[AUUG-Talk]: Re: Sell me an Apple!

[Greg Black]

[Cc list trimmed to remove lists I'm not entitled to post to.]

On 2006-03-26, David Newall wrote:
> Greg Black said:
>> Agreed that the OS is crap.  So is the hardware.
> 
> That's very interesting.  Apple consider themselves to be hardware
> manufacturers, and see their software as a hook to help sell computers. 
> They are distinguished by being, so the story goes, the only computer
> company who's customers are passionate about their products.  (The story
> is wrong; Microsoft customers are just as passionate, but where Apple's
> customers have love, Microsoft's have hate.)  Most people I've spoken to
> give the impression that the hardware is great to okay, and that it's the
> software that's most fabulous.  'It just works,' is a cry often heard from
> Apple owners.
> 
> Why do you dislike both Apple hardware and software?

Because it's crap, in my experience, and because Apple don't
care about anything except selling me more crap.

To be slightly more specific, applications (both 3rd party,
e.g., Firefox, and Apple-supplied) crash regularly.  And the
crashes sometimes leave the machine wedged so that it requires a
hard reboot to recover.

OS-specific stuff crashes.  Even the shutdown utility can
provoke a panic.

Although it will often wake from sleep (although not always),
this is usually followed immediately by a panic.  If it doesn't
panic straight away, it's common for applications to experience
all sorts of strange errors following the wakeup, eventually
(i.e., after 30 to 45 minutes) leading to a panic.

All the nonsense about Apple having a great GUI are nonsense.
It's probably OK if their way of doing things is what you like,
but it's almost impossible to customise and what customisation
is possible is extremely limited.

Software that just works on real Unix systems is often, maybe
usually, just broken out of the box on OSX.

And the Apple software support just sucks.  You have to pay for
point releases of OSX, and then they both break and also remove
stuff that you previously paid for and which you would now have
to pay for again, on top of the rather steep price of the
so-called "upgrade".  When I went from Panther to Tiger, lots of
stuff I had been used to suddenly stopped working or were just
removed from the system altogether.  Apple's handling of this
really gets up my nose.

And it's dog slow, even with a 1.33GHz G4 and 768 MB of memory.
Considering it's a single-user box that does no real work at
all, it's astonishingly slow.

I was looking for a laptop that would allow me to work when I
was travelling, so all I needed was a working browser, ssh, some
crypto stuff and I'd have been happy.  My Powerbook is more pain
than it's worth.  Therefore, as stated earlier, I'll never waste
my money on Apple gear again.

Cheers, Greg