So should we consider Apple a cult yet?

[elgarak]

I use a Mac Pro all the time. Admittedly, I think they are a waste of money seeing as how I can put together a much better PC for the same money. But whatever. Not my money.

I do see a freaking spinning beach ball all the time. I have no idea what the **** that means other than I need to reboot the system. So **** that other ****.

Spinning beach ball and reboot? Why?

Boy, you don't know anything about the Mac you're using.

 

[Rat]

Spinning beach ball and reboot? Why?

Boy, you don't know anything about the Mac you're using.

I thought they just worked?

 

[elgarak]

I thought they just worked?

They're tools. To use tools effectively one needs to know how tools work.

Claiming that "spinning beach balls on Macs require a reboot" (in this simple absolute formulation) shows ignorance about the tool at hand.

 

[not daSkeptic]

Claiming that "spinning beach balls on Macs require a reboot" (in this simple absolute formulation) shows ignorance about the tool at hand.

Indeed. The spinning beach-ball simply means the application in question hasn't responded to any system events in at least five-seconds. This could be due to something as simple as a lengthy operation (and will eventually recover) or it could be the result of an endless loop. Either way, I've never seen it affect anything other than the one program, and a simple force-quit takes care of the issue.

 

[dtugg]

Some aren't able to do these things, and it's not limited to Mac users. What you perceive as simple tasks are, to many people, very difficult for a variety of reasons. Some have difficulty reading, some have difficulty understanding, some have difficulty remembering, some have difficulty following directions, some have a phobia of things technological, some like to randomly push buttons ...

Just because you have the capacity to take an item which you have never seen before, quickly read the instructions, comprehend them, and follow them to the letter without deviating does not mean everyone else can do the same. Considering the number of times I've had to point this concept out to you I can only conclude that you are either a troll or entirely incapable of understanding that not everybody is like you.

Then they are dumb. I gave my grandmother simple instructions on how to do this and she was able to do it and she hates computers.

And re: spinning beach ball of death. I know you can force quit applications similar to alt control delete in Windows. You are not always able to do this; the system is completely unresponsive and the only way to fix it is to reboot. I actually cannot remember the last time a crash in Windows made me reboot the system

 

[not daSkeptic]

Then they are dumb.

Yes, they are. Welcome to Earth.

 

[Ysidro]

Rat, I appreciate your perspective, but I can't explain why you can have a PC and not experience the issues that every PC user I've ever met seems to have. This includes people I work with every day who develop for Windows and who know more about the OS than I ever will.

My experience matches Rat's. When I've had any catastrophic failure it's always been a hardware issue. That's not Microsoft's fault.

What the hell are these people doing to their systems?

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Christ, what the **** do you people do to your computers? I just don't see that sort of failure with any of the machines I have dealings with, aside from when hard drives are failing or the like, which leads me to point out that had you lost all of your drawings, poetry, and stories, you would have literally no one to blame but yourself. Hard drives die with similar frequency in Macs and PCs, mainly because they're identical pieces of hardware; if you don't keep up-to-date backups of your important data, it's not at all unlikely that you will lose it at some point, even if you're now using a magic Mac.

Dude, PCs do crash more than Macs. That's a fact.

What have I been doing to my computer? Well, I'll tell you what I've been doing to my computers: exactly the same thing. I haven't changed anything in my daily computer activities. And yet my PCs crashed all the times and my Mac rarely ever crashes. So it's not what I do, it's the computer.

 

[dtugg]

Dude, PCs do crash more than Macs. That's a fact.

Prove it.

What have I been doing to my computer? Well, I'll tell you what I've been doing to my computers: exactly the same thing. I haven't changed anything in my daily computer activities. And yet my PCs crashed all the times and my Mac rarely ever crashes. So it's not what I do, it's the computer.

The Mac I use crashes often (at least once a week). My Windows machines never crash.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Prove it.



The Mac I use crashes often (at least once a week). My Windows machines never crash.

Great, so we got so far:

Ron Tomkins: 1
Tdougg: 1

It's a tie. Except of course for all of my friends, who have been through the same situation I have. Also, many PC's I've used have shown to be more chaotic and tend to crash. That has never happened to me with any Mac computers.

Since you're probably gonna tell me you have a bunch of friends who have the opposite thing happening to them, then I guess we'll have to admit we can't reach a conclusion without a serious statistical study.

From my personal experience, it's the PC's. I'm not writing that in stone, but in my personal experience, PC's have proven to behave in a much less reliable way than Macs.

 

[BobTheDonkey]

Indeed. The spinning beach-ball simply means the application in question hasn't responded to any system events in at least five-seconds. This could be due to something as simple as a lengthy operation (and will eventually recover) or it could be the result of an endless loop. Either way, I've never seen it affect anything other than the one program, and a simple force-quit takes care of the issue.

So...you mean...one should expect to need a little knowledge of the system they're using for it to function properly?

Like, I dunno, how to load a DVD, click a few buttons, enter a username and password?

Fanbois gonna hate.

 

[dtugg]

So...you mean...one should expect to need a little knowledge of the system they're using for it to function properly?

Like, I dunno, how to load a DVD, click a few buttons, enter a username and password?

Fanbois gonna hate.

I know how you're supposed to resolve that stupid spinning beach ball. Doesn't mean it always works.

 

[BobTheDonkey]

I know how you're supposed to resolve that stupid spinning beach ball. Doesn't mean it always works.

I think you missed the point of my post...I'm not a Mac fanboi. I grew up on Mac's, have run different flavors of Linux, and still prefer Win7 *shrug*

What I don't appreciate, however, are the people like da skeptic who complain that installing Windows is too difficult for someone who knows less than nothing about computers and then turns around and tells someone that the problem with their Mac isn't really a problem if they just knew how to fix it.

Special pleading much?

 

[dtugg]

I think you missed the point of my post...I'm not a Mac fanboi. I grew up on Mac's, have run different flavors of Linux, and still prefer Win7 *shrug*

What I don't appreciate, however, are the people like da skeptic who complain that installing Windows is too difficult for someone who knows less than nothing about computers and then turns around and tells someone that the problem with their Mac isn't really a problem if they just knew how to fix it.

Special pleading much?

My apologies.

 

[not daSkeptic]

What I don't appreciate, however, are the people like da skeptic who complain that installing Windows is too difficult for someone who knows less than nothing about computers and then turns around and tells someone that the problem with their Mac isn't really a problem if they just knew how to fix it.

Special pleading much?

Yes, it would be special pleading if dtugg were someone who knew less than nothing about computers.

 

[MrMark]

Long-time (daily) JREF forum reader, super-rare poster here...

I'd always used Windows boxes and laptops and XP is the system I've got a shed-load of experience in. I got used to - through amassing experience in the system - the quirks and problems with XP and how to avoid them. My first-ever Windows desktop got so stacked-up with malware and whatnot that I'd have to go into the task manager and kill multiple processes over and over to ensure that the machine wouldn't try to dial a telephone number in Spain...

My problems on the machine were caused by my lack of experience at the time - I'd click "OK" on any download that popped up, used P2P to download all sorts of dodgy nonsense and basically acted that an oblivious drunk wandering through the bad part of town without a care in the world.

After gaining my stripes in XP I then dabbled in Linux as I'd read about the lack of malware and how Ubuntu was a "just-works" sort of a system. While I found the new system interesting to use - I love a bit of novelty, me - and I enjoyed the freedom from viruses and spyware &c., I didn't find it the most stable of systems and setting up things like audio and wireless could be time consuming when you updated something. On the plus-side, the online community for Ubuntu was first-class; on the minus-side, I didn't feel like I wanted to faff about and worry about being sure my system wouldn't suddenly fall over due to some - seemingly innocuous - change that I'd made.

A couple or three years ago I started looking at setting up a home theatre PC. I discovered Plex and the Mac Mini and was impressed that they'd managed to fit a fully-functioning PC in such a tiny form-factor. I purchased the Mini and since day one I've never failed to be impressed with its newbie-friendliness.

Yes, there were oddities like the drag-CD-to-trash-to-eject; the way in which you can close a window but the program remains open and so one. However, these issues - and plenty of others that I'm sure I can't now remember - were soon disposed of because the OS was so simple and intuitive.

I find Windows to be just as intuitive as I've put in my time with that system but OS X seems to remove a layer of complexity from the interactions you make with it. My home office has a Windows box on one side of the desk and a Mac on the other. I use them both pretty much equally, except I do my internet browsing on the Mac.

I don't think my position is one of being an evangelist. The only evangelism I engage in is that if a friend or family member wants to get a new computer, or is having never-ending issues with their computer, I'll tend to recommend a Mac just because in the long-term I'm going to get less support requests; in the short-term I'm sure I'll be asked quite a lot of questions just because it's a new system to them and it's easier to get trusted help from a friend than Googling a solution and being unsure of its provenance.

I've just read back what I wrote and it's a ramble without a point, it seems. I suppose the point is that you've got less to learn with a Mac, maybe? The caveat is that I've not used Windows 7 from a position of ignorance of Windows systems in general.

 

[quadraginta]

Rat, I appreciate your perspective, but I can't explain why you can have a PC and not experience the issues that every PC user I've ever met seems to have. This includes people I work with every day who develop for Windows and who know more about the OS than I ever will.

No, and I'm not being rhetorical when I say it really is a mystery to me as well. I don't think you're lying, and I don't think you're stupid, and I find it hard to imagine how you could be mistaken. I guess there could be some confirmation bias on both our parts, but otherwise I'm at a loss.

FWIW, I've been using MS products since 1983, when upgrading from 64K to a whopping 640K of RAM required that I open up the box and install eighty one sixteen pin DIP chips the size of a finger joint. My very first BSOD occurred a few weeks ago, when in a moment of weakness I unwisely allowed iTunes to update itself. (I have iTunes loaded on my laptop, but use it rarely, and try to keep its pieces out of my start-up routine.) I think it decided to be pissy about a Logitech driver I had just started using for my trackball. At any rate, I uninstalled the update and the problem went away.

In those twenty eight years I have so far (knock on wood ) managed to avoid being infected by any sort of malware on my personal machines. This in spite of using many more pieces of different software, and exploring the net in many more places than the average user. Mostly on machines with MS operating systems.

---------------------------------------------------------

In those early days many tasks not accomplished by off-the-shelf software could be implemented in MS-DOS with user created batch files. By way of example the one to get FidoNet rolling could approach hundreds of lines and call more than a few other batch files in the process. Often the OS environment space was employed to set flags which could pass info from one batch file to another (or to itself, since the batch files themselves were not at that time re-entrant.) The very earliest iterations of MS-DOS had a finite sized environment space which was quickly used up by this sort of task. Using debug I patched the OS to expand the environment space. This was not the sort of tinkering which an Apple user could do even if they wanted to, because the Apple OS was not that accessible to the user.

This kind of difference in philosophy was what set the two apart to me back then, and I haven't had much reason to consider it to have changed. It's a small point, and meaningless to most users, who weren't trying to do things like write or use huge batch files in the first place, much less fiddle with their OS on a level that debug operates, but the fact was that you could do it with one product, and you couldn't with the other, at least not with the tool set that came out of the box.

From the onset the most significant difference between the two was that PC users who had MS machines expected to be able to open up the box and add hardware or tinker with the software on many different levels, and Apple users, if they wanted to open the box up at all (which would void their warranties) had to buy special tool sets to do it. Clearly different target markets.

It is telling that Apple has come to depend on glitzy consumer products, mostly repackaging established but not quite yet mainstream ideas with slick wrappers and claiming that they are 'new', to make money, while MS is still selling software and software alone, just like they started out doing more than thirty years ago, and are still managing to do quite profitably.

In some respects Apple hasn't changed that much either, I suppose.

 

[fls]

Yeah, it seems pretty clear that since different users are looking for different experiences, it is fortunate the market offers variety on those terms. I still can't figure out why this generates antipathy.

Linda

 

[quadraginta]

Yeah, it seems pretty clear that since different users are looking for different experiences, it is fortunate the market offers variety on those terms. I still can't figure out why this generates antipathy.

Linda

Me either, but it's loads of fun to watch.

 

[Seismosaurus]

Christ, what the **** do you people do to your computers?

Nothing spectacular... browse the net, use Word/Excel, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, things like that. I don't even play computer games, with rare exceptions.

Hard drives die with similar frequency in Macs and PCs, mainly because they're identical pieces of hardware; if you don't keep up-to-date backups of your important data, it's not at all unlikely that you will lose it at some point, even if you're now using a magic Mac.

There was nothing wrong with the drive itself. Each time it happened my brother ended up having to wipe the drive clean and reinstall everything - the hardware itself was perfectly fine. He could never tell me what caused it specifically, though the suspicion was a virus that got past the virus program.

These days I have a plug in backup drive with the Time Machine backup feature using it.

I have to support iPhones at work, and they're not bad phones at all, but they're certainly not great.

Well I had very specific requirements for my phone. When I first got it I was carrying an iPod and phone around, which was a pain. The iPhone let me replace two machines with one, plus it's got iTunes, which is how I play music on my iMac... it's just sensible to have it all the same as far as I'm concerned. I like the screen, I like the functionality. That's what I like best about all Mac products - they're not infallible at all, but my "PC experience" is that you frequently have to fight the thing to get it to do what you want it to do. On the iMac, I just do stuff.