Mac threads resemble DU.

Blue Highway ^ | 7/01/09 | Blue Highway

[Blue Highway]

It seems like every time I venture into an Apple thread here on FR, it's similar to venturing over into Democratic Underground territory.

Personal attacks abound especially if you start criticizing Apple products or other Apple users for being naive into thinking Apple is everything their clever marketing department represents it to be.

It seems like the Mac ping list alerts the faithful flock to defend Apple to the death and that is when the claws come out and it starts to get ugly.

[DainBramage]

My G4 quit on me last week when I dropped it from five feet! (a weakness!) Of course I spent the 300 get to the screen and hinge fixed after having to hop over to the Dell.

[WVKayaker]

See my #199. I just hopped over to the G4 iMac until fixed...

Forgot to mention that in addition to the damage fix, Apple also gave me a new keyboard, and trackpad. Also, NO CHARGE. I was also two months past Applecare, but had no previous claims in 3 years.

The only other Apple product I had serviced was a 3rd gen iPod. They sent me a new one. I had dropped it, as well.

I was too lazy to take pics of my desk (it's way too messy, too), but a quick peruse of google images gave me a close second! I have a 24" ViewSonic AND the 20" Apple. Life is good. I sometimes hook up the 42" Vizeo for HULU, etal. TV, Nascar, and FR all together in real time, real life! I carry an iPhone in my pocket...

[DainBramage]

I didnt even think of using Icare. I had bought it but it was out of waranty I assumed. I had never had to use it.

[WVKayaker]

We all know about ASSUME.

I owned Apple stock from 2002- 2007. I sold it and made a bundle. I wish I had bought it back last winter. It is up more than 60% since it's low this year.

[Sudetenland]

Wow, that’a a heck of a system you’ve built. It ought to get the job done :) What kind of cooling did you use? Surely not air...

[Sudetenland]

Huh huh :) Yeah, I prefer to use hard drives to floppy ones...

[Clara Lou]

Thanks for pointing those out.

[ctdonath2]

Um...Post #1 _IS_ an ad-hominem attack. It berates Mac afficianados as “DUmmies” etc. with no basis for the accusation save vague implications of threads where YOU (the one who does _not_ own a Mac and has no experience with Apple customer service nor Apple’s unique design choices) were the one spewing slanderous invective sans facts.

[ctdonath2]

And most people have never had an Apple product fail under warranty.

Just to be fair, I did. Twice.

Once, the MacBook power supply failed. Took it in, handed it to the guy at the Genius Bar, he tried it out, handed me a new power supply, and wished me well.

Once, I blew out iPod headphones*. Took it in, told the greeter the line at the Genius Bar was too long for me to wait, told him I would gladly buy replacement headphones if they were available (they were not sold separately at the time), the greeter blinked, ripped open the nearest box containing an audio product, pulled out the headphones, handed them to me, and wished me well.

THAT is service.
I don't see where Mr. Blue is getting his delusions that the Genius Bar is a bunch of incompetent sociopathic sadists.

Unlike, say, Dell where I had to ship back the same notebook SIX TIMES before I got so fed up that I opened the unit, vaccuumed out the heat sink, and it worked fine afterwards.

(* - had an audio recording of the geologic sound of the Indonesian Christmas Eve Tsunami. Sub-base was incredible. Goodbye headphones.)

[Star Traveler]

You said — Just to be fair, I did. Twice.

—

And I wouldn’t have any doubts to this happening to you and/or a few others...

But, then again, y’all aren’t *most* — are you?

:-)

[... and I think I could say that “a super-majority of people have never had an Apple product fail under warranty... ]

[Star Traveler]

And also you said — THAT is service.

—

You bet! That’s one thing that is worth it’s weight in gold, with Apple and its products. It’s absolutely excellent...

[... any moment, now..., someone is going to come up with “the exception that proves the rule...” :-) ...]

[Mr. Blonde]

It sure does seem like you hear of Apple Retail Stores doing people better than required more than you do them fighting them tooth and nail to do the minimum.

A friend got a plastic Macbook for graduation. It was apparently making some noise so she took it in and they messed with it. After that the noise came back and a dead pixel showed up as well. She took it in again, the Genius helping her looked at it went to the back and gave her the top of the line aluminum Macbook. Totally unnecessary but it is things like that which will convince people any extra cost is worth it to be treated well if something does go wrong.

[Betis70]

I’ve had Macs, Windows, Solaris, Linux, and *BSD systems (at home, work is a different matter). I like my Macs because there are a lot of tools I can get for my field, but need my Windows machine for development work since all of our clients run Windows. Linux is fun for tinkering and I treat those machines like a sandbox.

Of all of them, my Mac hardware has held up the best to abuse. It was worth the $$$ for me. My Windows systems have all been stable, but the OEM hardware has not been great (failed motherboards, power supplies, hard drives). Factoring those replacements over the lifetime would increase the cost of my Windows machines to 1.5x the price of my Macs. YMMV.

I do find it odd that someone with no experience with Macs thinks he knows everything about them. Seems more DU like than anything: speak with a sense of authority on something you know nothing about.

If I had to choose one, I’d keep my Mac and get Bootcamp to run Win XP for work.

[ctdonath2]

Exactly. A recurring theme is “I _need_ Windows for...” - it’s just the momentum of Windows that keeps it going, not the desire to use it. As I plan getting a MacBook, the only hesitation now is the occasional need to run Visual Studio.

And yes, it’s bizzare that the one guy driving multiple threads here is ranting incoherently about awful products & services which he has not owned nor used, and imputing proper descriptions of his behavior upon level-headed responses of “actually, the products and services are marvelous”. I mean really, the guy is spouting hysterical tirades about non-removable batteries (designed to practically outlast the computer) when he won’t even cheaply replace a dead battery on his own notebook - not realizing that he is thereby proving the axiom that what users really want is what they DO with products, not what they SAY they want (in his case, never appropriately replacing something which he insists must be replaceable).

[vox_freedom]

I do find it odd that someone with no experience with Macs thinks he knows everything about them. Seems more DU like than anything: speak with a sense of authority on something you know nothing about.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

>> rabid anti PC mentality they have is disturbing.

I’m not so much disturbed by it, as amused.

Then again, I cut my teeth professionally writing software for the Mac. Up until about ‘93, that was pretty much the only platform I worked on.

Don’t use Macs at all anymore though.

Since the transition from the Apple II to the Macintosh Apple was snake-bit in its CPU choices. Neither the 68000 series nor the PowerPC series ever lived up to its billing in the long run. And Apple committed the folly of getting rid of its premier visionary, Steve Jobs, a couple of years before you left in '93. Full Stop.

Re-enter Steve Jobs, and

1. The OS is transitioned from Apple proprietary to Unix with a proprietary Apple shell while holding its customer/developer base and

2. Apple conceded that it didn't know more than the rest of the industry about CPUs, and adopted the industry standard Intel family. Snow Leopard completes that transition, in that it will support developers in their efforts to exploit modern multicore, 64-bit CPUs and graphics processors - and drops support for the PowerPC.

The upshot is that, from 10.6 Snow Leopard on, a developer knows where he stands with Apple. He knows he'll be dealing with the standard Intel product line. He has the software facilities to tap into the capabilities of the Mac hardware, and he is operating in a Unix/Objective C framework which gives him the software development tools that Apple itself uses, and which doesn't hold back secret features for Apple's exclusive use. I'm just a user, not a developer, so I don't really know - but wouldn't you have thought that you had died and gone to heaven if that had been the context in which you wrote software for the Mac in 1990?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Mac threads which are started to pick a fight within FR resemble DU.

[Keith in Iowa]

>>>I love my Macbook. But that doesn’t mean I hate my PC :)

Amen.

Computers are tools... use the best one that gets the job done. For me, some of those things are on my MacBook... other things are on PCs.

[Nervous Tick]

You have some good points. I occasionally get into the Mac/PC wars just for fun, but I don’t seriously have an issue with either platform. My computer isn’t a style statement or an emblem of my geek-ego, it’s just a tool for surfing FR and downloading pRon. Oops, forget I said that, I mean for getting my job done! :-)

[Nervous Tick]

>> wouldn’t you have thought that you had died and gone to heaven if that had been the context in which you wrote software for the Mac in 1990?

Sorry, I didn’t address your specific question. Truth be told, when I started programming professionally in ‘85, after a couple years into it I ALREADY thought I had “died and gone to heaven” because I was working on 68K macs! They were way cooler than the alternatives back then. I only worked on PowerPC for a couple years — even so, I had a PowerPC NuBus card that plugged into my (68030) Quadra 800!

It wasn’t Apple hardware or software that was responsible for my transition away from Mac. It was the simple realities of the industry segment I serve: EDA, test and measurement software, process control, and the like. Apple never went down this road, and I never left it. That’s really all there is to it.