“I’m a long time Linux user. Let there be no mistake. I have Linux servers out the ying yang. But, two years ago I was smitten with OS X and the easy wireless connectivity that iBooks could give me. Two years later I’m abandoning OS X and Apple. Let me paint the picture.” Read the the article at OSDir.
Having Bitten the Forbidden Fruit, it Bit Me Back. Six Times
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I saw this on Slashdot…
This guy is lame. Feeling guilty is a stupid reaction…. and an incorrect one at that.
The argument goes… “if my hard drive files… I cant go out and buy replacement parts at the average computer store”.
Th problem with that argument is that you CAN buy replacement parts for nearly every internal component of a Mac.
No, you may not be able to as easily with many of the components of Apple’s AIO units, but the same is true of any AIO from any PC manufacturer too.
Again… a stupid reaction.
He’d be happy locked into a single vendor if his iBook worked well. It appears the famous G3 motherboard problem has claimed another victim.
Pity, too. My first-gen iBook runs OS X like a champ, and I’ve not had a single problem with it for almost 5 years. Beat the crap out of it, and everything still runs.
The new G4 iBooks apparently don’t suffer the same problem. I expect Apple will end up getting sued on this one, and will make good to effected iBook users.
He’s right about one thing: Yellow Dog Linux runs great on Mac hardware. But there’s no need to feel guilty about running OS X. It’s great.
Come on guys, stop that stupid 1.8% markeshare argument. This thing pops up here frequently and this is simply nuts.
Ok – Eugenia, keep cool, this is slightly OT, but it has to be said one time:
It is not possible or reasonable to use Apples marketshare as a mesurement for their business success. Why? Because you compare the computer sales of ONE company with the computer sales of a WHOLE industry. How sould Apple ever catch up with hundreds and more companys that sell PCs? Think of all the big players (HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell, Gateay, etc….) plus the many “Joe’s PC shops” round the corner.
If you compare it that way I insure you Apples “percentage marketshare” will fall and fall. Yes, thats logical, because that only means that more PCs are sold than Macs. Apples userbase is not shrinking, they sell about 200.000-300.000 Macs every quarter – so they add these value to their userbase.
Thats simply the fact – like it or not.
If you’re going to put down lots of cash for a product, don’t feel guilty about it, ENJOY it. Its stupid to say “I payed $1200 just to feel bad”.
Would I feel guilty for not using Open Source software? Actually, I would a little, but most people aren’t like me. Maybe for about 2 hours after I bought the product. Afterwards, I just enjoy what I bought and not regret too much.
A guy has a bad experience with Apple hardware and doesn’t want to use it anymore. Perfectly understandable.
What I don’t get, is his explanation that it wasn’t about hardware, but about freedom from lock-in. That’s stupid.
He admits that his Apple hardware runs both OS X and Linux. No lock in there.
Mac OS X runs nearly all of the major applications available for Linux also. No software lock in either.
You could always make the case for lock in anywhere. Any app that’s Linux only is OS lock in, right? Gnome only? KDE only?
saw this article a while back. Its just a childish rant, really. if he was ranting about, oh, an Amiga part failing, It would never get this press.
For some reason I just doubt that the guy really had the same problem 6 times without doing anything “wrong” to his laptop. I mean really it wasn’t even the same laptop the whole time.
You feel bad when you lose data
You feel bad when your girlfriend leaves you
You feel bad when your brand new laptop craps out
You feel bad because you are not running linux?
I cant understand some people.
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
My G3 B&W/350 has been running flawlessly for months now. And, with Panther, it runs even better!
And to the person all pissed about his bad iBook experience(s), needless to say, when you try to cram an entire G3/G4 motherboard into the confines of a laptop, you are bound to run into “issues”. I, personally, will never own a Mac laptop (ok, I did own a PowerBook 145 about 5 years ago, but…), because too many things CAN go wrong and too few ways to fix them without hauling the little critter to a Mac dealership to get it fixed/replaced/traded in, etc.
For me, the only good Mac is a Power Mac tower. I may not like the G5’s looks entirely, but how on earth can *any* PC user be stupid enough to gut one to put a stupid, low-class PC motherboard inside! What a waste of a $3,000 G5!
Luposian
First: You could have the same problems with any computer brand. The moment you get to use a laptop is the moment where YOU lock yourself out. You can’t swap logicboards, if you get a Dell you cant get a replacement from IBM or Gateway. You have to use the same brand. Only with a desktop, are you free from this reality.
Second: Apple like any other computer brand, try their best to produce the best product possible. You happen to have bad luck. Apple is taking care of some iBooks that do have some problems with the logicboard. Again this happens with all brands. I know, I have been repairing PC for 17 years, believe me when I say that this happens a lot with all major brands, like IBM, Compaq, HP. In my personal experience Macs have a better track than others, but they are not perfect either!
Get it fix and you might at last be lucky enough to have it work like it should. My Pismo Powerbook have bee in service for 4 years now without a single problem, I know other users out there have the same experience.
Good luck next time!
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
check it out they started a repair program for iBooks.
I couldn’t agree more… Having been a tech for over 10 years myself, i’ve more then seen the torment users go through when they discover their IBM machine will need a costly IBM only part replacement etc. Admitedly I have not had much to do with Apples at all, but I do know their hardware is pretty sound, very much like the Atari & Amiga days… x86 PC’s are cheap, so don’t expect them to last forever, even a decade is asking too much for most
I think he just got a bit of bad luck myself.
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/01/28/ibookrepair/index.ph…
I’ve heard about the Logic Board problems too, but I can’t see it happening 6 times, unless something else inside the unit was causing it to go bad – maybe dirty output from a power supply? Most people have had solid experiences with the iBooks.
As far as “feeling guilt” about not using an “open standard” his explanation is lame. He’s complaining about “lock-in” when what he should be complaining about is, oh, a lack of interoperability.
As far as I see it, he’s locked into Linux. When his laptop dies, he needs something to work on. He wants his laptop/ desktop to be interoperable and he wants to be able to continue working if one should take a dump. To do that of course, he needs his systems to run the same OS (unless of course he wants to jump through a bunch of hoops getting junk to run correctly).
If his tower was Windows, would he wipe his laptop to put Windows on it? If his laptop was Linux and his tower Apple, would he dump the laptop for an iBook? Why doesn’t he buy a G5 tower? Of course the Yellowdog solution is (much) cheaper.
This statement irritates me: “Given a bit of patience I would have had wireless on that Linux laptop within months at the most.” Yeah dude, spend months twiddling with your computer just to get a feature working. You go boy.
Also what is this: “So, after setting up Linux for the sixth time.” If he has set up Linux Servers “out the yin yang” why doesn’t he set up a… profile? Seems like that would have happened maybe 4 or 5 failures ago.
“My first-gen iBook runs OS X like a champ, and I’ve not had a single problem with it for almost 5 years”
Love thet way people make these assertions on the Net.
I still have a first-gen iBook, and it most certainly does NOT in my experience.
But yeah Yellow Dog breathed some life back into it.
I have one of the first ibooks. 8mb vram.. well my fan constantly goes on. I just got it back from their service department and its the SAME! terrible, terrible. I don’t even login to the computer and you hear the fan spinning. I don’t think thats quality. At least their willing to fix it because i have Applecare. Besides, yeah i am pissed at what is going on with my ibook, but they are willing to fix it for a price..
i guess apple isn’t so bad.
Yeah, but that doesn’t do you a heck of a lot of good if you need wireless right now.
For me it was flip the iBook over, slap in the card, reboot, connect.
And yeah, I’m sorry he’s had logic board failres up the wazoo, but bad hardware can come from any company. Apple has repaired his computer every time.
1990: Compuadd 316nx still kicking, except batteries…
1999: ibook still kicking
2000: G4 sawtooth still kicking
2000: Pismo still kicking
2001: ibook(dual USB) still kicking
i.e. no problems, and the ‘books get quite a bit of usage, and the G4 is on, pretty much, 24/7. oops, forgot to note that the original hd in the G4 died, but was replaced with a quick trip to Compuseless for a new generodrive.
As to repairability: sorry bub, ANY notebook will, mostly, be expensive to repair, and unless it is a drive, keyboard, or trackpad it’ll mostly like be an $$$$ LCD or motherboard/power supply.
Now, I wonder why the wonderkid didn’t partition his drive and install linux as well if he was feeling so guilty?! (I still can’t believe that anyone would SERIOUSLY feel guilty about using or not using this OS or that OS. For that matter if he was feeling guilty about not using an “open standard” OS why didn’t he feel guilty about not using a *BSD? But, I digress…) (I’m also kind of suspicious of the: but I never did anything “wrong” and this happened 6 times story.)
(Actually all 2 of my ‘books have OSX 10.2.6, but they all also have YellowDog 3.0.1 on them, and I DO find that with one dialup provider the OSX PPP tends to, er, lock up, while the linux ppp driver only does so occasionally, and many times it is possible to manually kill pppd and get back to a working state, but not always.)
(Last note: May we have a proper usage of who and whom lecture as well? }:)
“Given a bit of patience I would have had wireless on that Linux laptop within months at the most.”
YDL is very good with zero config wireless networking. I’ve had it work perfectly every time on a 1.25 G4 tower, and eMac, and 2 TiBooks.
The link was broken, so I can not read the article. I think I read it on another board, but not 100% sure of it. I would say only that this is an atypical situation.
I have owned 3 OS X Mac’s – an iBook, a G4 PowerMac and my newest – a PowerBook. I also own a Mac II from way back. I have 15+ years with Apple and only 1 failure – (A flyback transformer in the old Mac II monitor). I also have 10 years experiance with PC’s – with at least 10 failures. Apple products have been a dream.
The OS does everything my Linux Box does … and more. It does everything my windows machine does (except play DAOC) and much more.
I can not speak to this particular case, but I (and I suspect most of the 10% of all computer users who use macs) find them to be a long way ahead of Windows or Linux systems. Market share for Mac laptops is growing, and I suspect that will be the case for descktops not that the G5 has made Apple competitive from a performance standpoint.
If you have not tried a mac in a while give it a try – OS X is wonderful, and you get a longer life out of the mac’s – though this hurts apple’s market share numbers.
The time is right to switch.
I’ve used Macs all my life, usually having at least 3 at any given time. Just now going back and looking at what has broken and what hasn’t, I’ve noticed that Apple products seem to fail my once every 5 years, and it’s usually minor even then. Not a bad track record at all.
Like Jon stated a few posts ago, having the thing break 6 times really sounds like the guy was doing something very wrong.
I had issues with a G3 where I bought a non-apple cdrom drive and installed it. When I tried to do a OS 9.22 install it would not allow me to boot off the cd. When I replaced the cdrom with a apple made one it worked.
The article has been slashdotted so I haven’t been able to read it. However, I run Gentoo Linux on my iBook and it runs mostly flawlessly. The only two things I miss are a second mouse button on the trackpad, and a PPC Flash plugin for Netscape. In terms of hardware reliability, I have not had any troubles to speak of, knock on wood.
Having said that, however, I would not buy another iBook, or Mac for that matter. The reason is, you really are locked into a small subset of choices. I’m not just talking Apple hardware, I’m talking all manufacturers.
There are a lot of things I would like to do but I can’t because I have Macs. I want to replace the CD-ROM drive in my G4 with a DVD +/-RW but third party drives aren’t fully supported by Apple’s iLife tools.
Likewise, I would like to replace the original Airport card in my iBook with an Airport Extreme card but Apple, the sole manufacturer, doesn’t make one.
Of all the available scanners, how many work with OSX? I know I had a bitch of a time buying a scanner after my old scanner manufacturer dropped support for OSX.
although Macs have standard PCI and AGP slots, how many third party video cards, power supplies, motherboards, sound cards, TV cards, gigabit Ethernet cards are there for Mac?
It’s hard for Mac users to even buy platform independent hardware such as keyboards, mice, network switches, etc. Unless the customer is an expert, they won’t know that a Linksys wireless router is Mac compatible. You and I know that it will work, but does the average Joe?
I did have some problems after I got my G4 Dual 1.25 GHZ. The hardrive failed the first month. Oh well I also had failures in our PC. Thats how things are. The guy did probably something wrong or just had bad luck.
BTW: MacRumors posted Apple is refunding some money as well as covering some of the replacment costs etc.. . Maybe the dude should look into to that.
———————-
http://www.sideliners.ca
The problem with that argument is that you CAN buy replacement parts for nearly every internal component of a Mac.
Really, can I go to Compusa and buy a new power supply? Office Depot has a great deal on Sony DVD +/-RW drives, can I buy one to use with iDVD? I want to use my G3 tower as a server, can I go to Microcenter and buy a gigbit ethernet card and new motherboard with onboard SATA RAID? Can I get an ATI All-In-Winder 9800Pro to watch TV with? Can I upgrade my clamshell iBook to 802.11g?
I don’t think so.
I have an old 99′ Compaq Presario(450mhz/8GB) which I use as a small file server(RedHat). It hasent had a single problem in its 5yr lifespan with me.
Ive never owned a mac before but if I were to make a guess at their reliality, id wager that its pretty respectable considering the loyal fan base that Apple has.
I bought an iBook with one of the afflicted logic boards in early 2002 – kept on getting kernel panics and the sound wouldn’t work.
Took it to the computer repair people at uni, they replaced the board and everything’s been just fine and dandy since. No problems whatsoever. I’ll certainly have no trouble buying another Mac in the future.
can I go to Compusa and buy a new power supply?
can I buy a new DVD player?
can I buy a gigbit ethernet card?
..a new motherboard?
..TV card?
..upgrade clamshell with 802.11g?
You can actually get most of the parts for your iBook. A friend of mine just replaced the CD/DVD player on his iBook with the newer slot-in dvd-burner and installed 1.5Gb of RAM.
Too bad that you slipped later in your post when you started talking about replacing motherboard, installing a TV card and upgrading your clamshell mac with 802.11g. I mean come on – its not like you’d upgrade your 486DX with S-ATA stuff!!
What more, mac users tend to buy a new computer every three years while PC dudes upgrade or buy new stuff at least once a year. Macs also has a very high second-hand value – why is that do you think…??
regards /jens
“Given a bit of patience I would have had wireless on that Linux laptop within months at the most.”
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hmm, let me decide… hardware lock in, versus “months” of my life. It took me about 30 minutes to set up a laptop, wireless pc card, and wireless router. It was Windows XP though. I suppose I should feel guilty to?
There’s actually a very good reason that Apple doesn’t make an Airport Extreme card for the G3 iBooks. The peak data rate of 802.11g actually exceeds the peak data rate of the modified pc-card bus that the iBook uses! Of course, since Airport and Airport Extreme networks are 100% compatible, this issue won’t prevent you from connecting to an 802.11g network…
But it’s my guess that that was more idle Mac bashing.
My brother just switched to an iBook G4. I’m getting one next month! It rocks. The failures are happening on specific models of the G3 iBook.
I owned a IBM 240 laptop a few years back. Within 3 days the mainboard needed to be replaced, that took 2 months for IBM to do for me. They also said they replaced the hard drive and keyboard just to be sure. When I got it back the sound was messed up and was pretty much unuseable. They told me that was normal for their low end laptops. The iBook my brother got is the low end 12″ model. The sound quality is perfect, the screen is great, the DVD playback is flawless, it runs wisper quiet, the keyboard is good, the OS is much better than Linux or Windows. In fact it is one of the most professionally put together pieces of hardware I have ever used. Features work without the need for much work from the user. I spend about 3 months getting Linux running properly on my desktop.
I know that everyone has their preference. For me I like the idea that the OS and hardware are provided by the same company so it can work so well together. Rather than trying to get the latest graphics driver for linux and hoping that it will work properly, or recompiling the kernel so that I can get dual CPU support and ATA controller support working.
I know Apple isn’t perfect, but I want to be a computer user again. Not a systems administrator to my own PC. My bro’s iBook seems to make that possible.
Before you all start labeling me a “Mac lover” or whatever let me say this. I love the iBook my bro has so much that I want one too. If that makes me a Mac lover then so be it. My desktop currently runs Mandrake 9.2 and Slackware 9.1 Linux, and I’m forced to use Windows 2000 here at college. (it’s all they have installed.)
“The peak data rate of 802.11g actually exceeds the peak data rate of the modified pc-card bus that the iBook uses!”
802.11g is 54 megabits a second, right? That’s only, uh, ~7 megabytes a second. Are you really telling me that the old Apple PC-Card slots can’t handle something that low? Even my 8 year old laptop has 32 bit PCMCIA…
If it wasn’t for good old “vendor lock-in”, you could have bought a USB 802.11 device. I run one on my Linux box, works very well. So, no, this is still Apple’s problem, not a general one.
-Erwos
So if I have a Dell Laptop with USB 1, and I can’t use USB 2 devices with it that’s Dell’s fault?
And shit, when i built my system at home I was so silly to buy a mainboard that has PCI slots and no AGP. I ended up having to buy a new one with AGP.
Most of the comments here seem to be about Apple hardware. When the author himself said it wasn’t really about the hardware, but the software.
He was using OS X, OS X isn’t available for non Apple hardware. If he was still using Linux when his ibook died, he could have just moved over to another machine running Linux and kept right on going. Since it doesn’t, every time his ibook had to be sent back in, he had to set up a Linux box to get his work done. That was why at the end he descided to put Yellow Dog on the ibook. If it dies yet again, he can migrate his settings/tweaks/etc. to another non-Apple box and keep working.
There was a comment to the effect that since he said he was running Linux servers up the ying-yang, why didn’t he just set up a profile. Reread the article, he doesn’t say that he has Linux servers _at_home_, therefore I would conclude that he manages Linux servers at the office. You can have 1000 Linux servers at the office, that won’t help you get your work done at home. He had his laptop, and another “beige box” that his kid uses. With the problems he was having with Apple hardware, I can understand why he would be reluctant to plunk down more good cash for more Apple hardware just to run OS X when his ibook dies. Linux runs on just about everything.
To sum it all up, the fact that OS X (with all of its creamy goodness) only runs on Apple hardware is a problem, for him at least. The resulting vendor lock-in proved to much for him. Heck even Windows runs on more hardware than OS X.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
someone247356
I too am a happy B&W/350 owner :0
It has served me well since 1999 when I bought it. It runs like a champ!
I now use it as a server since I bought a powerbook a few weeks ago due to the demands of my job
i think most people are missing the point. he wasn’t unhappy with the service, the fact that it kept breaking, or anything like that. in fact, he was unhappy that he LIKED it, but when it broke he had to turn back to linux. good old dependable, but somewhat ugly (not just appearance-wise) linux.
he didn’t like that he couldn’t put os x on his commodity hardware when his ibook broke. really. i promise.
Well, he can always buy another Apple for his home system. His kids will thank him too.
Guess this logic board thing kinds of negates the claims of superior Apple hardware. So does the fact that I find myself pointing this out every couple of months or so.
I’m really glad I didn’t buy an iBook. I was on the verge of ordering one for about 8 months. I decided to go with a Gateway since the FSB was four times faster than the iBook of the time (much better for audio work).
the company has to improve/innovate/whatever their products in both hardware & software.
consider when longhorn is out, os x will have hard time gaining impression.
i think still the most important thing is price.
osx is pricey than xp.
the hardware is way more expensive than pc.
compare powermac 2200+ with no display to my newly build pc amd 64 3000+ dvd burner and the list goes on loaded with suse 9 64bit version cost only half price of the powermac.
give me a reason to buy mac…
Where did he mention why he didn’t like OSX? Why did he feel guilty? Why did I waste my time with this?
Alot of people seem to be missing the point. He says that he likes OS X, he made it clear he even liked the hardware outside of the fact that he got one of the lemming iBooks that seem to be pretty common. Btw, it IS a fairly common thing. Out of the three friends I know who have an iBook, all three of them have had a logic board failure. One’s had it die on him three times. I know he won’t be getting another Mac even though Apple has been suprisingly good in fixing it.
What the writer of this article was stating is that he just isn’t comfortable with the fact that, if his laptop dies, he spends a day or more configuring a secondary computer he has just to try and emulate his workflow on the Mac. Thats a lock-on and a pretty expensive one. It goes beyond the cost of upgrading or buying a Mac, its the cost of lost productivity. Yes, it might take him months to get Wireless to work under Linux (been there…it blows) but on the other hand atleast if his laptop dies he can be up and running with very little downtime on the desktop. Why? Because its the same workflow. He doesn’t have to unlearn how to work.
I used to work somewhere that received 4 Lombard powerbooks, and I remember 3 of them went back at least once. I finally decided to take the plunge almost two years ago, buying an eMac (I was on a budget
. I wasn’t angry that Apple sold me a terrible computer with a crippled bus and insanely slow hard drive (with not a drop of cache on it). But a year and one month after I bought it, the “logic board” decided not to power my monitor anymore. And they wanted $800 to fix it, with no guarantee that the replacement part was going to last any longer than the part I was replacing.
So I bought a PC. An insanely fast PC for the same price I paid for my bottom-of-the-line eMac a year before. Now, I’m happy with the PC, but I miss the heck out of OS X. If the machine had lasted another year, it’s likely that I would be sitting in front of a G5 right now. But if that’s the kind of quality control I can expect from Apple, I’m going to have to pass.
Strange, that modern Apple computers seem so unreliably. Our Macintosh 6400/180 only had an empty battery once (as we pulled the plug when it was shutdown). For the rest, it has worked perfectly in the six or seven years we have it…
And my normal PC, two years newer, has had many many more problems:
– Speakers stinking like they were burning
– A CD player vibrating so heavily that it damaged the harddisk
– A broken harddisk (Western Digital)
– A broken power supply
– A broken Philips monitor, and (as it didn’t have guarantee anymore) the Belinea replacement also broke.
– The memory module went bad
– Some keys of the Trust keyboard stopped functioning because of dust that had come inside.
So a normal PC can also have it’s problems. I trust the Macintosh 6400/180 much better than my Pentium 350.
USB 802.11 for mac?
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=175
And that was easily found in the first couple links of a google search. Vendor lock in indeed.
tetsuo:
consider when longhorn is out, os x will have hard time gaining impression.
Umm, Longhorn will be out in two years (2006). That’s a *long* time to have to put up with Windows XP. And you don’t think that in two years OS X will not be updated once or twice?
Besides, given that MS seems to have hired all Fisher Price’s designers (hence the Luna theme), I don’t really have much faith that Longhorn will be sexy, and OS X really is slick. I don’t have a Mac myself, but seeing one in action really impressed me.
I think it funny how we get over excited when Apple has when they have a product failure, the media gets involved, why Apple community more vocal about anything less then perfection. So why do we not jump up and down on Dell the last four year that I have been at my current employer I have been force to use Dell laptops. I have to say in the last 3 year the quality of their product has been less then ideal, Six laptops 3 years. It started with Laptop form hell that I had five keyboards replaced, three motherboard, 1 CPU, an LCD. Why I put up with it was our company signed a warranty contract with Dell. The next Dell company gave me was better only one mother board change and new CD ROM drive, Worse is lately we have been having a Rash of hard drive crashes around here including my last Laptop which I finally expelled from my life on my last trip to japan. My Wife new Latitude D600 DVD player started sounding like old radial engine prop aircraft that that prop was out of balance the other day of the Dell laptops have been worse. At work I stopped using their desktop because of quality issue, At home I was tired of Windows2000 & Windows XP stability issue on my home pc systems and switched to a G5 2GHz at home, It made me and my new wife who has taken over the machine for iTunes, iPhoto, iDVD extremely happy with it quality and stability. For me UNIX with out having to use X-windows except as last alternative is bliss. I spent my first five year of my carrier setting up customer X windows environment and trying to get X windows app working with Xerver on Windows from every thing from SunOS, SGI IRIX, AIX, HPU/X, DEC Ultrix, DEC True64 Unix, USL Unix, Sequent Unix, Data General DGUX, and Linux since first distribution of slackware. After while it big turn off dealing with all the different config files and Windows Manager difference.
What real problem is our drive we want the lowest possible price (The Wal-Mart Effect) and a Company desire to please the stock market, which mean strong profits. How do you achieve these goal is go offshore for Manufacturing to remove labor cost, use lower quality standards on material that you use in your products, relax your tolerance to production standards and quality control. Some time you choice an offshore vendor and he tell you that he can meet your standard and he does not. Hence the IBOOK issue Apple moved to new Manufacture…
“consider when longhorn is out, os x will have hard time gaining impression.”
How do you figure? OS X will have a multi-year innovation jump on longhorn by the time its out. Judging by what I’ve seen in longhorn, much of it is a step backwards. Apple has absolutely nothing to fear in longhorn.
“i think still the most important thing is price.”
Thankfully, OSX gives you so much more for the money… otherwise you might have a point.
“osx is pricey than xp.”
OS X is not pricy at all… and only costs slightly more than XP.
“the hardware is way more expensive than pc.”
I think you mean more configureable… thus allowing you to buy less and therefore pay less. That does not mean less expensive. A PC equiped with the same hardware and software components as that which come standard on a Mac will cost you an amount that is very similar to that which you would pay for a Mac. Apple’s prices are VERY comperable to PCs.
“compare powermac 2200+ with no display to my newly build pc amd 64 3000+ dvd burner”
And the prices will be similar when you bunp up your PC to the same specs as that which come standard on a Mac with regard to hardware and software.
“give me a reason to buy mac…”
I can give you several, but something tells me your mind is already made up anyways.
The iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program will repair these components for free and offer a full refund for customers who have already paid for the repair. Apple will pay for shipping costs, the company said.
The program applies to iBooks with serial numbers in a range of UV220XXXXXX to UV318XXXXXX that were manufactured between May 2002 and April 2003.
Yes I can understand his frustration with his iBooks logicboard. But to replace the OS with another OS because of hardware issues unrelated to the original OS. That is just pure b***s***.
OS X was NEVER the problem. Hardware was. So if you replace anything you replace hardware. The logicboard will fail regardless of whether OS X or Linux is installed on it.
that deep seated guilt over not using Linux on my laptop has been given reason to come back to the surface
Why are you feeling guilty, did someone tell you that you have to use Linux or you will be punished in hell?
Apple replaced the iBook with another and I thought I was on my merry way. Not so. The same thing has happened to the replacement.
I feel your pain. If iBook really has problems, Apple should do something about that. But how can supposedly high-quality Apple hardware blow up so many time? I haven’t hear such a thing anywhere else, I must say. Dude, maybe pouring coffee on your iBook is not a valid operation?
I simply can’t bear the pain of the hardware vendor lock-in anymore.
I give you this though, when the computer breaks on you in the PC world, you could just jump to another PC vendor. But in the Mac world, Apple is all you got. Hopefully Apple stuff won’t have problems that make people irate and hop to another vendor. From what I have experienced, Apple quality and support is very good.
Just as flaky!!!??? I’d say that Dells are 10x more flaky. Look at this ibook incident compared to a regular thing. At least Apple laptops arent exploding and setting people on fire.
http://iafrica.com/news/sa/3030.htm
http://news.com.com/2100-1040_3-247023.html
Thats enough to make anyone fear their laptop.
Here are a few more incidences that whole pc industry seems to overlook while penalizing Apple.
http://news.com.com/2100-1040_3-238117.html?tag=st_rn
http://news.com.com/2100-1001_3-237772.html?tag=st_rn
http://news.com.com/2100-1040_3-240765.html?tag=st_rn
http://news.com.com/2100-1001_3-245029.html?tag=st_rn
http://news.com.com/2100-1040_3-247023.html
To give you a quick rundown, these show that IBM, Toshiba and especially Dell are fallable too.
What the writer of this article was stating is that he just isn’t comfortable with the fact that, if his laptop dies, he spends a day or more configuring a secondary computer he has just to try and emulate his workflow on the Mac. Thats a lock-on and a pretty expensive one. It goes beyond the cost of upgrading or buying a Mac, its the cost of lost productivity. Yes, it might take him months to get Wireless to work under Linux (been there…it blows) but on the other hand atleast if his laptop dies he can be up and running with very little downtime on the desktop. Why? Because its the same workflow. He doesn’t have to unlearn how to work.
I don’t buy this argument at all. If he was running linux servers up his ying yang at work, He wouldn’t need to relearn any work flow.
You can run just about any linux app on OS X. Hell you can even hide the dock and run KDE 3.1.2 on OS X and no one would know it was not linux bar the apple bar on the top.
Also has this guy heard of backups. Since you can run almost any linux app on OS X all he would need was his data backed up. Again he never explains why he needs to reinstall linux everytime his iBook fails. Hasn’t he heard of dual boot he can easily just put in another harddisk in his beige box and always maintain a linux install on it. He could even have rsync’ed his entire ibooks data onto the beige box every weekend if he dual booted it with linux.
Suppose I have linux x86 on a box and it had a hardware failure. Should I complain that my linux binaries on the hard disk won’t execute on my PPC linux distro on my powerbook, jeez talk about architecture lock in on linux. Linux binaries should run on any cpu in an architecture agnostic way, linux sucks because it doesn’t!!! none of this makes any sense does it.
My exact point with this article. None of his reasoning makes any sense. If he knew what he was doing he would not need to reinstall anything and could just continue his work even if his laptop died. He didn’t do his due diligence and he blames apple for vendor lock-in???
(For the record, I am writing this from a PowerBook (Panther) which I got about two yrs ago, previously I had used only linux/BSD for all my computing needs since about 98-99. I made the switch so that I would have be able to run my favorite linux progs (e.g. LyX, GnuCash, GiMP)
while having an easier time exchanging documents with all the people who insist on sending me gigantic Word files with tables, and graphs and blah blah blah….BTW, PLEASE don;t tell me about all the different ways to convert Word files in linux, I am aware of them and find them lacking for the many of the documents that I receive. Also, I do a lot of scanning and was looking forward to easy scanner usage using Acrobat, more on this later.)
As has been mentioned previously in several posts with subject lines such as “missing the point”, the author’s primary complaint is with vendor lock-in on the SOFTWARE side, the hardware issues were only mentioned as historical data to prove WHY software lock-in is a bad thing. We don’t quite know what data of his got “locked-in”, but let’s create an example scenario. Say you’ve got a bunch of PIM type information – using the apple apps, you’ve got data in Mail, Addressbook, and iCal. Let’s also say you’ve got a current backup, now the hardware fails. Ok, let’s extract all that data and put it on another machine – but all we have is PC hardware, so some possible scenarios:
1) You “backed up” your files to a .dmg file, trying to use all the apple tools that you paid so much for — OOPS! You’re FSCKED! How are you going to open that on a PC? A CD burned in HFS+ presents a similar problem.
2) You backed up to a .tar file, or an ISO9660 CD, ok cool so you can read your files…so that means the Mail data is easily importable (.mbox files) but what about Adress Book and iCal? Sure both are exportable to common formats, but how do you convert after your hardware dies? Maybe now you have to search for some utilities to convert that data to a more open format.
What would you have rather done?:
Load the exact same software on the PC hardware, move the data over, continue work.
Why can’t you do this w/ OSX?:
Because Apple makes their money off of selling hardware, therefore they do not want you to be able to use their software on a competitor’s hardware == lock-in. Get it?
Why not by a shiny new G5?
Well, if your only experience with a particular hardware brand was _SIX_ consecutive failures and repairs, would you be in a big hurry to give them another $4k? I sure wouldn’t. (I have had nothing but excellent experience with my apple hardware/applecare, and as such I am considering buying a G5, cost aside).
This guy’s an idiot because…:
Sure, he could have set up a full time linux server in his house, w/ IMAP for mail, some sort of groupware to keep his calendar/address stuff, but then where’s the benefit of paying more for the Mac? Most people buy Apple hardware to use apple software, aside from the odd PPC zealot and people impressed with Shiny Things.
So why did he get a Mac in the first place?:
For hardware compatibility. He made that very clear. It was a big selling feature for me too. I got my orinoco 802.11b card working on a Sony VAIO superslim running slackware back in ’01 <read, very little help available anywhere>, but it took me a week and this was after explicitly purchasing the card because it advertised linux support (orinico removed this from their website a few bit after after I called them up demanding linux driver support, and replaced it some time later)..needless to say this was a PITA. When my powerbook came, I thought “those days are over, now basically anything will just work..no more spending Xmas morning downloading drivers right?” – WRONG. The first thing I tried to do with my new powerbook was plug in my USB Epson Perfection scanner….and nothing. Hmm, try the apple site? nothing. The epson site – ah, there is no support for this scanner under OSX. Ok, so maybe epson hasn’t quite gotten with the program of the new OS yet (10.2 was maybe a month or two old) So I went out and bought a new scanner, and HP, with support for OSX 10.1+ advertised on the box. Got it home, installed the drivers (so much for plug and play)…and, NOTHING! it would work under classic, but not X – the reason, Apple did not provide a proper TWAIN backend. Net advice: Install GiMP and SANE and use the SANE drivers. Ok, so now I was pretty pissed off, just because all the switch commercials only explicitly mention “digital cameras” as being easy to work with, there was a definite implication that ALL hardware would be easier to deal with, when in reality to get my standard, common hardware to work I was expected to tinker with the fscking BSD backend???.
Fast forward a few months – HP has updated their software, and now I can scan under X, great, now I can finally use my expensive copy of Acrobat to get to some scanning – WRONG. The scanner still only works under the HP driver, no TWAIN = no Acrobat. Therefore one of my two reasons for buying a powerbook is out the window.
Summary:
Where he was right:
The fact that Apple software is (mostly) only available for Apple hardware constitutes vendor lock-in. If you are reliant on a single vendor to be able to access data you created with their products, you are locked in. Period. Also, Apple hardware, while in my opinion excellent in most cases, can for some users be just as bit a PITA as any other manufacturer’s.
If he had been running linux on his ibook, he would have no dependence on anyone other than himself and his abilities.
Where he was wrong:
Apple gives the user many opportunities to avoid vendor lock-in, the user must simply be aware of the open file formats that are supported. I for example keep all my files backed up in open formats on my linux server, just in case. This way I can decide to switch later to any platform my little heart desires, and keep all of my data. However, I sacrifice some of the Apple functionality, such as .dmg images files (which are really nice).
Also, at that point in time it would NOT have taken *MONTHS* to get his wireless card under linux if he put a little effort into it.
My point (and I suspect the author’s point):
Closed is closed, and one can not expect it to ever be Open. Whether one is talking about hardware or software dependency, reliance on any single vendor can bite you in the ass, and the only way to avoid it is to only use stuff that is Open/Free.
just my $.02
Well, I dunno.
I’ve never stuck my big fat monkey fingers in the wrong bits of my TiBook and consequently have never had a problem. I imagine that if I was to put my big fat monkey fingers in the wrong spot I could potentially have an issue… don’t matter if it’s and ibook TiBook G5 Dell Compaq Linux Unix OSX Windows Lindows Dos and Plan9.
Maybe he’s a monkey.
-J
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
Including reimbursment for previous repairs, argue with that.
I think you mean more configureable… thus allowing you to buy less and therefore pay less. That does not mean less expensive. A PC equiped with the same hardware and software components as that which come standard on a Mac will cost you an amount that is very similar to that which you would pay for a Mac. Apple’s prices are VERY comperable to PCs.
Don’t you ever get sick of spouting this crap ? As has been demonstrated several times, except for a few special cases (top end dual G5s and laptops) comparably configured PCs are significanty cheaper. In the price brackets where most people buy, you get far more PC for your $ than Mac for your $.
Yes. Its true, I have on of those lucky ibooks also, and i love my laptop. You can head on over to http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/ here to find details. I cant belive Im the first one to post this here. Or maybe its already been posted :0
You totally missed the point of my post. There’s hardware, but there’s no drivers. That’s Apple’s fault, because they make it such a damned pain to write official drivers for stuff.
The point is not about missing hardware features – it’s about intentionally strait-jacketing the user with less driver support in the name of lock-in.
-Erwos
There are available drivers for scanners. One has to do a search on the internet to find them. I found one and it works just fine.
There is a relatively inexpensive app available called, “VueScan”, that will handly many of the major scanners on the market. You can download a copy and try it out before investing your money. If it doesn’t work you don’t need to pay. It runs under Jaguar and Panther.
if by “so much more” you mean “GHz up that ying yang”
well, yeah…but my question is then … SO!
you get an eMac….you are running at 1 GHz, you have a super drive (DVD-RW/CD-RW) you have an 80 gig hard drive, 256 Megs of ram in one dimm, an ATI 7500 w 32 megs of dedicated ram, you get a 17 inch screen, you get the iApps, you get OS X, Apple works,and other assorted 3rd party software applications. FireWire and USB 2.
that is for 1100 dollars.
for that money in a PC all in one, I get: the gateway profile.
2.6 GHz celeron, combo drive, 15 inch screen (build in and fix position), 256 megs of memory , Intel Extreme 2 graphics with 64 megs shared system memory, windows XP home, Works, assorted 3rd party apps. USB 2 no fireWire (tough luck for home video I guess?)
now, again, apple lacks configurability, and on the low end, if you are looking at a modular PC, any manufacturer can beat them, but spec for spec (Type of computer is included) apple is dead on price or close to it of the PC counterparts.
You summed up the author’s argument very well, thank you.
So the guy’s laptop goes south for the nth time and the apologists come out and say, “It’s alright! Apple have a repair programme, so it’s sorted. We can keep worshipping Steve Jobs without our whole belief system falling over.”
Yes, other vendors have some pretty major quality control issues – witness the outrage with Dell – and what tends to happen is that a large group of people effectively boycott that manufacturer. Yet when people who seem to be positive about (or even affectionate of) Apple’s products mention their problems with the reliability of various Apple products, they get their letter of excommunication in the post, possibly with an explanation that the faithful are expected to buy a new iPod every six months.
If my laptop failed six times, I’d never entertain doing business with the manufacturer ever again. And it’d be irresponsible not to warn other people about it, too.
Ok:
IBM (laptop),
Philips (monitors,
Sony (laptop),
Microsoft (software),
Mandrakesoft (linux),
Dell (laptop).
Consider yourselves warned!
I’m use Win2k exclusively. I’ve never used a Mac or Linux.
You mentioned that “this really ends up being about the software.” I don’t understand what prevented you from backing up your files from the Mac laptop to the Linux Desktop from the outset. I synchronize my Dell laptop with my home system daily in case the laptop gets stolen or damaged.
Why would you have to set up Linux 6 times on your desktop after sending the laptop in for repair? Do you not typically not keep Linux running on that box?
I simply can’t imagine people continuing to purchase products from a company they have been burned by so many times. If I purchased a laptop from anyone and had these problems I can promise you I would never even consider buying another one. It’s just logical.
I’m questioning the value of the logic board replacement program. It appears that when Apple needs to replace an iBook logic board they just grab another faulty board off the shelf, pop it in, and return to sender. This is NOT correcting the problem but just dragging it out while making it look like they are actually doing something.