The Mac Myth: So Sick Of All This Mac Love. Macs Are A Pain.

http://www.johnhasson.com/index.php/the-mac-myth-so-sick-of-all-this-mac-love-macs-are-a-pain/

by coglethorpe • 17 years ago

16 56 17 years ago

johnhasson.com

lispydreams001• 17 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Macs are just about design, that's it. It's just a brand.

cschep• 17 years ago

Couldn't disagree more. Macs are about function, that's it. It's just about working right with less hassle.

This is my personal experience anyway. All day at work on Vista, crashing, stuttering, awful. Mac OS X at home.

If you already use (and are happy with) Linux, you probably won't gain much from a switch to Mac. I never wish I was on windows. I don't even have it installed in VMWare.

Our experiences are our own though. Hasn't this conversation been done to death?

sachmanb3• 17 years ago

i seriously think you guys make some of this up....i work all day in vista too, but it doesn't crash, or stutter...or anything. i don't use any antivirus programs, haven't had any problems in a long time due to excellent use of common sense. my machines go faster since i upgraded to vista from xp. my family is mostly computer illiterate but they don't run into that many problems either - even though my dad keeps forgetting where 'my documents' is.

outside of driver problems, which can happen on any machine and why you should get good hardware - and badly developed 3rd party apps that you shouldn't run anyway - windows has been pretty stable since win2000. not as stable as my freebsd boxes, but considering how much work i do - very stable. my desktop reboots on tuesday nights for windows updates and thats about it. all my windows 2008 machines are doing fine too, just like my ubuntu servers.

vista crashing, stutering, awful ... i read these but i have a suspicion your all exagerrating

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Presumably you also use a door propped up on cinderblocks for a desk, you listen to music on a Coby stereo, you carry a Zune, you drive a Kia instead of an Audi, you buy your clothes at Wal-Mart, and you drink wine out of plastic cups.

raganwald• 17 years ago

And goddammit, I write code by flipping toggle switches on the front panel of my Nova 1220 minicomputer, as God intended it to be done.

Now get off my lawn!

judofyr• 17 years ago

Nice try, but I'm not feeding this troll.. Okay then, two comments:

1. Why buy a Mac if you're only using Windows software (and not looking for other alternatives)?

2. "I didn't like this website, so obviously Internet is a crappy place."

EDIT: Still, there might be many another crappy websites out there. You're never uniq.

addicttostress4• 17 years ago

1. The Mac advertising and constant "It just works" mantra can lead many people to think they would work better on a Mac. The answer that you can just run Windows apps in VMWare when you need them gives people on the edge more of a reason to check out what all the fuss is about. It's been built up to be a bullet proof system from the OS to the hardware but like all systems it isn't perfect. When someone hears million times that this is perfect you should use it and they end up disappointed should you really be waging a finger at them for being an idiot because they listened to the advertising noise?

1.a (short): People buy macs to look cool or feel a part of the group of the "in crowd", even if that means they use nothing but windows on it.

coglethorpe• 17 years ago

I submitted this because I wanted to honestly see what people's views on the Mac were. Well, I guess I got my answer. :-)

What's interesting is that the Mac/Windows debate is intense enough that this still got comments and votes long after it was flagged off the front page...

javert• 17 years ago

I'm thinking about buying a Mac (currently a Linux guy, but I like the Mac hardware).

Is this article accurate? Seems like many, possibly most, computer science people use Macs and have much love for them.

addicttostress4• 17 years ago

My brother is a big fan of his MacBook Pro he uses for work and it's mainly because of his Unix admin background. When I look over his shoulder its all log files and terminal windows. Personally I've had too many issues to warrant a change of OS/Hardware for something that looks snazzy and has a pretty interface.

sachmanb3• 17 years ago

i believe that's because they get to run their -nix apps and rich apps (OS X/Cocoa) - mix in some Parallels and they got their windows apps too. that said, i have no interest in owning an apple machine because [1] i can run -nix apps on my servers and virtual machines, [2] i have no interest in OS X native apps, and [3] for value i get / costs, apple always loses out to machines i build for myself or laptops from dell

thenduks3• 17 years ago

Nothing is perfect (I mean, it's still more or less typical commodity hardware and who knows better than us that there's no such thing as bug free?) but... no, this dude is totally crazy. I've never looked back. Further, I've switched most of my family and friends, they aren't looking back either.

jhasson3• 17 years ago

Yes, lol, yes. by all means.. if you are a linux guy, just buy a linux laptop (pick your flavor). You can get 2 or 3 for the price of one mac, and it will probably last longer (physical hardware)

cvboss• 17 years ago

The article is NOT accurate. I am a happy owner of Dell laptop with Vista - and the guy insulted those two things :)

Seriously, I think its a matter of personal preferences.I am using my dell/vista 10-14 hours a day, restart maybe once a week/fortnight and have problems once in a while,

But hey, I am a developer myself, I know the process of software development too well to complain about anything sofware/hardware related. It's just the way it is.

And I think it's a bit lame to expect something that guarantees you flowless experience whatever you do. A computer is a bit more complex than a calculator. It gives you more power and more freedom and eventually more ways to break things.

utx005• 17 years ago

they still get very hot. they still don't have dedicated pgup/pgdn keys, the resolution is too high (1280x800 for me), the antialiasing is very blurry!, so expensive, so cold in the winter (the aluminium you ken)

a kick-ass t400 can go for 50% less for a comparable configuration. wait around in the lenovo site for a 20% off deal. they're running them non-stop now. i have t40/t61/z60t and t400. love them all to pieces. one powerbook (my great blunder) sold on ebay :)

oh, i dropped the z60t on its side from a considerable height. (~ 4m) a bit of the plastic on the side flew off, the monitor became unhinged. i just popped everything back together, kept working. wouldn't try this with a delicate powerbook.

addicttostress4• 17 years ago

My office has iMac computers used only for testing. Out of the 7 in the office 4 have died. One started smoking and made a very loud noise before dying out. None of the 40+ PC's in the office have died. Sample size of 1 office but it's enough for me to steer clear of their hardware. After all these problems its been a running joke in the office "I though Macs just worked?!"

carbon83• 17 years ago

Apple computers are consistently more reliable than average, and historically (at least the last 10 years) they've frequently been top ranked in reliability rankings (consumer reports, RescueCom, etc).

"Sample size of 1 office but it's enough for me to steer clear of their hardware."

That doesn't make a lot of sense considering minimal research would have revealed that this is not representative of the situation overall.

addicttostress4• 17 years ago

Minimal research from a perspective of hands on usage would be both time and cost prohibitive. It's acceptable to gain an opinion of hardware or OS by hands on usage but I wouldn't want to invest that much money in systems that I've watched fail on a regular basis.

jibiki• 17 years ago

Consumer reports seems to have rankings, but you have to register to view them. Fortunately, I found them (maybe) on google images:

http://cache.consumerist.com/assets/resources/2006/10/laptop...

My anecdotal experience is also that macs are a little bit unreliable, but this is obviously a subject on which we should trust the data (which says that macs are slightly above average.)

ryanvm• 17 years ago

As recent switcher, I have to say I mostly agree. Macs still freeze and lock up and do weird shit, but at least you don't have to run on the antivirus/antispyware treadmill like you do with Windows. That alone makes a Mac worth it for me.

Of course, I scooped up mine when it was a deal on Amazon. I could never justify paying full sticker price...

arrrg2• 17 years ago

If it freezes you are doing something wrong.

I had no crash or freeze of the OS (any OS, really, XP, Vista, OS X) for years now. Well, it’s down to maybe one or two per year, but that’s certainly tolerable.

utx005• 17 years ago

"If it freezes you are doing something wrong"

wow.

jeremymcanally• 17 years ago

If you run Windows 99% of the time, then maybe a Windows laptop is what you need? Seems like common sense.

Even outside of that, though, it sounds like this guy is basically a n00b. I've owned Macs for about 10 years now and never hit these issues (I know, I know, anecdotes, blah blah blah). I mean, come on. Worms? Seriously? What is he doing? Sitting on public wi-fi with his whole hard drive shared?

And his hardware problems would be fixed...had he gotten the extended warranty he whined about. That's standard for any laptop vendor; computers break, that's what the warranty is for.

Apple's not perfect by any means, but it sounds like this guy got two lemon laptops or he simply doesn't know WTF he's doing.

roc• 17 years ago

He's holding bad third party software against Apple and OS/X.

Really, you can stop reading right there.

robotron• 17 years ago

Exactly. That's the same kind of approach detractors to Windows take. Blue screens are actually caused by third-party driver issues, for example, yet are still used as a negative point when they are virtually nonexistent in current versions of Windows.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Verbatim quote from the middle of the post, not aligned to paragraphs, not that that would matter:

[...] [WTF firefox why u so slow on a mac?!]

But. If you JUST install Microsoft software on a windows machine u can say the same thing about stability. Oh yeah, duh, games. I don’t really play games like I used to anymore, but srsly. Games.

So… Don’t get a mac just cuz everyone else is doing it. [...]

moe• 17 years ago

His abuse of the language certainly doesn't help to take him serious. Is it so hard to spell out "you" and "because", if only to sound less like a spoiled 16 year old who's whining about his latest toy?

Once again I have to ask: Why has this been voted up? I want my last 5 minutes back...

jhasson3• 17 years ago

actually it would be "because", not "cause" lmao

edit: no fair, you edited your comment :)

SamAtt• 17 years ago

I don't like to get in the middle of these PC vs. Mac threads. But I couldn't resist the perfect opportunity to post one of the greatest videos ever put on youtube (imho)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clYOR8vLgE8

spatulon• 17 years ago

Sometimes I wonder whether electricians spend this much time and effort debating which screwdriver manufacturer makes the best screwdrivers.

Computers are tools. By all means, feel free to explain to the rest of us what's so great about your tool of choice, if you have reason to believe that we're missing something that could improve our workflow (the chances are that we're just trying to do different things, or prefer a different way of working). But please, do not get upset when somebody else chooses a different tool. It is not an attack on your worth as a hacker or human being, so there's no need to get defensive.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

screwdriver manufacturer makes the best screwdrivers.

For values of "screwdriver" that include electric screwdrivers, aka "drills", I think they do.

jamroom2• 17 years ago

I recently bought my wife a MacBook - she's previously only used Windows. For the most part, Mac OS X "just works", but to be honest, when it it DOES NOT work, it can be a real PITA to figure out a workaround. For example - why can't I resize a photo for emailing within iPhoto? This is something my wife does a lot, and having to "export" the photo to resize it is simply stupid. There's other little "issues" like that that have really frustrated her so far, so I can understand where the author is coming from.

thenduks3• 17 years ago

Hmm? Click photo. Click 'Email' button. Choose the size you'd like, 'Small (Faster Downloading)'/'Medium'/'Large (Higher Quality)' or 'Actual Size (Full Quality)'. Seems pretty straight forward to me...

Did you want to mention your other issues so we can clear those up for you as well? :)

jamroom2• 17 years ago

You're correct - that would not be an issue if it worked with Gmail (or at least she could see how it works with Gmail).

One of the other issues we have is that of file sharing - on her old windows laptop, we had a shared folder for images - when I copied the photos off our camera, I simply copied them over to her shared folder, so they were ready to go for her. On her new MacBook, I've SMB sharing setup on her images folder (as well as AFP), but I'm not able to connect to her "share" from my windows laptop. There's certainly a way to do this (or at least I think there should be), but it for sure doesn't "just work".

also, I just have to say that Finder (IMHO) just plain sucks. When I've navigated to a sub directory in an app (say via a "Open" dialog), it will remember that location for the next time it is opened. However, let's say you click "Open" again - you'll be dropped back in where you were (which is fine), but you have no way of going "up" a directory any more (since it's not in the current history). The only thing to do is change file views at this point so you can see the entire hierarchy, then click where you need go. I know how to do this, but my wife still hates it.

She also gets frustrated when an app is already running (she doesn't know that), and she clicks on the icon in the dock and it does not come to the front of other windows. She thinks the app is not responding, and gets frustrated.

I can go on if you want more...

Thanks!

logicalmind2• 17 years ago

As a long time PC user I bit the bullet about 5 years ago and bought a Mac. I was very familiar with PC's and a long-time linux user. I figured it was unix-based and had a nice UI. I didn't have any serious problems like the author of this post, but my major gripe was the continuous cost of OS upgrades. It seemed like every year you had to pay another $100+ for panther/leopard/etc. When I began refusing to do this and stay at the level I was at, programs stopped working. At least if you buy window XP you can run that software for the life of the machine. I haven't paid for the upgrades to my OS in a couple of years and now any software you try to install fails to run because my OS libs are out of date.

stuff4ben2• 17 years ago

Software doesn't just stop working because you refused to upgrade your OS. Likely what happened is that you upgraded your software not realizing that the newer version requires a newer OS. That's your fault for not reading the requirements. I've been on 10.4 Tiger since I bought my MBP back in 2006 and haven't had any existing software "stop working" because I didn't upgrade to Leopard. 3 years on an OS and it still works like the day I bought it. Still haven't reinstalled the OS which was a biannual thing with Windows.

logicalmind2• 17 years ago

What browser do you use that is current and works on an old version of OSX?

intranation• 17 years ago

OS upgrades on OS X aren't analogous with with service packs or similar though--Service Packs have very rarely, in my experience, offered the kinds of feature upgrades that OS X upgrades do. There's not really an equivalent in Windows XP.

ahlatimer• 17 years ago

I think we can all agree that we should buy a computer that suits our needs. If you mostly use Windows in a VM on a Mac, then it's your own fault for buying a Mac. You probably should've bought a Windows PC to begin with, since really the only difference is the design aesthetics. Macs use basically the same hardware as the PCs (with some exceptions), but the way it's put together is different. I'm perfectly happy with my MacBook Pro. In fact, I've never been this satisfied with a computer, and I've been working on them since I was 4. But, that's my own personal experience. OS X fits my needs better than does Windows or Linux (and I've used both as my primary OS), but will the same be true for everyone else? Probably not.

tdavis• 17 years ago

I expected someone to finally explain why my Mac sucks. Instead it is the usual anecdotal evidence from a faulty machine (or faulty user). How did this manage to get so high?

jhasson3• 17 years ago

So I just found out about this place from somebody telling me my rant is on ycombinator. Cool? I dunno.

Anyways, thanks for the thoughts. Answer some questions: I was mad at Vista and so I figured I'd date Apple instead to get back at Microsoft for the crap that is vista. After forcing myself to learn all the cool mac stuff I realized how screwed I was.

I have no clue who posted this here. This was just really for friends and so on. But your welcome to read and all that. Its the internets.. go crazy. -- boy I hope I dont have to make an account after I typed all this.

(Crap I do)

sachmanb3• 17 years ago

id like to add this, it's different from your normal pc vs mac stuff:

if apple at any point does take the majority of the personal computing market, we're all in trouble. at least when MS was being more punky and cornering OSs and productivity software, they didn't have the hardware too. an apple world is a scary world. apple fans used to wear those shirts with gates as the borg saying ms will assimilate us, as if apple was the savior and bringer of liberation. apple has ms beat when it comes to being restrictive

sure it's got the mach kernel and nix support, and you can run free software on it...all within their proprietary giant gui (the greatest gui for nix ever built, what the nix community has wanted for so long, something better than gnome....), but they didn't so much contribute to the free software as much as they just leveraged it.

take this phone in my pocket as an example. the iphone is the best phone on the market, no doubt. it has all the features i want, it was popular, got lots of developers, and now has even more apps. this phone, this fascist in my pocket, it's apps, it's services are all controlled, filtered and judged by a central authority named Apple, a private commercial interest, and it's a good thing that other companies are still interested in making phones and will keep challenging them to open up some more (such as pushing them to get past the "you cant even discuss development with other developers" phase, but that's really just one layer of their giant stack of stinky lock-ins and authoritative control ), and keep real development marching on.

it's poetic that the company started with wozniak and that advertisement of the hammer going into the big face of IBM, this liberation from the terminal machines controlled by big companies to personal computers you could mess with yourself, build yourself, hack at...... poetic, but doesn't change the fact of where apple is today. jobs gives me the impression he'd dictate what color underwear you wear when you use -his- products, if he had the chance.

beware an apple world.beware.

edit: on the plus side, im not worried because i heavily doubt that it will happen. for apple to ever gain majority, it would need to change in radical ways.

jhawk28• 17 years ago

The last crash I had on my mac was related to the networking drivers. They fixed it in 10.3. Of course, I don't have problems with crashing on my WinXP, Vista, or any MAJOR crashes on Windows 7.

kvs• 17 years ago

BBC BASIC on Acron -> DOS -> Windows -> BSD, VAX/VMS -> Windows 95 -> Linux/Windows 2K -> OS X (2006).

I have used them at various points in my life where the priorities are different. Of the experiences I have had, I can compare OS X, with Linux and Win 2K equally well (with Dell Hardware). I am a happy Apple customer now with occasional (mostly minor) complaints but I have always had complaints. [Should mention that I did try XP and Vista but didn't like the vibe of those OS]

What's with the self-assigned IPs on Linksys routers!? is my current complaint. Yet to find an answer but often a reboot of the router solves the problem.

slavox• 17 years ago

Honestly I actually agree completely, If anybody actually bothers to search through the trolls and actually uses a mac they might understand this.

When you have a problem with a mac you can't fix it, 90% of the time the problems are hidden away and impossible to troubleshoot.

My first mac, Kernel panic when using "Internet sharing" You plug in the Ethernet and it was 100% guaranteed to happen every time I got no support. Cool one bad laptop ok!

So i get a second one, Macbook 15" and it builds up it's own little box of problems, Overall it's wonderful but it just always manages to pipe up a few little errors here and there, Crash sometimes and not support very simple things. I got 3 new logic boards (That's CPU/Motherboard/Graphics) All replaced and still had the same problems over and over, Either they didn't actually replace it or there was something very seriously wrong with my ram (Which was never replaced anyway and now is fine)

The whole bootcamp/windows/linux on a mac is bullshit, there are always problems, And you void your warranty if you remove OSX (Yes it's true I got refused repairs due to windows)

I wish I could replace this with a windows laptop.

jemmons• 17 years ago

When you have a problem with a mac you can't fix it, 90% of the time the problems are hidden away and impossible to troubleshoot.

Demonstrably false. As far as systems and hardware are concerned, I worked as one of the guys who troubleshoots and repairs macs at a busy Apple store. Never once was I forced to say "I don't know. The problem is hidden and I can't troubleshoot it."

On the programming side, macs ship with dtrace. How much more troubleshooting power can a developer possibly ask for?

Just because you haven't bothered to learn enough about a system to troubleshoot it doesn't mean the problems are hidden. They're just hidden form you.

makecheck• 17 years ago

The guy simply bought a lemon. It happens. It says absolutely nothing about the rest of the Mac line (as I've had several Macs). While I have had some frustrating experiences, they've been pretty rare; like 3 in over a decade.

When I did have serious Mac problems, it always ended up being the hardware; something easily replaced, like bad RAM. It says something when you learn to suspect hardware problems because the OS itself is so solid.

johnbender• 17 years ago

ugh… another article filed with anecdotal evidence about how x sucks compared to y.

The internet is a trash heap and its article like this that have made it that way.

utx005• 17 years ago

yes. unless x=powerbook, and y=thinkpad.

ho ho ho.

The Mac Myth: So Sick Of All This Mac Love. Macs Are A Pain.

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