Tell me why...

[GalaxiePete]

Ok, This is going to be a long post. Don't go flame happy before you read ALL that I have to say. This is not the reason I signed up for this page, but unfortunately it is going to be my first post.

First a little about me, currently I am the IT Manager for a medium sized corporation. I am responsible for 100+ Windows PCs, about 15 Macs, 10 Linux systems and around 30 CNCs. Obviously some of those systems are servers. In addition I help out a lot of people with thier home systems and consult with my peers on issues. I have been working with computers for over 20 years now. I started out with Apple on an Apple II. I went to college (for engineering) where I got into Macs along with PCs and UNIX systems. I learned desktop publishing (self taught) and ended up the Creative director at a Printing company for a few years. Since college, I have believe UNIX based systems offer superior flexibility, reliability and performance.

Macs fell out of favor with me rather quickly in college - they were clunky and slow considering what you paid for them. I hated the OS (almost as much as MS Windows 3.1). I loved X Windows on the Suns I was working with. BEAUTIFUL in comparison. Then Windows 95 rolled around and IMHO blew away the Mac OS and the current X Windows. Needless to say XP is FAR superior to 95 in reliability and flexability.

During my tenure as a Creative Director, I personally switched to a PC. This was for practical reasons - I did little of the actual grunt work and was responsible for management type stuff that was being done on PCs. However, I quickly realized that virtually everything could be done just as well on a PC. Granted this was almost 10 years ago and some stuff still had to be done on Macs. Well I eventually got to the point I started replacing Macs with PCs. I know some people will call me the anitchrist for that and some of my people did. However, they quickly came to the same conclusions as me. I alway kept a couple Macs around for when they were needed (and one was always less then a year old) - but nobody wanted to use them.

Then comes OS X. To me, this sounds like a dream come true a real OS and on an Apple computer! (I have been experimenting with Linux and BSD for around 7 years now and love the Operating systems and strides they have made.) But wait...Apple found ways to muck it up.

This brings me to my question. Apple controls the hardware. Apple controls the Operating System. Apple controls a lot of software (i line of software products). So why when you are using the apple hardware (and ALL apple hardware) and thier software (and only thier software) can things like updates cause such nightmares????

How many of you have had your updates leave you hanging? There is only one update that has left me hanging on Windows systems since Windows 98 and that is the Windows XP SP2 - a simple "restore" gets you out of that. And to be fair that is like going to a new operating system with all the changes they have made. Let me make this clear - I DESPISE Microsoft. If I thought there was a feasible alternative for a company of our size - we would be on it. Linux is there, but the apporpriate ERP solutions for us are at this time ONLY Microsoft compatible. But back to the question...it feels like every update causes headaches on some of the Macs. I personally take care of the corporations owners systems. 3 Macs. Everytime he runs the updates at least one of them has issues. He has a G4 iMac, G4 iBook and a G5 Desktop. In the last year and a half I have had to intervene in 10 cases that took at least a day to sort out.

This brings me to the lastest incident. iPhoto was acting strange since the last update. Hanging on exit and such. Then over the weekend it quit working period. Well after messing around, it turns out that he had saved a .zip file from an e-mail in his Albums folder. The software was too dumb to ignore that file. I can NOT believe that. That is the POOREST excuse for programming I have seen in a while. That is a reason for file extensions. If it doesn't have the right extension - ignore it. And if don't ignore it and you can't parse it - spit it out.

Which brings me to another point...Disk Maintenance. I used DiskWarrior to clean up his hard drive. I have done this many times in the past, but the question here is - why do I need to go get a 3rd party disk maintenance utility for basic stuff in this day and age? Microsoft fixed this situation with Windows 95 - that is going on 10 years ago. Linux? Never had a problem the built in utilities in a given distribution couldn't handle... M$ even had the sens0e to force a running of the disk repairing utility after an incorrect shutdown.

And while I am ranting - iPods. Myself and 2 friends decided to get the 40GB ones last year. I went through 3 and they went through 5 (3 & 2) before we gave up on them. I'm not kidding. This was in a one month time span and we babied these things. We can't have been the only ones. I picked up an Archos with a video display and have had zero problems they went with Creative models - again zero problems since then.

I love Apple products, they have the best look out there. But IMHO they are not measuring up in performance and reliability. You pay a premium for an Apple - you should get a premium product. So why is quality control at Apple so bad in multiple areas? (Flame away)

[hmurchison]

I agree with a lot of your post. Good news is things should be improving. Bad news is you're probably overworked and underpaid managing that much equipment GP

[BRussell]

Sounds like you've had bad luck. As far as I know, there isn't any systematic evidence to suggest that Macs are less reliable than PCs or iPods are lower quality than other music players. The evidence I've seen suggests it's the opposite.

[iDunno]

Sounds like you have bad feng shui or something. I have never had a prob with System updates... and my iPod is still awesome after a year. I even dropped it two days ago and no probs.

But you are more than welcome to vent.

iDunno

[SQUÅSH]

I believe little or nothing in the post. I'd feel better if you had more than 2 posts on here and didn't complain about just about everything. Have a nice thankgiving Bill Gates :)

[tonton]

Anyone try putting a zip file in the iPhoto albums folder to test if that's true or BS? I seriously doubt it's true and he's just banking on no one trying it.

The reason I think it's not true is that no idiot in their right mind would be putting things in their iPhoto albums folder manually. You just don't need to go there, and there's no reason to do it.

[Kickaha]

I'll play nice. :)

1) .zip file in the iPhoto folder. No idea. Would have to test it. Sounds like a case of PEBCAK though. :)

2) Disk maintenance. The above should never have (and frankly couldn't have) caused this... which makes me suspect that #1 wasn't the problem. Also, Apple does indeed ship disk maintenance tools (Disk Utility), which call the underlying Unix tools you may be familiar with (fsck and such). In fact, fsck *is* called on an improper shutdown. (Not to mention the journaled filesystem.) You're simply misinformed on this.

3) Updates - never had a problem in the going on 7 years I've been using MacOS X (I was a beta tester long before it hit market ;) ). Not one. My wife's iBook had some funkiness with Mail after an update, but Disk Utility solved it nicely - turned out the permissions on a file were incorrect. DU fixes those.

4) iPod. Again, you've had bad luck, I suspect - I still have a *first generation* iPod that was bought right after they came out. I'm just now looking to replace the battery since I'm down below 90 minutes run time. The poor thing is beat to hell, but still going great.

Don't know what to tell you, other than to come hang out and ask questions in the Genius Bar here. There are some helpful folks here.

[Scott]

I work in a hospital that uses Windows computers to control treatment machines for important patient treatments. What a fucking nightmare. The virus updates and security patches fuck up the vendor software. The vendor software was written by crappy windows programmers and hasn't been updated in a while and only runs on NT4. The new computers run too fast for the old software and the old software runs like crap on the old computers. We're getting ready for a huge upgrade that will take about a dozen people working Th(pm)-M during which we can't treat patients.

Perhaps if they had gone with another platform the quality of the software would be higher and the entire process faster and better?


So from what I've seen the whole idea of "Windows is this way and Mac is something less and a problem" doesn't fly with me.

[ZO]

i'd have to go with the "bad luck" line.

I've had my 3rd gen 40gb iPod for more than a year now and never, ever, had a single problem with it (knock on wood). and just to run it in, I've never formatted it and incredibly enough, I still get about 6-7 hours of music out of it despite using it every day since I got it. I've even used it as an exteral HD for a video edit we had to do since the internal HDs werent big enough. Wow, that thing was hot for a few days.

While on OS9 I would run Norton Diskdefrag every month or so... since OSX, I have almsot never used any disk maintainence tools. zero since at least 2 years. I have 3 external HDs, 2 internal and overall dealt with 4 powermacs/ibooks/powerbooks. The only time I format and condition my HDs are when new MacOS X comes out (so, about once a year, now a bit longer)

with every mac I have had, and even those of friends and parents, I have NEVER had a problem with any software updates. Over 6 years (including OS9) that must be several thousand auto updates.

Yes, I have had "permissions" problems (that one just pisses me off, why doesnt it just run that automatically every now and then by default) and there were times I had Colonel Panics in 10.1 and sometimes 10.2 (99% of the time was because of friggen SMB sharing).

But its been about a year since I've seen even one on any Mac I have seen or touched. I hardly remember what it looks like when OSX KPs.

So, sorry to say, I think you just having a bad streak... or you have someone sabotaging your shit.

[danielctull]

I don't have a .zip file to hand, but I just put a .sit file in the iPhoto library and all seems just fine... :???: