evilrob
Active member
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2009
- Messages
- 4,925
OK, I'm glad we can agree on something! We can probably also agree that while the hardware is great, the iTunes software has become a bloated monster, regardless of which operating system you prefer.XIIVVX said:
I have had to work with the design fairies of which you speak - they also tend to be the ones you find in Starbucks wearing turtleneck sweaters and thick rimmed glasses even though they've got 20/20 vision, the ones giving Mac users a bad name, so I can appreciate your ire.XIIVVX said:
When I was Pro-PC was in a similar timeframe - when Apple mice still only had one button, and everything Apple cost several times as much as the PC equivalent.
Nowadays, Apple stuff is still expensive, but not to such an offensive degree in my opinion. Yes, you can buy a much more powerful PC for the same money, but I consider myself a computer user with higher than average expectations and my lowly 2007 2.13ghz Core 2 Duo with a mere 2Gb RAM is more computer than I will ever reasonably need - i.e., unless you're someone like Dal who has extreme computing requirements, I don't think power is as much of a concern as it once was; you can't really buy a computer which doesn't do the things most people want a computer for. Your average punter probably wouldn't know what a Core i7 was if it punched them in the face.
I could probably get by with a netbook, in fact I won a Dell Mini 9 with built-in 3G through Vodafone - but it annoyed the hell out of me with its quirks. I tried putting a stripped down XP on it using nLite, but it still didn't give me the consistent computing experience I enjoy with the Mac so I gave it to my brother.
I think it would be unreasonable to expect that every device coming out of the Apple factory will never fail, in the same way that it would be unreasonable to expect the "best" sportsmen and women to always win. Take the world of tennis for example - even Federer, Sampras, and the Williams brothers had their off days.XIIVVX said:
On that note - when the likes of the Williams brothers consistently win all the tournaments all the time, people don't like it. Apple seem to have had a string of wins over the past few years - and similarly I think that gets on people's nerves.
The key here, for me, is the frequency of the failures, and the consistency of behaviour when they are working; I genuinely believe that failures happen less frequently per 1,000 units with Apple kit than PCs.
Certainly in my experience, the time between "working" and "failed" is much more consistent, not that I've had a "failed" Mac yet - I hardly ever need to reboot my Mac or "turn it off and on again" or reformat and reinstall the OS like I did with my Windows boxes in the past. It's simply performed perfectly day in, day out, for five years - something I've never had with any other computer since I first got my hands on a ZX81 some 25 years ago (when I was 5 - I always got my Dad's old computers when he'd moved onto the next one), followed by a Dragon 32, Commodore 64, and progressing via 16-bit platforms like the Atari ST and Amiga, 8086 with a 5Mb Winchester, 286, 386, 486SX, 486DX, Pentium and so on.
I was an IT guy for a Waste Management company 8-9 years ago - and we did a complete desktop refresh, around 200 units. Got a good deal from a HP/Compaq broker - however, when the units arrived, a proportion of them were DOA, several failed within a few weeks - not the end of the world; that's par for the course when buying in volume. I'm sure you'd get a few duds if you ordered that many Macs as well. The worst thing with these machines, though, was that although they were all the same model, purportedly (same box, same serial number etc), some of them had a slightly different motherboard or graphics card or whatever, such that the machine image I'd ghosted to them all didn't work on a fair few of them and I had to specifically configure the randomers!
My point here being that the flexibility and interchangeability of parts to make "a computer" can also be a double-edged sword. The time wasted fixing the randomers probably outweighed the savings we made by going HP/Compaq - if we'd spent a bit more and got Fujitsu-Siemens machines, who guarantee all the parts will be the same in a batch, it probably would have ended up being more cost effective overall.
By the same token, I don't begrudge the silly amount of money I spent on my Macbook, because based on historical PC purchases I reckon I would have spent more on PC laptops over that same period of time, either because I would have had to replace it at some point over that same timeframe, or the unquantifiable value of my time spent maintaining it to run at its best; something I don't have to do with my Macbook - it always runs at its best. Or at least it did until I installed Lion - but that's fair enough - I've installed 2011's operating system on a 5 year old computer; it now performs slightly less well than it did, but it's still very very good. It performs considerably better than my work-provided 3-year old HP laptop did when they upgraded it to Vista, for example.
Maybe I'm one of the lucky few, but I've never had a dropped call or reception issues whether sat at my desk at work, on the sofa at home, in a car or on a train.XIIVVX said:
I'm assuming it's an Android handset. I wanted to like Android, and I haven't been afraid to try the other platforms like the now defunct WebOS and QNX. I used to put custom patched Windows Mobile builds on my XDA and XDA II from xda-developers.com to get it running at its best.XIIVVX said:
I think maybe because I've spent so much time in the past tinkering with my computers to get it "just right" - I simply can't be arsed any more, and Apple gear, while not perfect in every situation you can imagine, does most things right, most of the time, without any intervention or maintenance by me and that suits me down to the ground!
