firelock

sflocal said:

firelock said:

sflocal said:

#firstworldproblems

This is the part where I say that I am embarrassed to be a part of modern society where people whine and complain that they can't get their computers updated or working for a few hours, and those that write articles claiming it to be a bigger deal than it really is.  People NEVER say anything about the countless days, weeks, or years that something's been working well.  It's only that ONE day, or hours that the twitterverse gets their undies in a wedgie.  It's embarrassing really and those that think the world is falling need to take a step back and contemplate what's really important.  

I guess it's me being born before modern technology took over.  I know tech's not perfect and things go wrong, but damn... some people.

Disclaimer:  After all the complaining yesterday, I decided to upgrade my 2017 MBP that I rarely use just to see how bad it was.  I was fully prepared to experience the same problems as others complained about.  My MBP downloaded BigSur and upgraded it all in under and hour.  I was shocked.  I expected to leave it on the entire day/night while I do my other work.  On top of that, after a few hours of using it - so far - I've had zero issues with my apps, and was pleasantly surprised that my crucial apps (Java-based) worked perfectly.

Go figure.

The "opinion piece"?  Whatever.  People place way too high a value on these kind of articles.  Most folks have the attention-span of a gnat.  Today most will have forgotten about it.  By the weekend... completely forgotten about and now looking forward to their next 15-minute fix.  

Apple will take this event as something they need to work out.  It never ends, and it will happen again.  Nothing is perfect, but funny how some expect that from others knowing what they do could certainly be put under scrutiny as well.  Get over it.

The complaint is not that people couldn't download Big Sur, though that was the case, but that Apple (if this analysis is correct) managed to nuke a lot of Macs when the launched it. My entire department's Mac's were essentially bricked for about an hour and a half and none of us were trying to download the update. Applications would either not launch or launched and worked so slowly as to be unusable. I have two MacBook Pro's and they both became unresponsive at the same instant.

I will say that neither AI's news article from yesterday nor the opinion piece issued today adequately explain what happened, what caused it, how many people were affected, and why people are upset. That is why the comments here are hard to interpret.

90 minutes?  Wow.  There's 525,600 minutes in a year.  Glass half empty kind of person?  Go make a cup of coffee.  

disclaimer:  I'm in IT and I understand outages in our enterprise as well.  We calculated that each hour of downtime at our company costs about $80,000 of lost productivity.  At the same time, I also understand that everyone complains when something doesn't work, but never complements the uptime and countless weeks when everything is running smoothly and without issue.  Think about it.

Technology brings amazing benefits in speed and productivity.  If 90 minutes really burns your backside, maybe you should consider unplugging everything and running your company on paper & pencil and see how efficient that is.  That 90 minutes will suddenly feel like nothing.

People are just a bunch a entitled whiners that either have no idea how things were, or have very short attention spans.

I’m not sure why you are being a jerk, nothing in my post attacked you. Your post actually comes off as a rant that is made more senseless by the fact you try to defend something that should not be defended. You talk about the 90 minutes as if it was some sort of planned outage where we knew ahead of time that our computers would be unusable for a specified short period of time. This was an unexpected event that virtually unplugged thousands of Macs simultaneously without warning, explanation or apology. I’m not actually that upset by the episode but it can’t be brushed off like you have done otherwise we run the risk of it happening again. Apple touts its computers’ reliability, they need to ensure this.

I have two MacBook Pros side by side, one work-issued, one personal, and they both basically seized up at exactly the same time, roughly 2:30 PM CST. I tried rebooting and both systems were running so slowly that I could barely launch apps. About this time I got multiple reports from co-workers that their Macs were unresponsive. I was also on a Zoom call with a vendor who had a Mac and we both had to switch to our iPhones to complete the call. I looked at activity monitor and there were no runaway processes but I noticed that Adobe CC processes were unresponsive. I then checked Downdetector and saw that Adobe CC was having an outage. As soon as the outage was over both of my computers started working normally again, as did my coworker’s Macs.

fastasleep said:

Beats said:

I know everyone wants to poke fun but there has to be some talent here Apple can pick up?

LOL who? Whitman herself even said she wasn't a big fan of "entertainment", whatever that means. Katzenberg modeled the whole thing after his own ridiculous multi-lunch meeting schedule that isn't reflective of any normal person. What evidence do you have that there's anyone in this doomed company worth picking up out of the wreckage?

And the content creators are not tied to the company, either. And they only have two-year exclusivity on what they did produce.

neilm said:

I can well imagine a 23" iMac update. The current 21.5" display is a bit cramped by modern standards, but for home use a 27" iMac rather dominates its space. 23" would be Goldilocks' "just right" for the home, while with narrow bezels it need be no larger that today's 21.5"

I have an old 2012 iMac 27” that I rotated to my wife to use in the part of our kitchen she uses as an office. I didn’t realize how huge it was until we tried making a place for it there.

corrections said:

firelock said:

“ without a functional public health system”

Oh please. I generally like DED articles but this is just a hyperbolic political screed.

The US healthcare system is pretty good for employeed healthy people making over $50k, but that's not representitive of the overall population. If you lose your job or run into a temporary financial situaion, just gettting treatment for COVID can easily return a $70,000 bill, and most Americans don't even have $400 saved up for such events. What we are finding out is that the healthcare available to the poorest can impact the affluent. There is no "public health" system in the US, as millions of its citizens have no insurance at all. That includes many people who work full time. Public health is a system that covers the public, not just people who have employeers paying $300-500/month to cover their medical expenses.

I appreciate you defining your terms. As you are probably aware there a several ways to interpret the phrase “public health care system,” and yours is a fairly narrow definition. The Affordable Care Act provides a wide range of insurance options for even those that are unemployed or make low incomes. There are a variety of layers of federal, state, county, city, and even charitable assistance for healthcare for people who live in poverty. I know this from experience. My wife grew up on food stamps with her parents never having held a meaningful job in their entire lives. Yet, my wife got all her shots, and was able to go to the doctor and even the hospital when necessary. My mother-in-law, who has no income, and again NEVER held any job in her ENTIRE life, goes to the doctor regularly (in fact my wife is driving her to the doctor today), and has had several surgeries, including hip replacement surgery, all at the county public expense with not a dime being requested of her for any of these services. Please don’t tell me that we don’t have a system of public health care in our country. That is a hyperbolic argument and really not worthy even of debate. We have public health care. It’s just factual.

That said, I agree the system is in desperate need of reform.