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

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.

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the upgrades to my OS in a couple of years and now any software you try to install fails to run because my OS libs are out of date.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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. [...]

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.

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.

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.

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)

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?!"

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

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.