Apple, wtf is wrong with you?
daniel.morrione.net
daniel.morrione.net
Your fault.
My daily machine is a mid-2011 MacBook Air and it works like a dream.
My old machine was a late-2007 MacBook Pro. It's logic board started acting up about a year after I bought it. I didn't buy AppleCare. Apple fixed it out of warranty at no cost to me.
Take it in. Apple will most likely fix it. Most likely at no cost to you. The machine has been acting up for a year. You chose to write a whiny blog post rather than take the machine in. That's your fault.
Taking a 27" for repairs is a little bit different to taking a laptop.
Also: cool that they fixed your laptop for free, but keep in mind that was 5 years ago. 5 years ago Apple gave me a new iPod (for free) because the battery died. Now I have to pay $80 or something to have my current one sent away for a few weeks for a battery.
edit: spellung
No. But it's unreasonable to expect a patch pronto, while they must be investigating the issue (that the steps in the forum solved the issue, doesn't mean they cover every aspect of it, or that they work with everybody that has the issue).
And if the issue can't be fixed with a simple patch but needs several steps, it's reasonable to take your computer to them and have them perform them.
Don't know about where you live, but here there are actually laws concerning the minimum warranty. If something internally breaks within a year, you're certainly going to have warranty. I'm not sure about two years.
I think Apple actually got sued once for misleading advertisements, trying to get people to buy the AppleCare pack while they had warranty anyway.
I'm not an apple user so I had to google what that means. Apparently it is a synonym for mainboard and it seems to be mainly used for apple computers. Is there a reason to use "logic board" instead of "mainboard"?
For instance, you can only get Apple-equipment with "Retina-display". Ofcourse you get higher DPI displays from a lot of vendors, but they cannot offer you a "Retina-display".
Same for the "Facetime-camera", or front-facing camera as the rest of the world calls it.
Dude obviously has graphics card issues. Refuses to take it in to be serviced. Acts all surprised when an OS update includes revisions to the graphics drivers, which caused the bad behavior to worsen. Decides the right course of action is to pen an internet screed against Apple because, well, I have no idea.
The funniest part is, NVidia and ATI produce the graphics drivers, so if he wants to be mad at someone, he should be mad at them.
not exactly the intended behaviour of driver updates
Besides, some people in the referenced Apple discussions thread report that even after flashing the firmware, the problems continue.
I would have agreed with this argument had he installed a custom graphics card but this is not the case here. It came included with the product, so its Apple's responsibility to make sure it works. Say you buy a new car from Ford and the tires wear out in 6 months, despite Michelin being the manufactures, wouldn't you still blame Ford for it?
Alright, let's take a HN friendly example. Say you run a medium B2B startup and one day the API that a lot of other businesses depend on goes down. The reason could be attributed to a strange bug in the new Ruby/Django/PHP update. Would you still pass the blame to Ruby/Django/PHP or would you accept responsibility for it?
GPU driver issues? I don't care if they are Nvidia's (or AMD/ATI's) bugs, Nvidia (or AMD/ATI) is your GPU vendor, you have them fix that shit and just deliver that to me in an OS update. Otherwise your shit is busted.
If my Honda car had some firmware in it programmed by some 3rd party shop in China and it started acting up, I would damn well demand Honda figure out how to get it fixed regardless of whose bug it was. They are the ones who sold me the integrated solution, it is now their problem. Same thing with Apple devices, especially since they've chosen to create an ecosystem of computers with no user serviceable or replaceable parts.
Apple may or may not have an official fix. Either way it it takes time for Apple to QA before pushing it out to tens of millions of users.
Articles like this one are popular as well. Just write some nonsensical nostalgic story about some sort of computer or digital device, whining about how the company who built it has sold its soul and you are golden as far as HN kudos are concerned.
The reason people like this type of article is probably because, 'back then' was when they knew very little about computers. Now, when you reach a certain level of experience and knowledge, that magically looking Mac will suddenly be 'just a computer'. People don't want to go back to the olden days here you'd type commands into your Commadore 64, but they want to go back to that naive state of mind where when your computer did want you wanted it to, it felt like magic.
Would you want to install Mountain Lion on a five-year old Mac? Hell no!
Apple saw that hardware was starting to last longer and took steps. Part of their solution was to try to innovate. Retina screens, multi-touch trackpads and an increased focus on gestures to justify their use over mice, etc.. Another part was to drive costs, and prices, down. Besides placing price pressure on the competition, occupying a lower price-bracket means people are more likely to upgrade more often rather than trying to nurse their old hardware along for as long as possible. This is the good. The other parts of their attack on long obsolescence cycles are not so good.
All traces of easy upgradeability have left Apple's product line. You now need special tools to get into pretty much any Apple laptop, and they use propriety connectors for everything. Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not gonna happen. Yes, you can order Apple compatible parts and tools online, but this is not by Apple's design. They'd probably sue those guys into oblivion if they were really doing a lot of business.
Apple laptops feel great in the hand, as if they're built to last generations, but they're actually horribly delicate in some respects. The Air can be bricked by a mere drop of liquid in the wrong spot (this actually happened to me. One drop. I'm not kidding.). The proprietary screws and integrated battery mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and then clean things up yourself. It's a horrible feeling watching your laptop fry itself knowing it could have been saved if it had been designed with a removeable battery. You'll get no sympathy from Apple either. Their warranty does not cover spill-damage. When this happened to me, the repair bill was literally larger than what I paid for my air in the first place! Subtle hint?
Software glitches and poor support for older hardware are only the latest in a long sequence of Apple's moves to keep you buying new hardware. Have the geeks looked at your obsolete macbook, tsk'd, and subtly hinted that while you could continue suffering with that old beast, a new laptop would be very cheap and work much better!
Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as Linux or Windows users.
I'd like to know more about this.
In any case, even with all the wriggling, I've found ADP to be a pretty wonderful investment without even counting the increased peace-of-mind. I'm not sure if I'm just unusually hard on my laptops or if the gap between my repair cost and theirs is so large that it is easy to design a truly mutually beneficial warranty.
Most laptops (including mi MBP!) will survive light spillage without problems.
EDIT: removed snark.
That said, the air keyboard does have a spill protection layer that provides some measure of protection. My girlfriend has spilled far more liquid on her Air and it's survived well. It's unfortunate that you got a terribly unlucky circuit-seeking drop of liquid.
Yes. I have been treated better by practically every other manufacturer I've dealt with, including Dell (The M1330 I had prior to the Air actually survived several far worse spills because it had a removable battery). At the very least, no other manufacturer has made painfully bad jokes at my expense to my face.
EDIT: spelling.
that was your mistake there, i always play ignorant and say it stopped working. So far I've had no problems even with things that were my fault.
Dishonest? maybe, but apple can afford it.
Why didn't you just say it stopped working and leave it at that?
I've never had a bad Apple Store experience. I am sure there are bad staff. But there are bad staff everywhere in every business. I find it really perplexing that based on a single experience people swear off a product. 1 bad experience is not representative of the millions of interactions that happen everyday.
The capital investment required to go head-to-head against Apple, for now, seems to be keeping competitors away. When a company like Samsung or Lenovo to makes some moves in this direction, it might be a good thing.
Or, at least, I want them to keep the T series pure and business user orientated.
The only thing Apple truly has going for it is branding. Mac's are freakin' fashion accessories these days. I'm not sure if any other manufacturer can duplicate Apple's marketing genius, but I think we can already see Apple's trendiness fading. A big part of what built Apple's brand up over the last decade was being the plucky underdog fighting the MS man. Now Apple is "the man". Samsung's Apple-bashing ads might be heavy-handed, but they're almost identical to the ads Apple used to run against MS.
Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not gonna happen.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2012
The proprietary screws and integrated battery mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and then clean things up yourself.
As opposed to just about anywhere else, which will have standard screwdrivers. Visiting another office? What do you mean you don't carry around your pentalobe screwdriver?
Because that doesn't seem right at all.
I believe the exact opposite is true for the two MacBooks my wife has owned.
If you want to terminate an RJ-45, then sure, you kinda need an unusual tool to do it neatly and properly - it's an unusual item. But a specialised tool to undo a screw? Yuck.
I wish Apple would support the mSata interface. A lot of other manufacturers do, the drives are tiny, and you can get them in capacities up to 480 GB now.
Look at things like the Power Mac G4 - amazing design, really lovely internal layout, really easy to change anything.
I have no idea what Apple's equivalent product is today, but I do know that changing anything is harder, and that Apple is keen for people not to modify anything.
That's okay. Homogeneous install base makes support much easier and better. (Compare to blue-screens on Windows caused by shoddy graphics card drivers provided by vendors). But it sucks for people who know what they're doing and who want to make changes. Apple products are expensive, and not everyone wants to change machine every 1.5 years.
It is actually OS X.
Edit: I'd like to point out one other thing. Before anyone chimes in with how Windows or Linux or other PC makers are worse, I completely agree with you. My position is that while Mac OS X may still be the "best", it has been a long time since it has been "good". I find little consolation in the fact that it is not "as broken" as everything else, nor do I think that's anything to be particularly proud of. Especially with the amount of money I've given them.
Preface: Today two of my co-workers were lamenting over a similar phenomenon that you described, in addition to describing their MBP hardware troubles (dead motherboards, in this instance). Their solution was to buy another macintosh.
Why is this the solution? I don't buy the argument that other PC makers are worse. If my laptop died after 2 years, especially if I paid Apple prices for it, I'd be so pissed off that I would buy just about anything but another Apple device.
Have you tried using a quality PC with a modern distribution of Mint or something installed? I think you might rethink your position about "everyone else being worse". Take this with a grain of salt, I've had the same dell laptop for 5 years with Xubuntu and 0 problems. If I didn't have that experience my outlook would likely be different.
“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science.”
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/03/23Bertrand-Serlet-to...
Why not? I have, works perfectly...
> Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as Linux or Windows users.
I disagree. And the strong resale value of their products testify to this.
What does this mean?
What's funny any problems that I had with this computer (Wifi port permanently turning off), started with one of the Leopard upgrades, it was just fixed once when I upgraded to Mountain Lion (what a nice surprise) but it wasn't long, issue got back with one of the first ML updates.
Otherwise machine works really well, so it's not necessarily true that installing new OS on old hardware trashes it.
> When a tool has served me well and needs to be taken care of, I feel I owe it that kindness for all its done for me.
and then, when he wants to bash Linux:
> A computer is a tool, that’s all. When it ceases to work reliably we have to move on.
Why the double standard?
With Windows, if it gets jacked up, I just re-install, but with Linux, I feel I'm indebted enough to figure out what's wrong and fix it.
There are reason why debian takes painful months to create releases. They don't just say "ooo, this Friday, lets just pull what ever the git repository has and use that". Windows has also gone down this road. When windows 8 was released, the software was actually a half-year old since beta. if ones is using beta windows 8 and its raid had broken down, would one blame windows or one self?
> Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it.
He even mentions Windows 8 as a more viable option. WTH?
As someone who actually uses Linux on the desktop I have to very much disagree. I install it. It works. Every time.
Ofcourse he came from Gentoo Linux which has been rideculed internet-wide time and time again for their incessant need to über-optimize ever single little thing way beyond pointlessness.
His error in is generalizing this onto the rest of the Linux-world, and guess what? That's just so extremely wrong and not even close to a normal user these days. I haven't even bothered compiling my own "optimized" kernel the last 5 years. Shocking! I know!
This guy is a hardcore Linux geek converted into hardcore Mac-fanboy (polar opposite), sold on the "it just works" idea, because things didn't use to just work in the world of Linux.
The transition must have been wonderfully liberating. But now he finds that his newfound hero has abondoned him and that it was not the saviour he had hoped for and he is lost.
Had he only known he could return to his roots and find everything he wanted right there.
"This guy is a hardcore Linux geek converted into hardcore Mac-fanboy (polar opposite)"
Why?
Why are using and being a fan of Linux and being an Apple user (or for that matter a Windows user) mutually exclusive? You don't have to buy into the hardcore Stallmanian crap to use it or to enjoy it and even be a fan, hardcore or otherwise. Just as you don't have to succumb to some of Apple's more creepy policies in order to use there laptops etc. I find this attitude in tech particularly irksome. In the past, I have reacted aggressively, which serves nothing other than to get everyones backs up, but I honestly find that quote actually offensive, not to mention deeply myopic and childish. It also irk me that I'm irked by it. The whole community would be better severed by a collective laissez-faire attitude rather than constantly championing their choice or view as the one true path. Like I said at the beginning, I agree and this rant has been bubbling under the surface and I feel better for saying it. Feel free to ignore me.
I disagree that these are polar opposites. I have been a Windows guy most of my life, but after switching to Linux, I have learned to appreciate the merits of the UNIX basis of OSX.
What I mean by that statement (which seemingly wasn't completely obvious) was that he went from a "I want to be in control of and tinker with absolutely everything"-stance (Gentoo, enough said) to "I want everything working, done, out of the box"-stance (Macs).
I'd argue that is very much polar opposites.
Yeah, right. Say that to my many linux-using friends who can't write a simple "hello world" program to save their lives. Despite "[helping] found Gentoo Linux", the author comes off as a moron when he makes such comments about "Linux", whatever the heck it means here.
I'm a happy Ubuntu user now (right now, actually). I hope he gives Ubuntu a try sometime; it's leaps and bounds more reliable and tinker-free than Gentoo ever was.
edit: she => he
"and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it."
You kidding me? For the vast majority of OSS development and use, linux is by far the easiest solution. People (including me) use linux because they DON'T want to fuck around with shoe-horning software into running on a Mac or Windows. It's just the simplest solution for using and developing open source software. The above quotation may have been true about 6 years ago, but it sure as hell isn't true now.
Welcome to 2013.
Yeah, that's Gentoo. Such is life when you're running locally-compiled binaries that, depending on your USE flags, have been compiled with a combination of settings that nobody in the whole world has ever tested before.
I'm running Ubuntu Precise right now, and can quite honestly say that I have not done a single system maintenance task in the six months since I installed it and set it up. It just works. Granted, I'm not doing anything too fancy with it, just basic software engineering.
On the other hand, he uses apple hardware and loses "100′s of hours of productivity" (why didn't he just have it repaired) and what about it? "Long live Apple"
Such is the mentality of another apple user. (I realize that probably the vast majority of apple users are the ones I don't read about). But those that do and often end up having an article here... really?
I do exactly that on FreeBSD and never lost any raid whatsoever, possibly because the "raid stuff" tends to come together with the rest of the OS. There are probably issues that go beyond local compilation and flags.
I still thing Gentoo's great, and I'm glad I had a little fling with it, but ultimately I decided that the maintenance overhead was just too high for a workstation.
Guess what ? I use a Windows Desktop and really like it. Its fast, i can built it myself and works with everything. My web development is done on an ubuntu vm in the cloud so i dont care where my tools run. Id probably run Linux but as i do some game programming and my tools arent availabe there, i cant.
I also own a Macbook Air, i really like the hardware and battery life. Its a really solid mobile device. I dont like OSX too much but it runs my tools so i dont care. As PC laptop makers have catched up alot in the past 2-3 years id probably buy an ultrabook next as there are more choices and they are a bit cheaper.
So what ? No hardware/software is perfect, just use what works for you.
In total, I have seen three serious problems with mine and my families computers: 1) Failed hard drives 2) RAM that went bad 3) A clusterfuck of problems on a 17" MBP pre-unibody (Apple eventualy got it working, but it's on its last legs in general now because the owner refuses to install patches).
This is across, I wanna say... approximately 20 Apple devices ranging from phones to iMacs.
They're not perfect, but compared to the amount of problems from when everyone I knew had Windows PCs, I take a lot fewer support calls.
I get the anti Linux sentiment I use to use Gentoo before Ubuntu/Debian became so viable and it was/is painful to say the least. I'm not going to say I always agree with everything Canonical does with Ubuntu but I could make the same argument for OSX and Ubuntu has been amazingly stable.
So to anyone out there on the fence with OSX and fearing Windows, Linux is so much better these days. Approaching the ease of OSX.
Besides the fact that transporting it could damage it further, he would probably would have just been told it was end of life or needed a new GPU altogether and the chances of them having said GPU in stock would be next to nothing.
Maybe it's just my area but Apple stores here do not actually repair products, they just tell you to buy a new one.
This is just silly - a computer is not a trauma victim, it's a piece of hardware.
My experience has been that they've spent two days isolating a problem on my 2005 iMac which I caused by using 3rd party RAM with the wrong timing - issue didn't appear well after I replaced the RAM (I replaced the RAM again, it worked fine).
Though somehow it makes perfect sense for one of the people who helped build Gentoo to be disgusted with Linux.
The magsafe internal part of that MBP is also of much lower quality; one of the pins 'disappeared' and Apple replaced the magsafe and the external charger. Now the same pin disappeared but I'm out of warranty and they want E600 to repair it.
Thinkpad, here I come.
A lot of modern hardware has programmable parameters, "core voltages", PLL parameters that control running frequencies and the timings for DMA / memory access state machines.
Who's fault is it if the hardware vendor says use X, Y and Z for these parameters. And they include the same parameters in the software they supply and....
What if some %'age of the hardware doesn't actually produce the timings the configuration parameters specify, or does "really bad things"?
In reading the "source" article, there is a pointer to a discussions.apple.com thread. The "fix", if you go and read the thread, is on page 21 from Andrew Humphreys. What his solution does is change the timings and clock speeds for low power and idle modes of the GPU. Reading between the lines, the low power / clock speed settings don't work and will cause corruption. His changes are derrived from people having problems running Windows 7. The same changes seem to help people running OS X.
Perhaps someone from the Linux community will be willing to force the ATI GPU cards in question into low power / performance modes and see if corruption occurs.
I've no knowledge of what the parameters Andrew is overriding actually do, but for a portable platform "faster" almost always results in higher power usage, heat and therefore shorter battery life.
This might not be such an issue for desktops, if you can tolerate the noise of increased cooling.
Getting pragmatic about this, how could you design a Q/A test for this? Do you really afford to wait X number of minutes before / after each test to make sure the GPU is cold enough to go into low power mode? What if you decide to use hardware that can cool the GPU faster so you could get through all the tests -- doesn't that make the tests invalid as you are no longer using HW customers will get?
As a final note, there might be evidence that some graphics drivers were updated ~1 week before 10.8.3 was shipped. The evidence is in /System/Library/Extensions/
Why don't they send some of those geniuses to fix these problems? Can't they afford to support their products?
There's your problem.
On an unrelated note, tiny gray text on black makes it really hard to switch back to HN, so I can't blame you for not making it to the end. Ow.
But I have had the same graphics corruption problem mentioned in the beginning of the post, and it most likely is a hardware failure. It took a few phone calls and 4 visits to the Apple Store (5 minutes away) spending a few hours waiting to talk to half a dozen different people because they didn't want to fix it. This was after I had video/pictures documenting the problem (complete with hardware serial #) but no reliable way to reproduce and it wasn't reproducing for them with their stress tests. All that clusterfuck for one repair. Plus it was a MacBook Air, nowhere near as big as an iMac. If I wasn't so fuming mad and I was just being logical, I would have picked up a new laptop instead of waiting. Oh wait, this was a laptop I had bought because the last MacBook I owned keeled over after repeated repairs and the store manager offered me 20% off this one for my troubles.
Yesterday I went in to the store with my iPhone that had shattered glass all over the front and the genius looked at it and wanted to know what I wanted help with. No, really, you think I'm coming in for a software issue? It was so hard for me to assume he was being helpful rather than thick.
There are times when I deal with really awesome Geniuses, and I have countless stories of how awesome the Genius Bar used to be (red phone and actual geniuses and all, when all the Apple Stores in the world were countable on one hand). But there are times Apple really sucks for support and I can't say I blame the OP for not wanting to go. I always think twice before I think about going to the Apple Store nowadays :(
> which is scary because Windows 8 is unadulterated bullshit, and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it.
What a steaming load of shit.