"I’ve been struggling with my baby, a mid-2010 27″ iMac for months now. She’s been unstable for better than a year now, and it keeps getting worse. After a few minutes, or hours the screen gets corrupted. Little discolored squares appear and flicker and dance, eventually she hard locks. I have been meaning to take her to Apple but honestly… dragging an iMac through South Coast Plaza to the Apple store is a fucking miserable proposition, so I’ve been putting it off."
Your fault.
My daily machine is a mid-2011 MacBook Air and it works like a dream.
My old machine was a late-2007 MacBook Pro. It's logic board started acting up about a year after I bought it. I didn't buy AppleCare. Apple fixed it out of warranty at no cost to me.
Take it in. Apple will most likely fix it. Most likely at no cost to you. The machine has been acting up for a year. You chose to write a whiny blog post rather than take the machine in. That's your fault.
Dude obviously has graphics card issues. Refuses to take it in to be serviced. Acts all surprised when an OS update includes revisions to the graphics drivers, which caused the bad behavior to worsen. Decides the right course of action is to pen an internet screed against Apple because, well, I have no idea.
The funniest part is, NVidia and ATI produce the graphics drivers, so if he wants to be mad at someone, he should be mad at them.
Thank you for being the sane one here. This "engineer" didn't even understand that Apple doesn't write the drivers and "BIOS" for the card; how can I take his rant seriously? Not to mention he started it with "my computer has been acting up for the last year but, y'know, who has the time to take it in? You'll never guess what happened... it got WORSE!!" Feign surprise.
Welcome to hacker news. I bet if I write up some fake article about "Why I left [popular company], and why you shouldn't" I'll get in the top list in no time.
Articles like this one are popular as well. Just write some nonsensical nostalgic story about some sort of computer or digital device, whining about how the company who built it has sold its soul and you are golden as far as HN kudos are concerned.
The reason people like this type of article is probably because, 'back then' was when they knew very little about computers. Now, when you reach a certain level of experience and knowledge, that magically looking Mac will suddenly be 'just a computer'. People don't want to go back to the olden days here you'd type commands into your Commadore 64, but they want to go back to that naive state of mind where when your computer did want you wanted it to, it felt like magic.
I hate to break it to you, but Apple is very focused on increasing product turnover. Every other PC and laptop vendor is going through rough times because the obsolescence curve on Windows PC's has gotten so slow to fall off. A five year old PC can run Win8 (or Linux) pretty fine actually, so sales are in the scuppers.
Would you want to install Mountain Lion on a five-year old Mac? Hell no!
Apple saw that hardware was starting to last longer and took steps. Part of their solution was to try to innovate. Retina screens, multi-touch trackpads and an increased focus on gestures to justify their use over mice, etc.. Another part was to drive costs, and prices, down. Besides placing price pressure on the competition, occupying a lower price-bracket means people are more likely to upgrade more often rather than trying to nurse their old hardware along for as long as possible. This is the good. The other parts of their attack on long obsolescence cycles are not so good.
All traces of easy upgradeability have left Apple's product line. You now need special tools to get into pretty much any Apple laptop, and they use propriety connectors for everything. Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not gonna happen. Yes, you can order Apple compatible parts and tools online, but this is not by Apple's design. They'd probably sue those guys into oblivion if they were really doing a lot of business.
Apple laptops feel great in the hand, as if they're built to last generations, but they're actually horribly delicate in some respects. The Air can be bricked by a mere drop of liquid in the wrong spot (this actually happened to me. One drop. I'm not kidding.). The proprietary screws and integrated battery mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and then clean things up yourself. It's a horrible feeling watching your laptop fry itself knowing it could have been saved if it had been designed with a removeable battery. You'll get no sympathy from Apple either. Their warranty does not cover spill-damage. When this happened to me, the repair bill was literally larger than what I paid for my air in the first place! Subtle hint?
Software glitches and poor support for older hardware are only the latest in a long sequence of Apple's moves to keep you buying new hardware. Have the geeks looked at your obsolete macbook, tsk'd, and subtly hinted that while you could continue suffering with that old beast, a new laptop would be very cheap and work much better!
Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as Linux or Windows users.
I would actually agree to sign a contract the bound me to upgrade my Apple hardware every 1.5 years if it would guarantee they stop ruining Mac OS X. My problem isn't so much the fact I have to replace these things so often, its that its not even that great day 1 anymore. With the exception of AirPlay perhaps, just about every major facet of OS X has gotten so progressively worse for my workflow: Safari (bogs my computer down no matter how much ram I have), dual display support (a joke since Lion), Messages (buggiest piece of software I've ever used in my life, by a long shot), iTunes (same as Safari), etc etc etc
Edit: I'd like to point out one other thing. Before anyone chimes in with how Windows or Linux or other PC makers are worse, I completely agree with you. My position is that while Mac OS X may still be the "best", it has been a long time since it has been "good". I find little consolation in the fact that it is not "as broken" as everything else, nor do I think that's anything to be particularly proud of. Especially with the amount of money I've given them.
They're counting on the fact that for most users Apple products and OS X are much better than alternatives today. So they are theorizing that people will put up with this kind of strategy. In a classic example for the pattern, this is how they are opening themselves up for attack. I wish someone would genuinely rise up to the challenge, if for nothing else, to force Apple to once again be nicer to its customers.
It's like you think the other PC makers are any better. Not to defend Apple, but this is an industry malaise, and it's been going on for a lot longer than you think. Is it right that they do it? No. Of course not. That said, my 2007 iMac is still perfectly serviceable. It won't receive the next OS X update, but by then it'll be at least 6 years old. I doubt the components would cope - much like my 2006 HP Compaq nc6320 (catchy name) ran Windows 7 well enough but won't run Windows 8 and struggles with most of the recent Linux distributions. There is nothing wrong with feeling let down and putting your money elsewhere, as a consumer that is your right. I'd argue that your reasoning in this instance is flawed.
>Would you want to install Mountain Lion on a five-year old Mac? Hell no!
Why not? I have, works perfectly...
> Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as Linux or Windows users.
I disagree. And the strong resale value of their products testify to this.
I have Mountain Lion on early 2008 MBP, and it works really well.
What's funny any problems that I had with this computer (Wifi port permanently turning off), started with one of the Leopard upgrades, it was just fixed once when I upgraded to Mountain Lion (what a nice surprise) but it wasn't long, issue got back with one of the first ML updates.
Otherwise machine works really well, so it's not necessarily true that installing new OS on old hardware trashes it.
The proprietary screws and integrated battery mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and then clean things up yourself.
You can buy a pentalobe screwdriver for $10 from iFixit or $2 from eBay. You can also buy third party batteries off eBay.
There's a fair bit of research suggesting that we unconsciously value things in proportion to what we pay for them. Since Linux is free, it's a lot easier to be unsentimental about your Linux installation, even if that's not wholly rational (eg it represents a larger investment of time or expertise).
I especially like how he took the latest and greatest version of raid tools, compiled it by hand, and was surprised that something broke. He doesn't say it, but could it just possible be that it was a alpha build? a non-long term release?
There are reason why debian takes painful months to create releases. They don't just say "ooo, this Friday, lets just pull what ever the git repository has and use that". Windows has also gone down this road. When windows 8 was released, the software was actually a half-year old since beta. if ones is using beta windows 8 and its raid had broken down, would one blame windows or one self?
> Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it.
He even mentions Windows 8 as a more viable option. WTH?
As someone who actually uses Linux on the desktop I have to very much disagree. I install it. It works. Every time.
Ofcourse he came from Gentoo Linux which has been rideculed internet-wide time and time again for their incessant need to über-optimize ever single little thing way beyond pointlessness.
His error in is generalizing this onto the rest of the Linux-world, and guess what? That's just so extremely wrong and not even close to a normal user these days. I haven't even bothered compiling my own "optimized" kernel the last 5 years. Shocking! I know!
This guy is a hardcore Linux geek converted into hardcore Mac-fanboy (polar opposite), sold on the "it just works" idea, because things didn't use to just work in the world of Linux.
The transition must have been wonderfully liberating. But now he finds that his newfound hero has abondoned him and that it was not the saviour he had hoped for and he is lost.
Had he only known he could return to his roots and find everything he wanted right there.
"and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it."
Yeah, right. Say that to my many linux-using friends who can't write a simple "hello world" program to save their lives. Despite "[helping] found Gentoo Linux", the author comes off as a moron when he makes such comments about "Linux", whatever the heck it means here.
Gentoo was the first distro I used, hell, I even did a stage 1 install multiple times, and I understand his perspective perfectly. "Ain't nobody got time for that" indeed.
I'm a happy Ubuntu user now (right now, actually). I hope he gives Ubuntu a try sometime; it's leaps and bounds more reliable and tinker-free than Gentoo ever was.
This article is just plain stupid. Apple's service isn't what it once was, their hardware is lower quality now, blah blah blah...we all know that. Have you been living under a rock for the past 3 years?
"and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it."
You kidding me? For the vast majority of OSS development and use, linux is by far the easiest solution. People (including me) use linux because they DON'T want to fuck around with shoe-horning software into running on a Mac or Windows. It's just the simplest solution for using and developing open source software. The above quotation may have been true about 6 years ago, but it sure as hell isn't true now.
Agreed, as some one who has extensive admin and dev knowledge in OS X/ Win / Linux I find Linux to be the easiest to manage and install in a desktop environment.
> The exact moment I quit Linux was when an emerge pulled the latest raid-tools and broke my raid array.
Yeah, that's Gentoo. Such is life when you're running locally-compiled binaries that, depending on your USE flags, have been compiled with a combination of settings that nobody in the whole world has ever tested before.
I'm running Ubuntu Precise right now, and can quite honestly say that I have not done a single system maintenance task in the six months since I installed it and set it up. It just works. Granted, I'm not doing anything too fancy with it, just basic software engineering.
Yeah. I hate to sound snarky, but a Gentoo user swearing off desktop linux for good is exactly why we shouldn't be using Linux as a brand name. Ubuntu and Gentoo are miles apart in terms of how well tested they are on the desktop, and lumping them both under the Linux brand leads to this sort of confusion.
Why is it that Apple users are so damn opinionated ?
Jeez, just use what works for you.
Guess what ? I use a Windows Desktop and really like it. Its fast, i can built it myself and works with everything. My web development is done on an ubuntu vm in the cloud so i dont care where my tools run.
Id probably run Linux but as i do some game programming and my tools arent availabe there, i cant.
I also own a Macbook Air, i really like the hardware and battery life. Its a really solid mobile device. I dont like OSX too much but it runs my tools so i dont care. As PC laptop makers have catched up alot in the past 2-3 years id probably buy an ultrabook next as there are more choices and they are a bit cheaper.
So what ? No hardware/software is perfect, just use what works for you.
Most Apple users actually aren't that opinionated - it's just that the opinionated Apple users are more vocal than the Windows crowd. I'd say the Linux crowd are more opinionated than Apple users.
My experiences with Apple hardware in the past 7 years do not mirror this.
In total, I have seen three serious problems with mine and my families computers: 1) Failed hard drives 2) RAM that went bad 3) A clusterfuck of problems on a 17" MBP pre-unibody (Apple eventualy got it working, but it's on its last legs in general now because the owner refuses to install patches).
This is across, I wanna say... approximately 20 Apple devices ranging from phones to iMacs.
They're not perfect, but compared to the amount of problems from when everyone I knew had Windows PCs, I take a lot fewer support calls.
I've been running the same install of Ubuntu since 2007 with 0 issues. I've replaced the main hard drive doing a dd to migrate, swapped the entire MB/CPU/RAM and Video card, booted right up no issues. I run a raid 5 mdadm setup, with 0 issues took 5min to setup the first time been working since. Upgrading to the latest mainstream releases and package updates automatically along the way.
I get the anti Linux sentiment I use to use Gentoo before Ubuntu/Debian became so viable and it was/is painful to say the least. I'm not going to say I always agree with everything Canonical does with Ubuntu but I could make the same argument for OSX and Ubuntu has been amazingly stable.
So to anyone out there on the fence with OSX and fearing Windows, Linux is so much better these days. Approaching the ease of OSX.
Didn't read your rant since it was impossible for my human eyes. I may bill (!) you for the temporary loss of productivity. Your BG and color scheme are horrible, I would rather blend and drink my left foot than read your blog again.
This guy writes about operating systems the way I used to when I was 12. There is perhaps a valid point (I don't know, I don't use a Mac) hidden in terrible writing and fanboy opinions.
My 2008 Macbook really works like a charm, always has, always does. That was my second Mac after I tried them in the 90s (and hated it). I was very happy so in 2010 I bought, for a very large wad of cash, a MBP with an i7. Nothing but problems; problems which don't appear when you go into the store except the lousy battery life which they said is because I run too heavy software (which I don't mostly and the 2008 had/has no issues with it).
The magsafe internal part of that MBP is also of much lower quality; one of the pins 'disappeared' and Apple replaced the magsafe and the external charger. Now the same pin disappeared but I'm out of warranty and they want E600 to repair it.
There is a prevailing assumption that this problem is "caused" by bad software. This might be the case, but bad hardware could also be part of this!
A lot of modern hardware has programmable parameters, "core voltages", PLL parameters that control running frequencies and the timings for DMA / memory access state machines.
Who's fault is it if the hardware vendor says use X, Y and Z for these parameters. And they include the same parameters in the software they supply and....
What if some %'age of the hardware doesn't actually produce the timings the configuration parameters specify, or does "really bad things"?
In reading the "source" article, there is a pointer to a discussions.apple.com thread. The "fix", if you go and read the thread, is on page 21 from Andrew Humphreys. What his solution does is change the timings and clock speeds for low power and idle modes of the GPU. Reading between the lines, the low power / clock speed settings don't work and will cause corruption. His changes are derrived from people having problems running Windows 7. The same changes seem to help people running OS X.
Perhaps someone from the Linux community will be willing to force the ATI GPU cards in question into low power / performance modes and see if corruption occurs.
I've no knowledge of what the parameters Andrew is overriding actually do, but for a portable platform "faster" almost always results in higher power usage, heat and therefore shorter battery life.
This might not be such an issue for desktops, if you can tolerate the noise of increased cooling.
Getting pragmatic about this, how could you design a Q/A test for this? Do you really afford to wait X number of minutes before / after each test to make sure the GPU is cold enough to go into low power mode? What if you decide to use hardware that can cool the GPU faster so you could get through all the tests -- doesn't that make the tests invalid as you are no longer using HW customers will get?
As a final note, there might be evidence that some graphics drivers were updated ~1 week before 10.8.3 was shipped. The evidence is in /System/Library/Extensions/
>I have been meaning to take her to Apple but honestly… dragging an iMac through South Coast Plaza to the Apple store is a fucking miserable proposition, so I’ve been putting it off.
I can't agree. Ihad the same reaction, but as I read through the story it became clear that this was a simple driver/software problem that could (and should) have been patched with a nightly update. You shouldn't need to go carting a large and expensive piece of hardware into the store in these days of high-speed internet service.
On an unrelated note, tiny gray text on black makes it really hard to switch back to HN, so I can't blame you for not making it to the end. Ow.
Why is that a problem, beyond a desktop being heavy? I don't see any Dell/HP/Samsung/Lenovo/etc stores around for him to drag a pc desktop to. If there happens to be a Microsoft store around, he'll meet nice people but not get much help.
[+] [-] pkaler|13 years ago|reply
Your fault.
My daily machine is a mid-2011 MacBook Air and it works like a dream.
My old machine was a late-2007 MacBook Pro. It's logic board started acting up about a year after I bought it. I didn't buy AppleCare. Apple fixed it out of warranty at no cost to me.
Take it in. Apple will most likely fix it. Most likely at no cost to you. The machine has been acting up for a year. You chose to write a whiny blog post rather than take the machine in. That's your fault.
[+] [-] eridius|13 years ago|reply
Dude obviously has graphics card issues. Refuses to take it in to be serviced. Acts all surprised when an OS update includes revisions to the graphics drivers, which caused the bad behavior to worsen. Decides the right course of action is to pen an internet screed against Apple because, well, I have no idea.
The funniest part is, NVidia and ATI produce the graphics drivers, so if he wants to be mad at someone, he should be mad at them.
[+] [-] smith7018|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Margh|13 years ago|reply
not exactly the intended behaviour of driver updates
[+] [-] mosselman|13 years ago|reply
Articles like this one are popular as well. Just write some nonsensical nostalgic story about some sort of computer or digital device, whining about how the company who built it has sold its soul and you are golden as far as HN kudos are concerned.
The reason people like this type of article is probably because, 'back then' was when they knew very little about computers. Now, when you reach a certain level of experience and knowledge, that magically looking Mac will suddenly be 'just a computer'. People don't want to go back to the olden days here you'd type commands into your Commadore 64, but they want to go back to that naive state of mind where when your computer did want you wanted it to, it felt like magic.
[+] [-] beloch|13 years ago|reply
Would you want to install Mountain Lion on a five-year old Mac? Hell no!
Apple saw that hardware was starting to last longer and took steps. Part of their solution was to try to innovate. Retina screens, multi-touch trackpads and an increased focus on gestures to justify their use over mice, etc.. Another part was to drive costs, and prices, down. Besides placing price pressure on the competition, occupying a lower price-bracket means people are more likely to upgrade more often rather than trying to nurse their old hardware along for as long as possible. This is the good. The other parts of their attack on long obsolescence cycles are not so good.
All traces of easy upgradeability have left Apple's product line. You now need special tools to get into pretty much any Apple laptop, and they use propriety connectors for everything. Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not gonna happen. Yes, you can order Apple compatible parts and tools online, but this is not by Apple's design. They'd probably sue those guys into oblivion if they were really doing a lot of business.
Apple laptops feel great in the hand, as if they're built to last generations, but they're actually horribly delicate in some respects. The Air can be bricked by a mere drop of liquid in the wrong spot (this actually happened to me. One drop. I'm not kidding.). The proprietary screws and integrated battery mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and then clean things up yourself. It's a horrible feeling watching your laptop fry itself knowing it could have been saved if it had been designed with a removeable battery. You'll get no sympathy from Apple either. Their warranty does not cover spill-damage. When this happened to me, the repair bill was literally larger than what I paid for my air in the first place! Subtle hint?
Software glitches and poor support for older hardware are only the latest in a long sequence of Apple's moves to keep you buying new hardware. Have the geeks looked at your obsolete macbook, tsk'd, and subtly hinted that while you could continue suffering with that old beast, a new laptop would be very cheap and work much better!
Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as Linux or Windows users.
[+] [-] tolmasky|13 years ago|reply
Edit: I'd like to point out one other thing. Before anyone chimes in with how Windows or Linux or other PC makers are worse, I completely agree with you. My position is that while Mac OS X may still be the "best", it has been a long time since it has been "good". I find little consolation in the fact that it is not "as broken" as everything else, nor do I think that's anything to be particularly proud of. Especially with the amount of money I've given them.
[+] [-] neotek|13 years ago|reply
I'd like to know more about this.
[+] [-] ozataman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbuk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlingx|13 years ago|reply
Why not? I have, works perfectly...
> Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as Linux or Windows users.
I disagree. And the strong resale value of their products testify to this.
[+] [-] alex_doom|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seivan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] medikoo|13 years ago|reply
What's funny any problems that I had with this computer (Wifi port permanently turning off), started with one of the Leopard upgrades, it was just fixed once when I upgraded to Mountain Lion (what a nice surprise) but it wasn't long, issue got back with one of the first ML updates.
Otherwise machine works really well, so it's not necessarily true that installing new OS on old hardware trashes it.
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2012
You can buy a pentalobe screwdriver for $10 from iFixit or $2 from eBay. You can also buy third party batteries off eBay.[+] [-] schmidtty|13 years ago|reply
It is actually OS X.
[+] [-] charonn0|13 years ago|reply
> When a tool has served me well and needs to be taken care of, I feel I owe it that kindness for all its done for me.
and then, when he wants to bash Linux:
> A computer is a tool, that’s all. When it ceases to work reliably we have to move on.
Why the double standard?
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|13 years ago|reply
There are reason why debian takes painful months to create releases. They don't just say "ooo, this Friday, lets just pull what ever the git repository has and use that". Windows has also gone down this road. When windows 8 was released, the software was actually a half-year old since beta. if ones is using beta windows 8 and its raid had broken down, would one blame windows or one self?
[+] [-] josteink|13 years ago|reply
> Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it.
He even mentions Windows 8 as a more viable option. WTH?
As someone who actually uses Linux on the desktop I have to very much disagree. I install it. It works. Every time.
Ofcourse he came from Gentoo Linux which has been rideculed internet-wide time and time again for their incessant need to über-optimize ever single little thing way beyond pointlessness.
His error in is generalizing this onto the rest of the Linux-world, and guess what? That's just so extremely wrong and not even close to a normal user these days. I haven't even bothered compiling my own "optimized" kernel the last 5 years. Shocking! I know!
This guy is a hardcore Linux geek converted into hardcore Mac-fanboy (polar opposite), sold on the "it just works" idea, because things didn't use to just work in the world of Linux.
The transition must have been wonderfully liberating. But now he finds that his newfound hero has abondoned him and that it was not the saviour he had hoped for and he is lost.
Had he only known he could return to his roots and find everything he wanted right there.
[+] [-] geuis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lake99|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, right. Say that to my many linux-using friends who can't write a simple "hello world" program to save their lives. Despite "[helping] found Gentoo Linux", the author comes off as a moron when he makes such comments about "Linux", whatever the heck it means here.
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sagarm|13 years ago|reply
I'm a happy Ubuntu user now (right now, actually). I hope he gives Ubuntu a try sometime; it's leaps and bounds more reliable and tinker-free than Gentoo ever was.
edit: she => he
[+] [-] rozap|13 years ago|reply
"and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it."
You kidding me? For the vast majority of OSS development and use, linux is by far the easiest solution. People (including me) use linux because they DON'T want to fuck around with shoe-horning software into running on a Mac or Windows. It's just the simplest solution for using and developing open source software. The above quotation may have been true about 6 years ago, but it sure as hell isn't true now.
Welcome to 2013.
[+] [-] jjkmk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humbledrone|13 years ago|reply
Yeah, that's Gentoo. Such is life when you're running locally-compiled binaries that, depending on your USE flags, have been compiled with a combination of settings that nobody in the whole world has ever tested before.
I'm running Ubuntu Precise right now, and can quite honestly say that I have not done a single system maintenance task in the six months since I installed it and set it up. It just works. Granted, I'm not doing anything too fancy with it, just basic software engineering.
[+] [-] YokoZar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kayoone|13 years ago|reply
Guess what ? I use a Windows Desktop and really like it. Its fast, i can built it myself and works with everything. My web development is done on an ubuntu vm in the cloud so i dont care where my tools run. Id probably run Linux but as i do some game programming and my tools arent availabe there, i cant.
I also own a Macbook Air, i really like the hardware and battery life. Its a really solid mobile device. I dont like OSX too much but it runs my tools so i dont care. As PC laptop makers have catched up alot in the past 2-3 years id probably buy an ultrabook next as there are more choices and they are a bit cheaper.
So what ? No hardware/software is perfect, just use what works for you.
[+] [-] r00fus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannoHung|13 years ago|reply
In total, I have seen three serious problems with mine and my families computers: 1) Failed hard drives 2) RAM that went bad 3) A clusterfuck of problems on a 17" MBP pre-unibody (Apple eventualy got it working, but it's on its last legs in general now because the owner refuses to install patches).
This is across, I wanna say... approximately 20 Apple devices ranging from phones to iMacs.
They're not perfect, but compared to the amount of problems from when everyone I knew had Windows PCs, I take a lot fewer support calls.
[+] [-] megaframe|13 years ago|reply
I get the anti Linux sentiment I use to use Gentoo before Ubuntu/Debian became so viable and it was/is painful to say the least. I'm not going to say I always agree with everything Canonical does with Ubuntu but I could make the same argument for OSX and Ubuntu has been amazingly stable.
So to anyone out there on the fence with OSX and fearing Windows, Linux is so much better these days. Approaching the ease of OSX.
[+] [-] mrilhan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burnblue|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unimpressive|13 years ago|reply
Though somehow it makes perfect sense for one of the people who helped build Gentoo to be disgusted with Linux.
[+] [-] batiudrami|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tluyben2|13 years ago|reply
The magsafe internal part of that MBP is also of much lower quality; one of the pins 'disappeared' and Apple replaced the magsafe and the external charger. Now the same pin disappeared but I'm out of warranty and they want E600 to repair it.
Thinkpad, here I come.
[+] [-] auctiontheory|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endgame|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] szc|13 years ago|reply
A lot of modern hardware has programmable parameters, "core voltages", PLL parameters that control running frequencies and the timings for DMA / memory access state machines.
Who's fault is it if the hardware vendor says use X, Y and Z for these parameters. And they include the same parameters in the software they supply and....
What if some %'age of the hardware doesn't actually produce the timings the configuration parameters specify, or does "really bad things"?
In reading the "source" article, there is a pointer to a discussions.apple.com thread. The "fix", if you go and read the thread, is on page 21 from Andrew Humphreys. What his solution does is change the timings and clock speeds for low power and idle modes of the GPU. Reading between the lines, the low power / clock speed settings don't work and will cause corruption. His changes are derrived from people having problems running Windows 7. The same changes seem to help people running OS X.
Perhaps someone from the Linux community will be willing to force the ATI GPU cards in question into low power / performance modes and see if corruption occurs.
I've no knowledge of what the parameters Andrew is overriding actually do, but for a portable platform "faster" almost always results in higher power usage, heat and therefore shorter battery life.
This might not be such an issue for desktops, if you can tolerate the noise of increased cooling.
Getting pragmatic about this, how could you design a Q/A test for this? Do you really afford to wait X number of minutes before / after each test to make sure the GPU is cold enough to go into low power mode? What if you decide to use hardware that can cool the GPU faster so you could get through all the tests -- doesn't that make the tests invalid as you are no longer using HW customers will get?
As a final note, there might be evidence that some graphics drivers were updated ~1 week before 10.8.3 was shipped. The evidence is in /System/Library/Extensions/
[+] [-] visarga|13 years ago|reply
Why don't they send some of those geniuses to fix these problems? Can't they afford to support their products?
[+] [-] jsz0|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cremnob|13 years ago|reply
There's your problem.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
On an unrelated note, tiny gray text on black makes it really hard to switch back to HN, so I can't blame you for not making it to the end. Ow.
[+] [-] kalleboo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geuis|13 years ago|reply