Once again, I posted a Tweet (which went on to my Facebook) about Apple messing up (this time, about Mail with disappearing attachments). There were no replies.
Interestingly, whenever I post about a Windows bug, the Mac evangelists all swarm on to it, usually with the sentiment, ‘Get a Mac.’
They all disappear whenever I post a problem about the Macintosh.
Yet, the Windows users don’t swarm all over and say, ‘Get Windows.’
While through most of the 1990s, I would agree with the Mac sentiment, since around 1998, I’ve been able to crash Apples as regularly as Windows-based machines. (I do not have enough Linux experience to make a judgement of that platform.)
I’m not sure where this supposed superiority complex comes from any more, other than the Mac buyer being financially better off and paying more.
But paying more, as a 1990s Rolls-Royce owner might attest, does not get you something better.
However, as Rolls-Royce knows, perceived quality plays an awfully big part in brand equity.
The reality is I’ve had everything from font embedding errors and missing icons to corrupted file transfers and programs crashing on opening on the Macintosh.
They are every bit as serious as what I experience on various Windows platforms.
And while I get fewer Mac viruses, the ability for an average Joe like me to troubleshoot is severely diminished because of the smaller user base—and, consequently, the dearth of support pages out there.
Or, the conspiracy theorist must ask: is it due to the brand being so hallowed that users don’t post information about their supposedly perfect computers?
It’s all the same to me: computers are computers, and they all crash at some point.
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But when they’re up and running the Mac is a much nicer creature.
Hej Hans Eric: nice to hear from you!
They are all the same to me, really.
While through most of the 1990s, I would agree with the Mac sentiment, since around 1998, I’ve been able to crash Apples as regularly as Windows-based machines. (I do not have enough Linux experience to make a judgement of that platform.)
You actually have subsets of Mac users that talk about Macs before the Darwin kernel was adopted, and after. Or before the Intel architecture was adopted, and Macs still used the PowerPC chip.
There are protagonists and antagonists along those lines. One of the biggest ones is the users that wanted a BeOS kernel to be adopted instead of Darwin.
The Macintosh is actually a strange bedfellow in the alternative OS world because the Darwin kernel ties the Mac to the evolution of UNIX. Or perhaps I should say it shares a subset with Linux and BSD on behalf of its UNIX inheritance.
So… many Linux evangelists are much kinder to Mac users than they are to Windows ones. That is slowly changing, but an explanation of such would be outside the scope of my comment.
The thing about Linux, though, is that it’s not as standardized as either Mac or Windows. I’d say much of the Linux distros out there trace back either to Debian (Ubuntu traces to Debian), SUSE, Red Hat/Fedora, or Gentoo. You therefore can’t make pat statements about Linux as a whole because those branches are a little different. The desktop isn’t standardized, either: desktop GUI choices include Gnome, KDE, XFCE, and Unity. Of course you then have users that prefer the command line interface alone; something that Windows users sometimes consider a relic of the MS-DOS era.
Anddddd then there’s the Hackintosh: the Mac OS desktop computer on non-Apple hardware. Apple continues to be proprietary (somewhat) in its hardware; more so than Windows and definitely more so than most Linux setups. (I will say it’s wise to choose hardware carefully when setting up a good Linux box.)
Anyways, the consensus I got from many users was that Macs DO crash, supposedly less frequently, but of course cost much more to fix.
It was also pointed out to me that the original Mac (later redubbed the “Classic”) was buggy as hell, but was much, much more user-friendly than most machines of the era.
Oh, and then there are those that are nostalgic for the Apple 2 series. I used a //e back in the day and I don’t quite understand such sentiments, really.
I did hear from one friend who talked of motherboard failures, but it seemed he was prepared to put up with them (as Apple replaced them free of charge) than own a PC. Viruses were the biggie, and I have to agree on that front.
I’d like to see a robust, no-frills OS sometimes: a non-buggy and up-to-date OS 9, for example, might not be a bad thing; equally, Windows XP has dated reasonably well by being more tightly programmed than ME. All the fancy stuff like jumping OS X icons and Windows Vista and 7 glassy effects look great, and I know we can switch them off, but they come across as mostly cosmetic.
I was a fan of the Apple IIe, and the IIc was, arguably, Apple’s first truly stylish computer. However, we could only afford a Commodore 64, and I got years of good use out of that.
well what i seen when i was working for a router/cable modem/dsl modem company i found the mac users were more rude and expected me to support their system. as a linux user and not a windows user or mac user i looked at both windows and mac system as the same as what i can do for them as in support since i was just their for the my products and not for their computer systems. when they were rude i would then send them to apple I would go and say look im here for my products not for your computer. they would say well you would do this for windows i would then say look i dont use ether system so i dont favor ether. and I do more for mac users than i do for windows. the thing is the pride of these people have made me to the point to never wanting a mac computer. I get sick of knowning how to use thier system bettr than the users of the owners of that given system. the thing is if your calling someone for help you dont treat them bad even with a unpopular system like mac os. anywho all operating systems have their problems believe me i have seen little bugs from each system. and can tell what the problems is knowing what version of mac os or of windows. there is no perfect operating system and nothing is perfect its man made im waiting for linux to finely get some light in the computer world