A Question About Apple
by Mike Kimel
A Question About Apple
My wife has been an Apple user for a long time. I on the other hand have tended to avoid purchasing Apple products for myself – I just cannot get around the concept of a single button on a mouse, nor why I should be interested in buying a product whose manufacturer apparently makes conscious decisions to remove features based on someone’s aesthetic sense rather than usability. That said, I did notice that Apple products had a tendency to be reliable, though that reliability certainly came at a price.
Recently, my wife convinced to ditch my Droid for an i-Phone so we could use facetime. Perhaps because of that, I’ve become overly sensitive to issues involving Apple products as of late. My mom has a keyboard for her iPad which seems to have stopped working. (I was the one who originally recommended she buy an iPad as I figured it would be easy enough for someone as technologically unsavvy as her to use easily.) The only way I can get my iPhone to admit I have a voice-mail is to power it off completely and then turn it on again. It’s been that way from day one – at first I chalked it up to yet another thing about the phone, but my wife told me it wasn’t supposed to behave that way. And I notice my wife has been complaining about her Mac – something that didn’t happen except rarely with its umpteen predecessors.
Is this just something from my immediate circle (i.e., random anecdotes) or are the company’s products becoming less reliable? Anyone else notice anything?
You could have just both installed skype to do video calling.
The last ios6 update has caused a lot of connection problems since they added 3g. My ipad has been unable to maintain a wifi connection longer than 5 minutes. This problem has diminished as app producers issue new releases but still exists. I have also had network lockups that require hard reboots to recover. Running different ios version devices with itunes can cause a lot of problems. Itunes folders were dropped so can trash the media library on newer devices. The proliferation of devices with newer features combined with a long legacy is proving unmanageable.
I’m being forced to use Macs at my new job and I’ve been extremely unimpressed. Compared to PCs, they’re expensive and difficult to maintain (replacing RAM, etc is a chore). I’m starting to convert my startup over to PCs and Chromebooks, and each one of these conversions is saving 30-75% over the Apple machines.
Jeff,
Skype was fine by me. My wife is an Apple person. I think she’s starting to wonder though, if the premium she pays for is worth it. She’s been to “genius store” to get work done on her mac a number of times in the last few years. She’s come to understand that a) I don’t seem to need to work done on my cheaper, more powerful windows machine, and b) if I did need work on my machine, it wouldn’t cost as much.
The one problem with a windows machine – a lot more malware to deal with.
Lord,
I have noticed that I do drop off my wi fi an awful lot with my iPhone.
Piaw Na,
Interesting.
I’m not surprised with voice mail problems. Over the decades I’ve learned that voice mail can take several days to show up in one’s voice mail box. This has long been a telco problem, even before cell phones. I’m not surprised Apple hasn’t figured out how to work around it.
As for my other Apple gear, it is definitely more reliable than 5-10 years ago, though I think they passed through a maximum maybe three years ago. Some of this may just be me. I’ve gotten more adventurous with my plug ins.
If Ars Technica is correct, Apple did a big cleanup and bug fix release with Snow Leopard, but lately they’ve been pushing a lot of new technologies, so we’re much closer to the bleeding edge. For example, they spent a lot of effort building in version control, network synchronization and persistent sessions. I think they’ve done a good job, though some of the interfaces have rough edges. Of course, it involves some inversions. In the old days, it was the power users who used version control and scoffed at the “lusers” who couldn’t master SVN or the like. Now it’s the power users bitching about version control, and the naive users who think it’s all jake.
I don’t know if the cost premium is worth it, but every time I buy a new machine and price it out at Dell or HP, it seems they charge just as much as Apple. Maybe it’s different if you aren’t much of a power user, but a lot of my non-power user friends have switched and are happy with their new Apple products. Two of my Blackberry friends love their iPhones, and several PC friends have been buying iMacs and iPads.
Also, to Plaw Na, how often do you change RAM on a computer? I haven’t bothered since the 90s. I just buy everything that fits. Then again, I’m not one of those guys who drops a new V8 engine into my car every now and then.