I don’t like the way things are going with Mac OS X. My fears that something was slowly getting worse, were validated yesterday while visiting the Apple Store’s Genius Bar. While my laptop was being checked for issues, I told the Genius who was taking care of me that I have not rebooted the laptop in 27 days. He said that not rebooting might cause instability. He recommended I reboot my laptop at least once a week. When I looked at him incredulously, he called another Genius who was standing in the next stall, and that other Genius confirmed it.
Really? An Unix OS with a BSD Core going unstable if not rebooted every week?
The truth is that I look at the system logs, and I don’t like what I’m seeing. There are things going on under the hood that are quite worrying and annoying. There are too many errors and warnings in the logs. For a company that prides itself on producing cleanly designed products, I would expect the same philosophy would be applied under the hood. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The “rumor” in chat rooms is that in truth, Apple hates us Geeks. That the ideal Apple customer is the typical mindless Zombie user, who buys products because of their aesthetics and because they “just work”. The user who wants simplicity, and who won’t sniff around log files. It feels almost like Apple has become more of an “iOS” company, and is becoming less and less of a “Mac OS X” company.
This caused me to start researching into alternative hardware – a thin & light 15″ laptop that will run Ubuntu Desktop for me, have a quad core i7 processor under the hood, with at least 8Gb RAM, and a very fast GPU with dedicated 1Gb RAM. It is this search that made me realize that Apple’s competition is shooting itself in the foot, and is literally driving consumers away into Apple’s open arms.
However: The non-Apple scene is a mess!
How come? Well, When was the last time you tried to shop for a “PC” Laptop recently? Have you seen how many processor options are available even within a single family of processors? How many Intel i5 and i7 variants are out there? How many GPU Types and Variants are out there? How many types of disk drive standards? Sizes? Speeds? Protocols? Cache sizes? TRIM Support anyone?
The truth is that the moment you step outside of Apple’s realm, you find yourself in a jungle. The “Experts” all have their opinions on what the best laptop/desktop is. Who do you trust? Who do you believe? And for how long will their opinions hold true? Probably not too long…
This reminded me of that research about consumer happiness as a function of choice. It turns out that when consumers have too many options to choose from, they will first be overwhelmed with the selection, and later, they will be unhappy with their selection, thinking there might have been a better product they could have chosen. But give them just 2 ~ 4 products to choose from, and they will be absolutely happy, believing they selected the best product. Knowing this, let’s look at Apple’s product offerings: You basically get to choose whether you want a light laptop with less features, or heavy laptop with more “pro” features, then the screen size and resolution, and then the amount of RAM and Disk Space, and you’re done!
If only it was so simple with non-Apple hardware, I am pretty certain less people would switch to Apple products.
One thing is for sure: Apple is beginning to disappoint me, and I am now on the look out for a great, thin, sturdy laptop with great specs. It will run Linux for me, and will NOT require a weekly reboot just to keep things “stable”.
4 responses to “Goodbye Apple?”
well it must be come in hell right about now if your starting to waver the apple way… I still remember your talking high about the Apple IIc you had so long ago.
and not that Apple IIc was bad, not at all but in those day’s way back when the “dos” family PC’s were still in some lead over Apple – that changed over time and apple took over with there first MAC but it’s not where i am going.
I’m very much ANTI-apple here i say it openly – i’ll never own an iPHONE even if i think the iPAD is a fun thing to have it’s still a 10″ monster you need to carry around (i prefer the 7″ PAD’s like the samsung galaxy TAB).
I told a co-worker that after steve Jobs passed away it felt like Apple lost it’s “vision”, the engine is running in full swing but no one is really leading the way, the creativity is gone, there is no innovation all the “fun” apple thing that make you think about really getting an apple computer “i’m an Apple /i’m a PC” are gone, what’s left is a very tight anal company holding everything in a very tight fist and not letting any one look in to there closed garden.
i might be wrong but that’s how i feel.
and for if some one thing I don’t have any apple products – i have in my lab 2 ipone 4, one iphne 4s & 5, iPAD, iPAD II, iMAC and a macbook. (so yes i do have some of those to know what i am talking about).
They are still the best products out there, I just hold them to a very high standard because I’m a perfectionist. And there is no reason why a company with so much money would release a less than perfect product. There is simply no excuse. None.
Hi there!
First, ‘welcome back’ to the Linux world 🙂 . I know you never left it but still.
Knowledge and freedom is a double egded sword… . I still prefer the option of the myriad of options to choose from. On the bright side, in the US (in contrast to Israel where I live), you have Linux laptop vendors. Don’t forget to search through those. Choosing in advance only these vendors to survey has advantage of minimizing the result set you need to comb and, very importantly, avoiding wasting time researching a specific model ‘if every hardware thingy in it will work under linux’… . The down side of such vendors is the fact that they are costlier than buying a laptop with Windows and installing Linux on it.
As a practical advise, check out latest Dell project code named “sputnik”: http://content.dell.com/us/en/gen/d/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop .
Good luck! 🙂
Boaz.
I love this Sputnik laptop, it looks very sleek. I think it’s only a matter of time until Linux Laptops will surpass all the shit that’s out there right now. Amazing OpenGL drivers and GPU’s, great screens, and all that.
Still, today I kinda decided I still really, really like my ~2010 Macbook Pro. It’s still a really good machine. Especially considering that I got it back in 2010, and to this day, very few laptops are as good as this laptop (I mean outside the world of Apple).