What Bugs Apple Fans About Apple 437
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes.com went to MacWorld to ask Apple fans what bugs them about the computer and gadget maker. Turns out the lack of replaceable batteries, need to buy Vista separately, and most of all the stock price bugs people."
Re:Leave it Forbes... (Score:3, Informative)
My boss and I make jokes about Apple, Inc. vs. Apple Computer, Inc. Dropping computer in the name was not just to aid in the sale of phones. I think Apple has lost some focus on their computers. Leopard has not been as big as they had hoped. We're putting off the upgrade at work as long as possible. Leopard reminds me of vista in many ways. I won't bother to argue that point again. I know some people love Leopard and I've even found one person at work who loves Vista. I'm still hoping for a patch to get rid of the memory leaks with their new garbage collection in Cocoa. Most "power" users I know can get about a day a gigabyte (RAM) out of Leopard. I get two to three days out of my old PowerMac with 1.75GB of RAM. A friend of mine has 3GB in a Mac Pro and he can get 3-4 days before a required reboot. My boss has 2GB in his iMac, and left it on during the holidays. He couldn't login to it to reboot when he got back after a week. There are problems with it.
I also seem problems with customer service. I pre-ordered Leopard. It came at 9AM on release day. I attempted to install it on my wife's Mac Pro. The DVD was damaged and I hadn't noticed. I skipped the disc check and prepared to install only to have the install die. I'm not blaming apple for having a non bootable Mac. That was my fault. However, I had to wait until 6PM to call them, wait on hold for 10 minutes to talk to someone, and then 50 more minutes to get a resolution. They didn't have 10.5 in their system yet to send me a replacement disc. The tech eventually arranged for me to go to the nearest apple store. He said I just needed the DVD and original package. I walked in to be harrassed by the Apple Store employees for not bringing a receipt. Had that Mac been my only system, I could not print it anyway! It wouldn't boot. The box only had a packing slip. I offered to bring it up on a demo system, but they didn't want that. Finally, they gave me a new Leopard box. I haven't been very fond of going to that apple store ever sense. The tech was nice, and I did realize it was a launch day. I didn't appreciate the shitty service at the apple store. It's not the first time I had problems in that store. I ordered online so I wouldn't have to go there. I had a friend who had to get his laptop fixed. They guy told him bootcamp was beta in Leopard! He also told him it was too unstable to use. WTF.
What are you talking about? (Score:3, Informative)
What laptop are you looking at that starts at $2000?
Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment (Score:2, Informative)
Re:the scam that is the I-tunes gift card (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/store/giftcard/ [apple.com]
The Command key (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Attitude... (Score:4, Informative)
What strange and pointless article. Macs have all sorts of well documented deficiencies in either hardware or design, and even the most loyal fanbois will usually acknowledge them.
I am coming to believe that the rabid fanboi is a mythological figure. I have never once actually encountered such a person.
To wit - my preference for a Delete key instead of dragging files to a trash icon is not a weakness on my part, it's a more than reasonable preference. Regardless of all the keyboard options and such, there are many times when I simply prefer to press Delete.
Try hitting Cmd-Delete.
Re:Leave it Forbes... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple sells two million copies of Mac OS X Leopard in first weekend [macdailynews.com]
Additionally, Jobs revealed in his keynote that in 90 days, Apple had shipped 5 million copies of Leopard (which of course, means retail boxes plus new machines, but Leopard undoubtedly helped sell those machines). This resulted in 20% of the installed base running the new OS in 90 days.
You were saying?
what about the 75% rule? (Score:1, Informative)
What really bothers me about Apple products is how they've started shipping everything at about 60% finished, full of bugs, lacking features, or with features that just don't work. Afterwards, there may be one update to address the most obvious problems and bugs, but they almost never finish the missing features, getting the product to about 75% of advertised functionality before abandoning it. This is quite common with everything coming out of silicon valley these days, the "everything is beta, ship it" mentality.
The only exception to this is their flagship product, OSX. For any given cycle, there are 10 or 11 updates for the life cycle, they really pour their energy into bug fixes and security patches. Unfortunately, across the rest of their product lines, such follow-on support is non-existent.
The one big example I recently had to deal with was with a bunch of Airport Express Base Stations I had to install for my employer. Fantastic little access points, if only they worked. About 60% of the features work, the remaining features are dead or too buggy to count. The one and only update fixed only a few bugs, and removed all the broken features.
There is a USB port which Apple once claimed could be used for plugging in a remote disk or printer. The firmware for supporting disks never worked, only one update caused the option to disappear. Now that there is a new base station with a built in disk, they've quietly dropped support for the existing line, telling people who want the NAS functionality they once paid for to go buy a new product.
Same thing with printer support, there is a small white-list of printers that sort-of, mostly, work with the AEBS, but most USB printers do not. Just a bug that will never be fixed because a new product exists and all prior products immediately become unsupported.
The management application is buggy as hell, it actually only works for a short time immediately after booting the machine. This has been confirmed by Apple support, who have now announced there will be no bug fixes for the Airport Utility. The newest access point "Time Capsule" will have a completely new Airport Utility, which can not be used to manage other, older access points on the network. The newer Airport Utility can not be run simultaneously as the old one, so to manage your Apple APs you have to reboot your machine when switching from one utility to the other. Apple's support response was "our products are not designed for anything other than home use, corporate environments are not supported and may violate your guarantee". Our Apple corporate sales rep was apologetic, but has never managed to get us any real support.
iTouch upgrade fee = Sarbanes-Oxley requirement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Parallels not Bootcamp (Score:2, Informative)
I particularly like Parallels' Coeherence option, which has OSX treat individual Windows windows as separate applications in the Mac environment, so they behave just like Mac instances when you press F11, for example. Being able to copy and paste between OSX and XP, and to have one use files stored on the other's filesystem are further examples.
However, I'd have to agree with GP's point about having this functionality preinstalled instead of having to install Parallels and XP after purchase.
- RG>
Re:Old complaint... (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, I used to be the same way.
But, then, I went fiddling around with it, and for starters, if you enable the options:
tap two fingers on the touchpad = right click
put two fingers on the touchpad and move them = scroll
And I have to agree with an above poster, now that I've had these features (fleetingly, damnit, i hated giving the macbook pro back when i quit my last job), I can't stand to use touchpads without them. Once I had this stuff enabled, and knew how to use it, I couldn't have cared if the damn thing had any buttons.
I mean, come on, apple, the rest of the world now has 5+ button mice (mine has L, R, two thumb, scroll wheel which scrolls u,d,l,r, and is clickable, on-the-fly sensativity settings). I think mom and pop can deal with a two button mouse. But I get what they're doing: they're trying to save the techie types from "Ok, now left click on...", by A.) KISS philosophy, B.) Allowing power users to enable these functions on the new mightymouse, C.) Engineering the OS so that almost all common functions are one click away, not two+ or a right click away, i.e. by having contextual buttons on each app.
~Wx
Re:Attitude... (Score:4, Informative)
Command-period has been the "cancel" keyboard shortcut on Mac OS for over 20 years, I suspect it will work where you're talking about with the progress bar.
And check out "full keyboard access" stuff in the system preferences, you'll find that not only can you use the keyboard for menu activation and such, you can also create your own custom shortcuts for almost any operation in any application you like. The keyboarding capabilities of the Mac OS are superior, overall, to pretty much any other system I can think of. Add on Quicksilver or something similar and it can get downright crazy how much you can accomplish in arbitrary applications without touching a mouse.
If you're somewhat new to the Mac, I recommend picking up one of David Pogue's books, he provides a great mixture of theory and practical information about how things are designed to work.
Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment (Score:2, Informative)
The 20" Cinema Display is actually one of the few true 8-bit 20" screens still available. 90% of the screens out there are now the crappy TN film panels, which have lousy viewing angles and can't display 16.7 million colours properly, despite their marketing claims to the contrary. I was quite surprised a year ago when I did a lot of research for buying a new screen, and the Cinema Display was the most competitive and best value screen in its class. This is more true than ever now as the market for 8-bit screens keeps shrinking.
Re:Video Cards (Score:3, Informative)
To keep this on topic, the one thing that bugs me the most about Apple is all the misconceptions associated with their computers, such as "they only have one-button mice", or "they don't use standard video cards". Hell, I've even heard claims that Macs can't go on the Internet or they have special printer cables that only work with Apple.
Re:And to miss THE ONE MOUSE BUTTON (Score:3, Informative)
I'm going to assume you're just supremely ignorant instead of a troll and explain (I'll type slowly for you) that all the laptops "right-click" by simply placing 2 fingers on the trackpad and clicking *anywhere* on the button. I addition, you can configure the trackpad to treat a tap on the pad itself with 2 fingers to indicate a right-click. With these methods you can "right-click" with your hand in any position on the trackpad instead of having to cock it to find the "right-click-button".
You can also drag two fingers around anywhere on the trackpad to scroll your page/window in all directions. Much easier than those retarded trackpads with the "zones" on them for scrolling.
On second thought, with such a low id number, you can't be *that* ignorant - I think I just fed a troll. ...And gave up mod points to do it.
Re:Lack of acknowledgment of my market segment (Score:3, Informative)
An ordinary PC desktop:
Either supports two monitors of my choice out of the box or can be fitted with a cheap and easy to fit card that allows it to do so.
Monitors are usually a seperate item that can be bought from a different supplier to the PC if desired and saved from one PC to the next.
Either has graphics suitable for moderate 3D gaming out of the box or can be fitted with a cheap and easy to fit card that allows it to do so.
Can be fitted with extra hard drives on proper hard drive optimised interfaces mounted internally where they won't get unplugged by accident and run off the computers power supply so people won't forget to turn them on.
Can have it's ram and hard drives upgraded/replaced with a single screwdriver.
And yes can be fitted with expansion cards either immediately to meet specialist requirements or later to extend the machines usefull life.
The mini
only supports one monitor (unless you want to get into really crappy USB to VGA adaptors)
Monitors is seperate item that can be bought from a different supplier to the mac if desired and saved from one mac to the next.
has space for only one internal hard drive which must be a laptop model (slow and/or small).
requires two very thin putty knives to open and more dissasemby after that to get at the drives/ram, yes it's not as bad as some laptops but that doesn't make it good..
has no usable expansion slots (there is a mini PCIe or something with the wireless card in but you can't really get anything else for those slots and it has no external access).
The imac
supports two monitors but one of them must be the built in one
comes with a built in monitor that cannot be kept after the end of the macs usefull life.
has space for only one internal hard drive though it is a proper desktop model.
haven't researched getting inside this one in detail but the impression I get is that the ram is easy to get at but the hard drive requires a lot of dissasembly.
does not have much in the way of expansion slots, the graphics card is replacable but only with special cards that are hard to obtain.