Decision
Henceforth, any Kool-Aid-swilling would-be evangelist who tries to tell me that Apple products "just work" will be jeered and mocked until my throat is sore.
Because they don't. From a historical perspective, they've built a lot of shit. And I'm not just talking about the notoriously-poorly-built Apple III, a box whose standard technical support advice included picking it up and dropping it from a great height onto a hard surface, to re-seat ICs that had popped out of their sockets because the board overheated and warped. The first MacBook Pros overheated like hell because Apple's manufacturing instructions specified a massive overapplication of thermal paste to the chips and heat sinks. The batteries did things like catch fire and explode. Let's face it, back when Apple was being all non-standard and building its own hardware, they were dying, and it's only switching to commodity hardware like PC-standard video cards and CPUs that saved them. So their hardware has historically been mediocre at best.
Their software? Yes, OS X is lovely. It's nice. It's also not really theirs, not the functional parts. Underneath it's all POSIX-compliant BSD. Give them credit for prettying a Unix OS up sufficiently to capture desktop share, but they didn't make this thing up themselves. And aside from OS X, their track record has been pretty mediocre historically as well. Don't get me wrong, they've got a very nice set of user interface guidelines, but they're more than capable of writing absolute shit, and have been for a long time. In fact, some of the worst software that you can run on a Windows platform is Apple software that they've written for Windows. I've bitched long and hard about what a shitty piece of shitty shit iTunes is, for example, most notably for its habit of spontaneously deciding to start ignoring user input and for the fundamental way in which it breaks the connection between files and attributes describing those files.
And now they've reached a new low, they've finally adopted the Microsoftian practice of having new releases be backwards steps in usuability and reliability. I was recently required to update the firmware on my 3G iPod Touch, because iTunes wouldn't sync newly-purchased songs over to it anymore. Even though these are DRM-free, it decided I needed to use the new firmware in order to listen to them. Now, updating the firmware on an iPod is like training a monkey to repeatedly hit a nuclear bomb with a hammer; you know that it's going to blow up eventually, you're just not quite sure when.
Version 4.0 sucked. It included all this new multi-tasking bullshit that I don't give a fuck about, because I mainly do one thing with my iPod: play music with it. 4.0 slowed my iPod down to Apple II speeds; searching for an artist or a song used to be instant, it'd start returning results as you were typing in the name. With 4.0, I typed in the name, and then had to hit 'Search,' and then had to sit there and wait 15 seconds for it to produce results. Just trying to get a list of playlists, select one, and hit 'Shuffle' would take at least 30 seconds.
I was just about to blow 4.0 away and reset the thing to the factory defaults, when Apple released 4.1. Keeping in mind the popular definition of 'insanity' as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I flashed it to 4.1.
Okay, seems like it fixed the slowdown. But know what it doesn't do now?
Play fucking music.
It's amazing. They've managed to take the digital output from a digital music player and inject static, crackling, hissing, dropouts, and pops into it. It sounds like listening to a cassette tape that you dropped in a puddle and then left sitting in your car in Phoenix all summer long. And they managed this by means of software, without changing the physical circuitry at all! That's some Ph.D level shit right there, it is.
In summary: Fuck Apple. Their shit *doesn't* "just work."
Because they don't. From a historical perspective, they've built a lot of shit. And I'm not just talking about the notoriously-poorly-built Apple III, a box whose standard technical support advice included picking it up and dropping it from a great height onto a hard surface, to re-seat ICs that had popped out of their sockets because the board overheated and warped. The first MacBook Pros overheated like hell because Apple's manufacturing instructions specified a massive overapplication of thermal paste to the chips and heat sinks. The batteries did things like catch fire and explode. Let's face it, back when Apple was being all non-standard and building its own hardware, they were dying, and it's only switching to commodity hardware like PC-standard video cards and CPUs that saved them. So their hardware has historically been mediocre at best.
Their software? Yes, OS X is lovely. It's nice. It's also not really theirs, not the functional parts. Underneath it's all POSIX-compliant BSD. Give them credit for prettying a Unix OS up sufficiently to capture desktop share, but they didn't make this thing up themselves. And aside from OS X, their track record has been pretty mediocre historically as well. Don't get me wrong, they've got a very nice set of user interface guidelines, but they're more than capable of writing absolute shit, and have been for a long time. In fact, some of the worst software that you can run on a Windows platform is Apple software that they've written for Windows. I've bitched long and hard about what a shitty piece of shitty shit iTunes is, for example, most notably for its habit of spontaneously deciding to start ignoring user input and for the fundamental way in which it breaks the connection between files and attributes describing those files.
And now they've reached a new low, they've finally adopted the Microsoftian practice of having new releases be backwards steps in usuability and reliability. I was recently required to update the firmware on my 3G iPod Touch, because iTunes wouldn't sync newly-purchased songs over to it anymore. Even though these are DRM-free, it decided I needed to use the new firmware in order to listen to them. Now, updating the firmware on an iPod is like training a monkey to repeatedly hit a nuclear bomb with a hammer; you know that it's going to blow up eventually, you're just not quite sure when.
Version 4.0 sucked. It included all this new multi-tasking bullshit that I don't give a fuck about, because I mainly do one thing with my iPod: play music with it. 4.0 slowed my iPod down to Apple II speeds; searching for an artist or a song used to be instant, it'd start returning results as you were typing in the name. With 4.0, I typed in the name, and then had to hit 'Search,' and then had to sit there and wait 15 seconds for it to produce results. Just trying to get a list of playlists, select one, and hit 'Shuffle' would take at least 30 seconds.
I was just about to blow 4.0 away and reset the thing to the factory defaults, when Apple released 4.1. Keeping in mind the popular definition of 'insanity' as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I flashed it to 4.1.
Okay, seems like it fixed the slowdown. But know what it doesn't do now?
Play fucking music.
It's amazing. They've managed to take the digital output from a digital music player and inject static, crackling, hissing, dropouts, and pops into it. It sounds like listening to a cassette tape that you dropped in a puddle and then left sitting in your car in Phoenix all summer long. And they managed this by means of software, without changing the physical circuitry at all! That's some Ph.D level shit right there, it is.
In summary: Fuck Apple. Their shit *doesn't* "just work."