your living your life , for a mac .
I'm happy I have a reason to hate windows everytime I read an article about it . Keeps it real . If someone told me Windows sucks I'd say "Yeah sometimes it does..." . If someone tells you Macs suck.................oops, your late for work.......by 3 hours .
Cheers .
"Everyone is judgemental, just that most are'nt honest about it... "
---------------------------------------------------
"To destroy is to challege man .
To create is to challenge god ."
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NutMan At:11:12 PM
will the show be late this week since you have to add the music in on top of everything else that you normally do?
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Kevin J Baird At:3:51 PM
Well if you like the Rangers, their AHL team "The Hartford Wolf Pack" crushed the Monsters yesterday.
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Master_H At:2:40 PM
Go Rangers
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Lard At:10:49 PM
Only by one point - and Ottawa has more losses.
They're doing worse than the Maple Leafs! That's shameful!
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Kevin J Baird At:10:45 PM
Ottawa is doing better than Colorado though, so don't feel too bad.
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Lard At:10:32 PM
I'm embarassed to be an Ottawa fan. They are sucking hard.
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Kevin J Baird At:10:31 PM
Well cool, but I can't think of a hockey question right now either.
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Lard At:10:29 PM
I watch hockey!
NFL sucks balls!
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Jedihillis At:10:26 PM
I can't wait to hear this episode. Sounds pretty funny.
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