Got your attention?
All right, then let me start.
Actually, before I start, let me set the record straight, just in case some Jobs-nuts out there were already playing with the trigger of their reply button:
No matter how much you think you can vouch for your loyalty to King Jobs and his court of Cupertino, no matter how much you think you’ve earned your right to sit with the Knights of the Golden Apple, no matter how intimately attached to your Powerbook you are… Thou doth not even come close to my level of Macitude, OK? Just don’t try.
I learned to draw on MacPaint with a 512k before I knew how to hold a pencil, I was making killer games on Hypercard when you were still playing Mario Bros. on your brother’s NES and I had written enough useless Mac-PC flamewar postings on Usenet to fill a newsgroup within the first year of my first “Internet” account (yea, I know that’s pretty pathetic… but remember we are talking about a faraway time where nobody had yet figured what to do with this internet thing beside trolling and browsing for porn… not that anybody has, ever since). The total value of all the Apple equipment I’ve bought, had my employer buy, or stollen from heavily-guarded warehouses at great risk for my life, would likely pay off the debt of a small African country, and short of getting a position as Steve’s personal poolboy, I’ve been involved in about every aspect of the Mac-related development industry you could think of.
So before you start yelling at me for disparagingly commenting on your beloved brand and tell me how much you really like your iMac, just make sure we are on the same ground, ok?
Right. So, why do I hate Apple and their products?
Where do I start?
How about here… and there…
Now of course, maybe I’m just a very unlucky person who happen to have bought the only two products coming from Apple this past year, ridden with defects and design flaws. Maybe I am an incredibly unlucky person and the models I bought belonged to a minority of factory defects, in no way representative of the overall high quality of their products.
Or maybe, just maybe, most of the products released by Apple these last few years are low-quality, margin-gnawing, under-tested pieces of crap, thinly disguised under [admittedly very pretty] professional designs.
Now, these are the kind of stats we won’t ever see unless somebody breaks into Steve’s office safe, but a little bird tells me these defects occur a bit more frequently than you are entitled to expect from devices paid well over market price. Actually, my little bird has a lot of friends who have purchased either an iPod or a Powerbook G4 in the last year or so, and a quick roundup on their level of satisfaction with their machines indicated that the group of those experiencing huge white blotch on their laptop LCD or comatose battery life on their nearly-new iPod far outnumbered the happy-customer group. call that a coincidence, but I was barely surprised when my own equipment started failing in the announced fashion after less than 6 months of intensive-though-careful use.
And don’t tell me this is no big deal, “as Apple will magnanimously accept to take care of these small impediments, at no charge for me”, and return a functioning unit, “in less than 2 weeks”… Do you think I paid such an inflated price for a laptop, just in order to spend a day backing up its data, figuring how to mail it in one piece and part with my main work instrument for a period of 15 freaking days?!? All that because Apple did not deem useful to do basic testing on their products and have been selling entire series of defective products ?!?
Even though my quasi-religious loyalty to the brand is waaay long gone (nothing like an internship somewhere 30 minutes south of San Francisco to help you bury that kind of pre-adolescent infatuation) and work has long been switched half off the mac (ever since the difficultly defensible years of MacOS 8-9), using OS X had given me a lot of hope for the future. And I was happy to have a decent alternative to that increasingly bug-ridden excuse of an OS, 90% of the planet insist on subjecting themselves through.
But right now, I really do not see how I could ever buy another piece of Apple hardware any time soon. I doubt I am the only one. And somehow I got the feeling Steve doesn’t really give a damn: he’s much too busy selling iPods and iTunes tracks to my grandma and my little brother, and he’s probably right considering the cash opportunities in either market.
Let’s seriously hope for some hardware overture (“overture”, you know, as in “intel version” or, gasp “mac-compatible clone”) before Apple kills its OS for good along with its hardware…
Update: When I told you I’m not alone…
Update 2: And the fun only begins… what do you know… this morning, the super-cool magnetic latch on my PB just died… meaning that, on top of having white blotches all over the screen, a semi-faulty charger and a frame unexplainably skewed, I am now unable to properly close my laptop… I feel like killing somebody.
The screen will be covered by the warranty, and everyone (even most mac computer users) accepts that the battery issue makes them useless. Of course if you had actually researched the iPod before buying one then you wouldn’t be in this situation.
David,
First off, I’d advise checking the date: you’ll realize this is a bit old news.
Second, the screen was indeed covered by the warranty (quite obviously), a warranty doesn’t excuse the fact that a piece of hardware seem to have been sold with an incredibly high rate of defects, long after they would have realized. basically Apple’s way of saying “we sure hope not everybody will notice”…
As for the iPod, I bought it a *long* time ago. Back when this particular issue was neither very publicized, nor necessarily relevant to the very model I was buying. But if, in essence, you are calling me an idiot for not realizing Apple was selling a crappy product before I bought it, consider me warned now: won’t happen again.
The first iPod I had was defective. It wouldn’t connect via FireWire. As I was a Windows user, running FireWire off his motherboard’s built in ports, I was adviced by Apple to buy a FireWire card that set me back $40.00. Still no go. A trip to the G5 machines in my university’s computer lab quickly told me that the fault was in the iPod. Still, my lust for OSX compells me to buy a Mac (when I can afford it)… damn it.
Given that you write the best spam filter WordPress has ever seen, it’s quite funny to see your blog with something like this. Less funny that you send it as an email to people who haven’t even commented never mind requested a subscription
First off (for future readers who may be wondering what the previous comment is about):
Mr. Russel, in his comment above is referring to a now defunct comment that consisted essentially of the words “die apple” repeated over and over. Ostensibly a disgruntled apple user voicing his issues with the brand and simultaneously managing to get acquainted with my blacklist (and possibly the RBL server’s blacklist, if I’m in a bad mood).
Second, to Mr. Russel:
Indeed, I write a spam filter for WP (whether it’s the best one available or not, I’ll leave it to its users to decide, I’m quite happy with it myself). The accepted definition of spam does involve, to some extent, automation. If said “spam” has been manually typed and individually submitted, it does not, per se, constitute “spam” as we know it, merely annoying and moronic banter.
SK2 (the spam filter you are referring to) is designed to stop primarily *automated* spam. It can occasionally work on some manual spam (assuming certain patterns emerge). It should take only minimal technical knowledge to realize that a comment such as the one you glanced at is hardly stoppable by any form of script. Short of using some sort of Naive-Bayes algorithm (which would most likely end up letting through all the *real* automated spam) or training a monkey to detect high level of moronity in comment’s content (but we might have certain false positive issues here too), there is no way to automatically filter such comment. I thought this should be obvious, but apparently not.
Now, as for why you received this email and contrary to your recent statements, guess what: 1) you did comment on this entry and 2) you did request a subscription by leaving the “Send me follow-ups by email” options checked.
I personally didn’t even have to check to remember your particularly virulent tour of this blog and the many more or less relevant comments left on miscellaneous entries. As for you, simply browsing to this page and looking at the comment list would have quickly revealed that you were, indeed, a previous commenter (the stronger color of the comment icon, indicating a subscribed commenter, but you’d have been forgiven for overlooking that part).
Now may I humbly suggest you peruse that “Remove all subscriptions” link in the email that was sent to you, so as to avoid repeating such tedious conversation every time a moron in a commenting mood stumble upon one of my entries (and it unfortunately happens more often than it should).
My apologies – my name was obscured by a colour clash (I have a ‘nofollow detector’ css hack in wordpress, white and pink don’t go well). My mistake – sorry about that.
Spam Karma still kicks ass though, and I will miss it more than anything else about WordPress now that I’ve moved to Textpattern.
Apologies wholeheartedly accepted and wishing you luck in your future textpattern endeavours.
Hmm… A magnetic clasp on a computer… Who’d a thunk it?
I hate apple for host of different reasons that are all summed up like this “The worst hardware and customer support I have ever experienced!”
In the last three two Mac’s died and I just bought(was forced to buy) a Macbook for my daughter and I could not get it out of the apple store before it broke. It is sitting at the store right now and the apple “genius”(an oxymoron) is trying to diagnose and fix the problem. This has gone on for two days.
Oh and did I say that the apple store told me the Macbook was ready with all my data transfered from an Ibook and whn I checked it nothing had been transfered. Great cusotmer service.
To close out this rant…3 IPod’s in three years all broke…my cheap MP3 player from MPIO has not skipped a beat in the same time.
That is why I hate apple!!!!!