Why Apple Sucks
This journal has been brought on by my recent problems with my ipod. I bought it at the CU book store about a year ago, and it was from then on designated "My Precious." My precious cost me $300 that I saved for a long time for. I could have bought 100 cups of coffee with that ipod (futurama reference, anyone?) but instead I bought My Precious. And Precious indeed she was. I enjoyed my mp3 player very much. Such freedom, not having to cart cds around everywhere, to listen to whatever music I wanted, whenever I wanted. But sadly, My Precious must now rest in peace, for she is no longer working. I first started having problems last Thursday when I was listening to various angsty "break-up" songs, both happy and sad to celebrate the ending of my relationship -- no, silly, not with Ian, we're still very much in love -- but with aerospace engineering. I'll write up a whole long LJ rant about THAT later. But right now we're discussing my ipod woes. Anyway I was listening to various angsty songs when all of a sudden my ipod just froze up. My precious has always been a good little mp3 player, so that had never happened before. I tried connecting her to my laptop, but nothing happened, so I went home and connected her to the wall socket. My precious made various loud hard drive noises like she was in pain and then a little icon with a folder and an exclaimation mark appeared. I went to the apple website and they suggested that I should reformat her and start over, but my reformatting software wouldn't recognize her. So I went to the apple help message board and found out it's a very common occurance with ipod gen 4s purchased about a year ago (with a one year warranty). And then I remembered in human spacecraft the other day we were discussing how companies design things to fail just as soon as the warranty expires. Don't you love it when school has applications in real life.
Anyway from what I can tell the hard drive is pretty much shot. I can send her in to get fixed but that will cost money. I can buy a new mp3 player but that will cost money. I can say screw it and go back to CD's but that will not only be terribly retro but also will have meant I wasted $300 and therefore will cost money. What part of starving college student do you people not understand?
And so through my mp3 player woes I came to find the fundamental flaw in apple computers. Don't get me wrong here. I have always been the first to defend apple products, and I grew up on a mac (besides my dad's old compaq, the dell on which I type this was my first PC). But the problem with mac is that they sacrifice performance for "prettiness." The one thing I will give it is that the newer OS's are unix based which rocks compared to whatever the hell it is windows is programmed in. But ... Windows is ugly and clunky and utilitarian and infected with spyware but at least it's up front about what it's doing. If your PC is fucked then it will give you a blue screen or maybe if it's really fucked a black screen with white letters and say "Look at me I'm fucked you'd better restart me if that doesn't work you'd better reformat me and start over sorry sucks to be you here have some ugly computer jargon as to why I'm fucked."
Mac, though, is decidedly obnoxious about it.
"Look at me I'm a SAD MACINTOSH see my frowny computer face don't you feel SOOOO bad for me no I have no idea how you can fix it but LOOK the macintosh is so very SAD!!!111one" ... yeah. Okay so maybe the sad mac isn't THAT annoying but I'm in a ranting mood. It seems like the nice programmer people at apple could spend less time programming scripts that make the computer look sad when it's fucked and more time making sure that the computer doesn't get fucked in the first place.
That may be an unfair assessment though. Mac OS X is a really amazing OS software wise. And it's pretty. And who doesn't like pretty things. But apple hardware is just ... not where it should be. My old ibook had the memory and OS upgraded and it was as good as new when I bought this one but I had to replace it because the hardware just sucked. The cd drive didn't work and it had already been replaced twice. It was just evil. My dad's old compaq worked as good as the day he got it for 4 years (which is like ancient in computer time) before it got a virus and he decided he should replace it (I don't think he's ever heard the word "reformat" much less knows how to do it). All the apples I've ever owned start to go downhill after about a year. So yes. Apple, if you're reading this, improve your hardware quality, and *maybe* I'll consider that $2500 powerbook for my next laptop. Otherwise, hello Toshiba.
Anyway from what I can tell the hard drive is pretty much shot. I can send her in to get fixed but that will cost money. I can buy a new mp3 player but that will cost money. I can say screw it and go back to CD's but that will not only be terribly retro but also will have meant I wasted $300 and therefore will cost money. What part of starving college student do you people not understand?
And so through my mp3 player woes I came to find the fundamental flaw in apple computers. Don't get me wrong here. I have always been the first to defend apple products, and I grew up on a mac (besides my dad's old compaq, the dell on which I type this was my first PC). But the problem with mac is that they sacrifice performance for "prettiness." The one thing I will give it is that the newer OS's are unix based which rocks compared to whatever the hell it is windows is programmed in. But ... Windows is ugly and clunky and utilitarian and infected with spyware but at least it's up front about what it's doing. If your PC is fucked then it will give you a blue screen or maybe if it's really fucked a black screen with white letters and say "Look at me I'm fucked you'd better restart me if that doesn't work you'd better reformat me and start over sorry sucks to be you here have some ugly computer jargon as to why I'm fucked."
Mac, though, is decidedly obnoxious about it.
"Look at me I'm a SAD MACINTOSH see my frowny computer face don't you feel SOOOO bad for me no I have no idea how you can fix it but LOOK the macintosh is so very SAD!!!111one" ... yeah. Okay so maybe the sad mac isn't THAT annoying but I'm in a ranting mood. It seems like the nice programmer people at apple could spend less time programming scripts that make the computer look sad when it's fucked and more time making sure that the computer doesn't get fucked in the first place.
That may be an unfair assessment though. Mac OS X is a really amazing OS software wise. And it's pretty. And who doesn't like pretty things. But apple hardware is just ... not where it should be. My old ibook had the memory and OS upgraded and it was as good as new when I bought this one but I had to replace it because the hardware just sucked. The cd drive didn't work and it had already been replaced twice. It was just evil. My dad's old compaq worked as good as the day he got it for 4 years (which is like ancient in computer time) before it got a virus and he decided he should replace it (I don't think he's ever heard the word "reformat" much less knows how to do it). All the apples I've ever owned start to go downhill after about a year. So yes. Apple, if you're reading this, improve your hardware quality, and *maybe* I'll consider that $2500 powerbook for my next laptop. Otherwise, hello Toshiba.