How Do You Spell That?

Of course, this was bait for me. :-)

1.) The beauty of why MacOS does, and has, worked so well is quite the opposite. It's because there is limited hardware for it and that hardware is engineered to much higher specifications than run of the mill crap Compaq consumer PC hardware. Because of that, the OS has a much easier time, rather than having to have craploads of special workarounds for the myriad pieces of buggy hardware that comes out of some random asian warehouse.

2.) Don't blame Apple for a CompUSASerf's attitude. If you were to go over into the Windows section of the store and act like a Mac bigot, you'd get the same snobby attitude from the Windows serf.

Don't think of it as "bait", think of it as "something to think about on a quiet Saturday evening". ;-)

The whole "engineered to higher standard" is a load of bovine-processed organic material. While they have been able to keep their design in-house, the failure rate between Dell and Apple are not that staggeringly different.

So being bored on a Saturday night, I did some digging on failure rates at consumerreports.com. Guess what? Apple came in with a 7% "inoperable failure" rate, Dell was at 9%. Seeing as how the base Apple starts at $900 and the Dell is around $350, guess who is going to get my money? ;-)

And this isn't the first or last time an Apple guy sneered at me. IMHO, working the Apple section at CompUSA must be the most demeaning and unpleasant job in the store (especially if you are on commission). 95% of the people don't want anything to do with you, and you have to deal with the crap from people like me. ;-)

It's not just about "inoperable failure" ... it's also about plain old shoddy implementations of hardware specs, etc., requiring the operating system to work around such things, etc. *That* type of higher standard makes the operating system significantly easier to maintain, since there's far fewer "crap hardware workarounds and hacks" to maintain.

And, again, blaming Apple for the actions of a CompUSA employee is not useful.

And, as an apple guy who wanders into the PC section occasionally, the reception you got from the "apple guy in apple section" is *EXACTLY* the same snotty response Mac folks get from "the PC guy in the PC section".

"Crap hardware hacks"? You mean the development of products by hundreds/thousands of companies in a free market? Yes, that's bad. We should just have one company controlling everything....no wait, that's bad too. ;-)

I'm not blaming Apple for this guys bad experience (well, maybe I am for putting themselves in a losing position); but this was a general observation of the people that try to sell Apple products. Honestly, in five years unless Apple comes to it's senses and ports OS X to the PC, it will be dead. It's trying to build the whole digital music experience which might let things stretch out longer, but right now they are dooming themselve to being a niche player. While they might have the "greatest computers on the planet"; no one is going to know because after a few years they won't exist.

BTW, out of the five computers that I have owned over the past four years, the shoddiest computer I've owned was that eMac. The CD Drive was clunky as hell and the overall design was just bad. Now looking at the Dell that is on the wife's desk (and which cost me a whole $250 brand new), it's rock solid machine which is easy to get into and work on.

Oh man! I hope I'm not becoming an Apple poster boy now! That would not be cool at all. I hate Apple, remember?!?

I'll give my perspective on this...

In the last three weeks I have gone from running Linux on ALL of my machines (including my Thinkpad), to running Windows on my laptop and Linux on my desktops all the way to now using nothing but my PowerBook for pretty much everything.

Why?

Well...I moved away from Linux because it was starting to drive me nuts getting things to work as they should. Even after almost 5 years using nothing but Linux every single day, it was still a pain. I decided that I'd try Windows. That didn't go well either. I put a fresh install of XP Pro on my Thinkpad and half of the stuff that should work didn't. Mainly, I couldn't put it to sleep any longer. Hell, I could do that with Linux on it!

So even though you can buy a Dell box for almost nothing these days, it it no way means that it will work as expected down the road when you need to re-install.

XP Pro on the Thinkpad (which is what it came with too!) was horrible. Scrolling in IE was unusable. VERY clunky. I only lasted 2 days with it before giving up.

I ended up back on a Mac after a 5 year hiatus. I didn't want to go back, but I did. So far I'm really impressed. I have all the UNIX that I need (for the most part) and a nice 'pretty' front end that actually works. Wireless works. USB works. Firewire works. Multiple monitors is a piece of cake.

The moral of my story is that the Mac just worked as I needed it to. No problems. I hate saying that because I hate Apple, however, in this case it is true.

And...my Cinema Display does rock! That combined with the PowerBook is the perfect setup for development!

My first experience with XP Pro was hellish as well. It wouldn't install right, the desktop was strange, etc, etc, etc.

Then I did clean install on the same machine (before was an upgrade). Here's what I've done differently...

#1. IE is never used. It is a kludgey mess. Mozilla Firefox is a screamer, I use it exclusively.

#2. Hard Drive: Original Install was on a fragged 5400 20G, new install was on a 7200 40G. Big friggin difference.

#3. Tweaks. Over the past few weeks, I've been applying various tweaks to tune the machine to what I want it to do. Turned off indexing which seemeed to double the speed right off the bat. Made a few config changes for the memory I have on my new laptop (1G) and enabled a faster shutdown. My normal shutdown time runs around 8 seconds. Startup has been tweaked to make the system usable around 45 seconds (including CMOS).

I think the biggest problem I have with Apple is the same problem I have with GM, Ford, etc. They want me to spend $35G on a new SUV with all the bells and whistles. While those bells and whistles might be handy and life saving, the cost/benefit of those are slim. And for what I use this machine for, it doesn't make sense to buy a machine whose failure rate is 2% less than the rest.

Jason, if you are feeling really brave, send that ThinkPad out here for a week and let me see what I can do with it. When I first got my HP it was pretty slow, but after a few days of playing with it, it screams. Example, playing QuakeII while having a Citrix session with six windows open, along with four windows of Firefox AND iTunes with a song on pause. Never noticed a screen skip, and that's with an AMD chip inside.

As I type this the Thinkpad is being 'restored' from a $40 restore cd that IBM boned me for.

The point was that the idea that the Apple machines do indeed work is true. Not so true with Windows.

Trust me, I'm no fan of Apple, but when it comes down to it, any flavor of Unix (bsd/linux/solaris/etc,etc) is better than Windows.

I've been a Linux guy. I'm still a Linux guy. All of my servers are running Linux. I never have problems with them. But, for a desktop machine, Linux isn't cutting it, and Windows just isn't safe enough for me.

That craploads of special workarounds for the myriad pieces of buggy hardware that comes out of some random asian warehouse is exactly why I love Windows. I can pull three gutted PCs out of three different office dumpsters, combine remaining parts to build one machine, do an OS reinstall, and be up and running. There aren't enough Apples out there for it to be worth my time doing this, and they are too pricey for companies to make them available to me that way.

Besides, I would never risk using a machine whose users admit to being addicted.