I swear to G=d, if see that smug Mac dude ever step in front of my car I’m going to run his ass over! I’m 4 months into my MAC experience, here’s what I have to report.
1) Compared to Vista… the mac is just as bad.. worse. The worse part is I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do when it does go down. Which BTW is once a week or so. I’ve had to cold restart the dang thing at least twice a week. This weeks fun, my email stopped sending… I have no idea why, I deleted my accounts and reset them up to NO avail. I can’t send an email through mail. ARFLSKF
2) Supporting software is buggy. I bought Adobe Elements. Matter of fact you could argue that Adobe Elements was one of the main reason I bought the damn machine. So far I have yet to be able to import a picture into Elements. So far all my editing has been.. back on my Vista machine. That’s been pretty aggravating. Ironically the only software that works well is….. microsoft office. Ironic I say that their competitor works better on their machines then they do.
3) Cost- you pay 2X for everything on a mac. Which I sort of justified because I bought the line that it was all going to work the first time. Well, it did work the first time, then it started breaking for some reason and now I’m worse off than I ever was with the Vista laptop.
4) Applecare- this has been the biggest disappointment of all. I paid $100.00 for premium service. Here’s what I got; long waits on the phone, longer calls, suggestions that I bring the machine into a store, and the worse part… 8:00 to 8:00pm hours. Not 24 hours? Are you f’n kidding me? You can’t staff a center in Bangalore with service people?
5) Itunes- Why in the hell is the world so damn enamored with ITunes? It’s a rip off. Napster is a fall better deal, the quality is better, the prices are lower and you have a rental option to fill your MP3 player with out paying per song. ITunes? Bend over ’cause your going to have to do it Apple’s way or no way. Jeez, they’ve become what they used to claim the be the alternative too, they’ve become the Big Bad Company..
In hindsight, I have an overpriced toy that has yet to do a days work. In addition performance has declined over time to the point where the machine isn’t good for much as it is. I’ll wind up taking into the store and getting it fixed and we’ll be back up I’m sure.. but the bottom line is.. it’s not even close to the PC. It’s about the same from a stability standpoint, only I paid twice as much for it.
Hmm….I was pondering an Apple for a laptop for myself for some coding. You’re a cold slap in the face compared to the normally Mac-centric folks I know.
The sad thing..I bought into the cult, I wanted to like it… To be fair my kids think it’s the bomb, but all they’re doing is screwing around with ITunes and Page.
I bought into the cult over 20 years ago with my Apple IIe. That bad boy had 64 (count em) 64 k of memory…the cool green screen and a dot matrix printer. I was the biggest nerd on my block.
The sad thing is that my parents still have that computer with its SUV sized floppy disk drives…
I’m a PC girl, and so many people swear by Mac, but I don’t see myself changing. Especially married to my husband…
I am totally frustrated with ITunes! I actually bought and downloaded an MP3 version of a CD off Amazon the other day which might be the way I go now. I only have an MP3 player, so we have to burn [itunes] them to a CD and rip them back as MP3 files or something (Aaron does it) and it takes forever. Yes, talk about doing it their way only…bugs the heck out of me.
People are always telling me to buy into Apple for the graphics side of things and now I know why I don’t.
)
Got rid of Vista as I find XP just as stable and less power hungry which when your running CS3 is pretty vital.
The other thing is, do I really want to have to re-learn everything? My friends say I can always run compatible software on one… what is the point of that?
Just an old stick in the mud… I’ll stay with what I know, especially after reading your comments.
I have had a Mac since 2005. I am not in love with OS X either and I’m a Linux guy. I figured it was going to be like Linux with a pretty GUI and I found it’s more like a pretty GUI that I haven’t a f#$king clue what’s going on underneath.
Yes, that’s the idea of Mac and no, I don’t like it.
For web surfing and burning CDs it’s fine. For anything else I just don’t care for it. While I *love* iTunes and will be getting an iPhone in October (because it’s the best mobile device available right now, not because I want to be a fanboi) I don’t see myself buying another Mac.
Couldn’t disagree with you more. Love my MacBook Pro, love the operating system, rarely crashes. Life is good in my Mac world. Plan to NEVER buy a PC again if at all possible. On our older iBook we’ve had a couple issues with boards, but otherwise it’s holding up even after 3.5 years.
And, seriously, get a gmail account and do your email that way. Who actually uses the mail program on their computer’s hard drive anymore?
I want to love the thing, I want to want to buy a macbook pro… it’s the “cool” thing to do. But.. Rental music on napster is great, and now I’ve learned that my two top productivity software packages, Visio and Project have not yet come out in Mac form.
I’m also still using Corel’s photo software, with great results BTW, on the PC because I still can’t get Elements to work correctly.
I use GMail for archival of e-mail (I have every single email I was sent since I started with the service on 6/22/04) but I still use a mail program on my Linux machine because, well, I’m a geek and I host my own SMTP server.
Aha! So the Mac does crash, huh? My experience with Vista is not good…so am still undecided what I should buy when I upgrade my XP-based home computer.
I don’t want to learn new systems and procedures either, so I’ll stick with Macs as I have for the past 22 years. (My first computer was a Tandy with a cassette tape recorder as memory.)
My experience with help at Apple Stores (Southdale is less crowded) has been great. With 8 family Macs in the past 10 years (5 still in use), we’ve only had to go to the Apple Store three times and send laptops in for service twice (the older ones).
Can’t you run Visio, etc. on the Mac using Windows? I thought that was a big attraction of System 10.5 for some people.
Maybe we should meet at Cafe Wren some Sunday morning and consult, but it sounds like you’re already ahead of me with your expertise in Corel, etc.
Wow! Amazing to me what you get comments on, and what you don’t Great conversation. I wonder of Apple keep track of blogs and postings about their products.
Here’s my summary. Got back from the lake this weekend. Uploaded some pictures. System froze up while I was editing them.. Great.
Still have no email. Kevin,. While I do use the web version of GMail and Yahoo, you give up a lot of functionality from your email client.
Apple Care is terrible. No luck using them.
Good news is when it’s working it is fast and efficient and has a great interface. I’d love to use it for photos, but I haven’t been able to get photoshop to work.
I haven’t had a machine freeze up since I was using System 7.6.
Does the machine freeze up or is it just the software? Have you tried using “Force Quit…” in the Apple menu (top left)? That will get you out of a frozen application without restarting the machine. Doesn’t solve the software problem, but resolves the freeze.
From Help: [Choose Apple menu > Force Quit, select the application in the list, and click Force Quit.
or
Hold down the Command and Option keys and press Esc. Then select the application in the list and click Force Quit.
or
Hold down the Option key and press the application icon in the Dock.]
If the machine is freezing up, then there’s a bigger problem. All System 10 updates installed? (See “Software update” in the “System Preferences” in the Dock.)
If I had the problem, I’d go online and make an appointment at the Genius Bar at either Apple Store and head up. The people there have been able to diagnose and solve problems on the spot (except for one faulty motherboard).
Southdale store
Mall O’America store
If you’ve had it with Apple Corp., try First Tech, 2640 Hennepin in Uptown. They’re less likely to do on the spot diagnosis and more likely to send the machine off for service, but it’s usually a 3-4 day turnaround.
Good luck.
Blake
I have 5 Macs in my home, all run just fine. Obviously you’re having some problems, and perhaps the particular unit you have has some hardware problems – sounds like it could be bad memory. Apple is not immune to faulty hardware, any more than any other company is. To assume all of this is because the operating system is poor is rather unrealistic, but fairly typical of recent Windows switchers; since the Windows OSes are so poor, they tend to get the blame for everything.
I have used both PC’s and Mac’s for over 20 years – there is no question: Mac is much better. My firm used to spend 17%-25% of our time solving software issues when we had new, top of the line Dells (just before VISTA). We switched to iMac’s and our tech problem time is down to 1%. You may have a lemon – happens. Read Gates’ emails – that’s all you need to know about Windows. On MSNBC recently, three hosts of Morning Joe admitted that they use Mac’s and one, Joe, said he just put a six-month PC up on ebay for sale because the thing was worthless. That sums up my experience with worthless MicroSoft. There is no way a UNIX based system like MAC is going to be as “quirky” as any Windows based system.
I am so sick of smug mac dude and ads on NYTimes. I have both ibook and PC. Ibook crashes plenty — towit — the spinning rainbow coil.