I hear mac fanboys yelping all the time about how macs “just work” and “out of the box…this or that” and “iLife included,” etc. All this raving is supposed to convince you to spend lots extra on a Mac.
For a while now though, I’ve been having more problems with my Mac than my PC. Seriously.
It randomly kernel panics. For those who don’t know, this is the equivalent of the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death. It’s a forced reboot. I’ve had more KP’s on my Mac Mini in the last year than on my PC, and I use my PC much, much more than my Mac Mini.
I can’t enable Digital Audio out while playing back recordings from TV that I made with my (mac-overpriced) USB TV tuner, because every time I do…Kernel Panic. Guaranteed.
Lately, my operating system (yes, the beloved OS X Leopard) ground to a halt because of fragmentation issues–but you can’t defrag a mac hard drive without shelling out for iDefrag, so I had to boot from the OSX install DVD to be able to backup my drive to another drive and then restore it back to the original drive. What a pain.
Front Row, a fairly simple media playing application, takes about 60 seconds to load. No visible reason why. You press the button on the remote, nothing happens, and you just have to wait. And wait. And wait….oh, but Apple has also stopped including those handy little remotes with their computers. Now you pay $20 for them. (Are you kidding!?! $20?!?)
As far as iLife is concerned…check out the apps included with Vista/Windows 7. Amazingly, they’re quite good. Get over your Mac utopian perspectives, they’re obsolete.
“But you can run Windows on your Mac too with Boot Camp or Parallels!” Or, you can just buy a PC and run Windows all the time. I got so frustrated with OS X today that I installed Windows 7 on my Mac Mini–it ran faster than Leopard, looked really really nice, but ultimately had to go: there’s no good drivers for the Apple IR Receiver, my Bluetooth mouse didn’t work perfectly, and my overpriced Mac TV Tuner wasn’t working quite right. Once the final Version of Windows 7 is out though, you better believe I’ll be giving it another try.
Lately, my most-used phrase of exasperation has been along the lines of: “that’s a Mac for you.”
If it weren’t for Quicksilver, SSH, two-finger trackpad scrolling, and the perfect size of my Macbook…I’d be completely disillusioned. Instead, I’m just mostly disillusioned.
