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I would actually agree to sign a contract the bound me to upgrade my Apple hardware every 1.5 years if it would guarantee they stop ruining Mac OS X. My problem isn't so much the fact I have to replace these things so often, its that its not even that great day 1 anymore. With the exception of AirPlay perhaps, just about every major facet of OS X has gotten so progressively worse for my workflow: Safari (bogs my computer down no matter how much ram I have), dual display support (a joke since Lion), Messages (buggiest piece of software I've ever used in my life, by a long shot), iTunes (same as Safari), etc etc etc

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.

Ok honest question and I hope you don't take this the wrong way:

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.

So, I have a couple of answers. The first being that you are probably right. I've been a Mac user my whole life so a big part of it is just comfort, coupled with some remaining hope that things will return to the way things were. It was not that long ago that OS X updates were genuinely solid. Everything up to Tiger was great in my opinion. Secondly, I plan on making myself a PC in the near future just to handle graphics stuff and for gaming. The latest 10.8.3 update has negatively affected my framerates and the lack of support for the latest graphics cards is making it harder and harder to do some tasks. Lastly, there is the fact that I do iOS development so I need a Mac for that regardless. If I was still doing web dev my options might be different.

I wonder how much this has to do with the departure of Bertrand Sertlet.

“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...

Ditto to that, i was a huge fan of OSX until lion and mission control. Started to use win 7 with dexpot and some other customization and haven't booted to OSX in at least 6 months now.

>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.)

I'd like to know more about this.

I killed a slim keyboard the same way. Keys are non removable. There is no way to fix it.

I was sitting at a table and a friend set his travel mug down too forcefully. You've probably seen this happen many times. Set a travel mug down the wrong way and liquid will slosh against the opening you drink through, causing a single drop to pop out. In this case a drop of coffee arc'd neatly across the table and landed right on the cracks of one key on the upper-right of the keyboard. The Air was still running, but I powered it off immediately and turned it upside down to try to get the liquid out. I thought nothing really got in and tried to power it up a minute later, but the Air was kaput. I doubt one drop would have shown up on the spill detection gizmos Apple uses, but I was honest about the incident. For my honesty, Apple declared it spill damage and offered to repair it for an exorbitant fee, which I declined. To add insult to injury, the geek I encountered was one of the most obnoxious tech-support people I've ever run across. Stereotypical fat, pimply teenage nerd. He actually joked, "Gee! That was an expensive cup of coffee! Hur hur hur hur.". This guy was worse than all the Microsoft fanboy stereotypes Apple ads have lampooned over the years. I swore off Apple products on the spot and have been free and clear ever since. It's actually kind of amazing, but an outsourced Indian call center or even a complete lack of customer service would have been better than the insensitive and offensive way that geek dealt with me.

At the risk of down votes, the Mac was "kaput" because of liquid ingress and it only takes a drop on any component to do the damage. The fault my friend lies with you. Honest question, do you think you'd have been treated any better elsewhere?

Unlike Apple (at least the last time my wife bought one), other PC vendors are happy to sell you accidental damage protection with a laptop. I'd say that is a pretty big difference.

At the risk of sounding cynical, that's not for the benefit of the consumer. It doesn't mean much either as most manufacturers I've had experience with will try and wriggle out of honouring those agreements, HP especially. That said, Apple absolutely should offer this facility.

Agreed, the wriggling is an issue. I've always been able to deal with it, but it is frustrating (especially since I primarily run Linux - support is probably the top reason I dual-boot). I've found that I can minimize it by buying the "business-class" laptop and/or the "business-class" warranty, but that is still irritating and a trap for the unwary.

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.

Come on, if you really think that a drop of coffee will usually kill any electronics you must have never even handled a circuit board...

Most laptops (including mi MBP!) will survive light spillage without problems.

Depends on what the liquid came into contact with and whether or not it was live. I absolutely think that Apple, or in this case their 'genius' should have done more. With that in mind, the OP should have complained.

EDIT: removed snark.

I was going to tell a story of washing old circuit boards in the breakroom sink at a prior job, but I guess I'll pass. :-)

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.

@sbuk

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.

I'd hazard that because you didn't have the opportunity to speak to them face to face. If you were that aggrieved, you should have complained to the manager. I totally agree that the kid was out of line. My experience of Dell has been worse than yours. I won't have any of their products in my house. I have found their pre-sales support to be overly aggressive and patronising, post sales support to be lack lustre, verging on incompetent and a build quality that can only be described as inept. HP are not much better; I recently returned a HP Spectre XT that had a faulty power button. It took a written legal threat to get anything close to a resolution. These are all anecdotal, but very real incidents to counter your own.

EDIT: spelling.

> but I was honest about the incident

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?

And people wonder why apple's are so expensive...

well they had to charge enough to get that 100 billion in cash somehow!

I also play ignorant. But this is exactly what I am paying for. Make a booking online, turn up at a store, play ignorant. The last time I took advantage of the Apple Care warranty I had my claim completed with enough of my lunch break left to grab a quick lunch.

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.

They're counting on the fact that for most users Apple products and OS X are much better than alternatives today. So they are theorizing that people will put up with this kind of strategy. In a classic example for the pattern, this is how they are opening themselves up for attack. I wish someone would genuinely rise up to the challenge, if for nothing else, to force Apple to once again be nicer to its customers.

Though there is money to be made doing this (and I also wish it might happen) ...

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.

I really don't want Lenovo to go against Apple.

Or, at least, I want them to keep the T series pure and business user orientated.

To be honest, I didn't like OSX when it first came out and, despite my best efforts, could not force myself to like it when I gave it another chance a couple years ago. It's an OS that demands the user to conform to it's way of doing things rather than conforming to the users way of doing things. That's fine for some people, but not me. I like the feel of Apple's hardware and find their prices very reasonable, but they're simply not built to last. This is a tragic and fatal flaw for what would otherwise be great hardware for running another OS on.

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.

It's like you think the other PC makers are any better. Not to defend Apple, but this is an industry malaise, and it's been going on for a lot longer than you think. Is it right that they do it? No. Of course not. That said, my 2007 iMac is still perfectly serviceable. It won't receive the next OS X update, but by then it'll be at least 6 years old. I doubt the components would cope - much like my 2006 HP Compaq nc6320 (catchy name) ran Windows 7 well enough but won't run Windows 8 and struggles with most of the recent Linux distributions. There is nothing wrong with feeling let down and putting your money elsewhere, as a consumer that is your right. I'd argue that your reasoning in this instance is flawed.

The point here is that we used to buy Apple (and pay their price) just because they weren't like the rest of the industry. That doesn't hold anymore.

My point is that the are are still considerably better and actually not much worse than they've ever been. I've never had to threaten Apple with legal action in order to get the support I was due. With regard to Apple today, most of you appear to be too young to remember the 68000 => PowerPC transition in the early 90's. It was extremely painful for us with older 68 series machines with Apple offering no support at all. Where Apple are today is several orders of magnitude better than they were then.

>Would you want to install Mountain Lion on a five-year old Mac? Hell no!

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.

That does not automatically imply reliability. One can see the fact that the unit lasted long enough for resale as an extended QC cycle at the reseller's expense.

>One can see the fact that the unit lasted long enough for resale as an extended QC cycle at the reseller's expense.

What does this mean?

Yes but consider the resale value on most Macs. When I upgrade every two years, I only have to shell out about $500 for a faster machine.

I've had my Air since it came out. Still solid. Still SSD. I compiles are a bit long, and flash kills. But still solid built.

I have Mountain Lion on early 2008 MBP, and it works really well.

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.

  Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not gonna happen.

A typical SSD is larger than the MacBook Air. But you can add third party SSD modules:

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.

You can buy a pentalobe screwdriver for $10 from iFixit or $2 from eBay. You can also buy third party batteries off eBay.

I hope they deliver before the liquid hits the critical circuits!

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?

Are you suggesting that most people have micro screwdrivers suitable for opening cases ?

Because that doesn't seem right at all.

Screwdrivers capable of opening up every Thinkpad I've ever used are included in every generic screwdriver set I've ever bought for "jobs around the house" (tightening screws on furniture, opening up toys to replace batteries [sometimes requires pretty small screwdrivers], mounting WiFi routers on the wall, ...).

I believe the exact opposite is true for the two MacBooks my wife has owned.

Like fpgeek, I also have a thinkpad, and the generic 'fix-it' kit my housemates have under the kitchen sink has screwdrivers that fit it. And if I'm caught short somewhere, any hardware store carries something that can help - which is not the case with pentalobe screwdrivers.

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.

Yes, but if OWC didn't throw in a special USB case, the original SSD module would be useless as you can't plug it into any other laptop, nor can you realistically sell it.

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.

There is a connection called mSATA, which allows a mini pci-e plug to double as a IO port. Nearly all ultra-books use this connector, and there are many good SSD products that use it. Apple have continued to change their adapter in different revisions, depreciating many lines of third-party SSDs for Airs. While mSATA may not have been in common use when the Air was created, it is now incredibly common.

Yes, you can use unauthorised hacky methods to change batteries. A laptop beautifully designed for tiny thiness is a bad example to use, because there are obvious trade offs.

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.

> OSX

It is actually OS X.