Ye Olde Reliable MacBook died. No, not really. But it was a very sick little machine for a little while there.
On vacation, it was having trouble importing pictures into iPhoto. The operation just wouldn’t complete, but I noticed that some of the pictures it could get to seemed corrupted.
So — trip to Wal-Mart for a couple new CF cards to fill up, instead of reformatting the used ones. Figured The Beast would be able to make short work of fixing anything that might be broken. Then while letting the Boy™ watch Spider-Man on the MacBook on the flight home, it thoughtfully shut itself off without warning, and the boot-up screen changed from the gray Apple logo to a gray Ghostbusters logo, minus the ghost.
Made an appointment at 4:00PM yesterday for the Genius Bar, then borrowed the wife’s MacBook to write the script for this week’s PJTV Hair of the Dog. Finished, I headed down to the studio to plug the computer into the teleprompter to rehearse a few lines, and got a nasty reminder that her machine has a newfangled Mini DisplayPort output instead of good ol’ Mini WhatEverLastYear’sPortWasCalled.
Ran down to the Apple Store three hours before my Genius Bar appointment to pick up the necessary cable — Mini-DP-to-big-ass-RCA. Time each direction: 20 minutes.
Discovered it would take two adapters to make the thing work. Mini-DP to DVI, then DVI to Video. Whew. Fifty bucks later, I had the cables I needed.
Running a bit late, I started putting the adapters together while driving (I know, I know.) They — and you’ve seen this coming a mile away, I’m sure — didn’t fit together. Although they sported identical labels, the male DVI was for computers, the female DVI was for video, and never the twain shall meet. Extra prongs on the male end, which is fitting enough when you think about it.
Took the first exit and looped around back to the Apple Store to try again. They had no two cables, or even three, which you could use to devolve an ultra-modern DisplayPort output to a simple RCA jack.
Back in the car and on the phone to PJTV Superproducer Mark Anderson to figure out how we could make the prompter work. Much discussion, no solutions. Told him I’d go downstairs and fiddle with stuff and see what I could come up with.
In the end, nothing worked. Or rather, nothing I could make work that didn’t involve precariously balancing my wife’s shiny aluminum computer four feet above a concrete floor, on the tip-top point of a tripod.
Taping cancelled, I headed back down to the Apple Store again, broken MacBook in hand. Sure enough, it was a bad hard drive. Hey, it happens. But thanks to AppleCare, I was back on the road with a replacement drive, installed and partitioned, in under 15 minutes. Never even had to show ID, hand over a credit card, or wait in line.
Back home, I hauled out my OS X install disk (still in the original box, in the original packaging, carefully stored in the office) and went about the dreary business of installing the OS.
That done, it was time to install a year’s worth of patches and updates… and our internet died. Keeled over it did, slipped this mortal coil. It was an ex-internet.
By this time I was getting really quite tired.
Internet fixed — no boring details on this one, you’re welcome — patches installed, Time Capsule backups restored, it was like the MacBook had never been ill. Except for all that driving and the stupid cables and such. Anyway.
Capping it off, I installed the 2.4 update to our Apple TVs and… there’s no other word for it… it sucks. Everything clean and elegant about the UI has been larded up with useless data, added theatrics, and text pumped up so big that it screams at you like a comment troll with his hammer laid down hard on the CAPS LOCK key. Seriously, now when I run the thing all I can think is, “Dude, you got a Dell!”
And that’s about as bad as a sunny day can get.
PJM Home
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15 Comments
1. mojo:Apple has always been primarily a hardware company. Which is why they’re behind the curve in hardware, confusingly enough. It’s why a Macbook Pro costs 1/3 more and runs half as fast as, say, a new Dell or HP notebook.
As for the OS, it’s GNU linux with an (admittedly very nice) fancy GUI tacked on.
If Apple had had the brains to port their OS to the i386 platform back in the day, they’d be rolling in Billy Gates’ cash right now. But no, they had to lock it down to THEIR hardware.
Jul 1, 2009 - 1:03 pm 2. Stephen Green:Actually, the new MacBook Pro 17 was described by one of the PC magazines as the fastest *Vista* laptop they’d seen.
There’s something wrong with Linux? You coulda fooled me. All the various *ix systems seem to be more stable and secure than Windows.
You say “tacked on” as if good GUIs happen by accident. Judging by the dreck MS puts out, I’d say that isn’t so.
But, you know, other than the facts and stuff you’re dead on the money there.
Jul 1, 2009 - 1:29 pm 3. Blaine:And this is better than PCs how?
Jul 1, 2009 - 2:03 pm 4. mojo:Nothing wrong with Linux, it’s one of the more reliable platforms out there. But I’ve always likes the Apple OS, even before they changed over to that. It’s their snooty attitude that pains me.
By “tacked on”, I mean it’s not an integral part of the OS – no X-based GUI is. And again, nothing wrong with that. It’s a beaut, much slicker that Gnome.
Current Macbook proc is “2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip shared L2 cache running 1:1 with processor speed”, which is the same as what’s in a Dell XPS-grade system. Apparently they’ve upgraded it, last I saw was a 1.8GHz single-core unit.
Jul 1, 2009 - 4:00 pm 5. Glenn (NotReynolds):@1 : No, MacOS X is Mach and FreeBSD inside, not Linux.
But yes, it’s mostly open source, like Linux, with most of the advantages thereof, like a few thousand people who know operating systems poking around and saying, “Gee, that will probably break someday” instead of the few hundred you get at BillG’s place.
Jul 1, 2009 - 5:25 pm 6. jed:OS X isn’t Linux underneath. It’s BSD. Also, I don’t think it uses XWindows, though I recall reading that you can run X on it. Or it could be that they’ve buried XWindows under Carbon/Cocoa. Well, just found this:Due to its unix underpinnings, Mac OS X comes with an implementation of X11. It has been an optional install prior to Leopard (10.5). Starting with Leopard it is installed by default. An early ArsTechnica article I found on OS X architecture showed Classic/Carbon/Cocoa as an API layer, but not XWindows. This all jives with my recollection of discussions with friends who run both Mac and Linux boxen, where I recall them commenting that you could install X11 if you really, really wanted to run a particular app and have it look/feel like the one on Linux — though there are certainly some issues there, as a lot of the GUI apps for Linux are using either the Gnome or KDE libraries, and I don’t know that either of those are available for the OS X. Maybe they are; I haven’t had a reason to look.
Blaine: PCs can have HD failures too, you know. And while I’m not sure what’s going on with the mini display port, the rest of the video mess isn’t Apple’s fault. He’s just lucky he didn’t have to toss HDMI into the mix.
Jul 1, 2009 - 5:37 pm 7. Stephen Green:Mojo —
The low-end MacBook CPU is 2.26 and goes to 2.8 as standard equipment on the 17″ Pro, upgradeable to 3.06. I got all that in 15 seconds at Apple.com.
Jul 1, 2009 - 6:30 pm 8. jaymaster:OK, this clinches it. I’m selling half my Apple shares tomorrow.
I’ve noticed it myself on the iPod side (I’m not a Mac user). Things are slipping.
The 1200% increase Apple delivered me was a nice ride. But alas, all good things must end.
And no, it has nothing to do with Job’s liver.
Well, maybe a little….
Jul 1, 2009 - 9:50 pm 9. Casey:Looks like Stephen is succumbing to the Apple kool-aide. Pretty soon he’ll start publishing articles that prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that AlGore is funding a crusade to oppose global-warmening-denial by ensuring that all the dummies in the world use Wintel machines, so’s they’re too dumb to understand the real crisis.
Ok, something more serious: I think OS X is a magnificent operating system. If I had the money, I would buy an Intel Apple system. The excellence of OS X, alas, does not explain why Apple still can’t even break out of minor league status market share in the PC market.
Given the quality of OS X and Apple production, just why aren’t their systems selling better? Given that MicroSoft produces such terrible operating system software, shouldn’t Apple be enjoying a far greater market penetration these days?
…This actually relates to Stephen’s most recent response to Mojo; Apple may actually employ state of the art tech, but it still charges more for an equivalent hardware platform, just to use OS X. Back when Apple relied on Motorola chips, they could hide behind some smoke’n'mirrors, but now that modern Apple systems use the PCI bus, IDE/SATA hard drives, Intel processors, there is no legitimate hardware excuse for the premium Apple price.
I don’t even want to hear about Linux. OS X is based on FreeBSD, which is based on BSD Unix. Sure, *NIX is a stronger enterprise system than NT -especially considering Apache- but that doesn’t invalidate the utility of Wintel as an end-user platform.
Linux is still a hacker/tweaker/adjuster platform. It is optimal for those who just love to spend their time mucking around with grungy details. Linux is good in the same way that having a manual choke in your car is good. If you enjoy that level of detail, knock yourself out. The rest of us just want to start the car, go to Krogers and pick up the groceries, then go home. Push on the gas; push on the brake; put the car into Park; then turn off the car. Most normal human beings don’t want a Porche Boxter or a Ferrari.
MicroSoft has pushed the “it’s just a car” paradigm for quite a while, and despite OS X’s technical superiority, MS still dominates the marketplace. Have we reached the “MS is just another stinking Chevette!” stage yet? No. Will we ever? Perhaps. But Apple has yet to attain the level of Honda or Toyota in the automotive sphere.
What I find ironic is that Stephen Green, iconic Libertarian, is devoted to a platform which is, to date, a relative failure in terms of “free minds & free markets.”
Jul 1, 2009 - 11:51 pm 10. rosignol:Given the quality of OS X and Apple production, just why aren’t their systems selling better?
‘there’s not many things that someone cannot make a little bit cheaper and a little bit worse’
Lots and lots of people will settle for a little bit worse if it means they can get it a little bit cheaper. These people appear to be a majority of the market for computers.
Personally, I think it’s worth spending a little more on the hardware if it means I’ll be spending less of my precious, limited, recreational weekend time dealing with crapped-out hardware and flaked-out software.
Jul 2, 2009 - 1:24 am 11. mojo:Didn’t mean to restart the OS wars, guys. Just my stupid opinion, ya know?
Jul 2, 2009 - 11:18 am 12. jed:Linux has come a long way from being a hacker/tweaker platform. Sure, you can customize it all you feel like spending time on, but you don’t have to, and all the basics are there and work just fine. Some people might encounter the odd problem with video or wireless, depending on the chipset, but those issues are getting to be more rare as time goes by. I know of several “no hassle” installs on laptops.
The main reason for MicroSoft’s dominance is market network effects, and their pre-installation arrangements with the major PC vendors.
Jul 2, 2009 - 12:03 pm 13. dorkafork:“Given the quality of OS X and Apple production, just why aren’t their systems selling better? Given that MicroSoft produces such terrible operating system software, shouldn’t Apple be enjoying a far greater market penetration these days?”
As an Apple shareholder, I am very happy with their increasing popularity.
What I find ironic is that Stephen Green, iconic Libertarian, is devoted to a platform which is, to date, a relative failure in terms of “free minds & free markets.”
I don’t see how Apple could possibly be termed a failure in terms of “free minds & free markets” in any sense. If you don’t like their “closed system”, don’t buy in. Not to mention the fact that Apple’s the reason you can buy DRM free music. And do I need to mention the Microsoft’s antitrust violations?
Jul 2, 2009 - 7:44 pm 14. Campisi:I’ve never understood this claim from die-hard Apple people (many if not a majority of Apple users are not die-hards in my experience) that Windows machines crap out all the time. I’ve had Windows machines for most of my computing life, and I’ve only had a couple issues that weren’t in some way due to my own ignorance of how Windows and computers work. The only computing experience I’ve had that even approached the “unreliable shitbox Windows” experience many harp on about involved a Linux distro that at in its most sorted state still failed to outperform the Windows OS that was previously (and subsequently) installed on the system in question.
Jul 6, 2009 - 1:51 am 15. rosignol:It has to do with our friends and relatives who don’t know beans about computers and shop on price. They invariably end up with a cheapass motherboard, underspec power supply, and a crappy hard drive, and it’s basically roulette to see which will die first. Then they call us for help, because we ‘know computers’.
Yeah, we ‘know computers’. Specifically, we know enough about computers to know that when you buy cheap white-box hardware, you’re going to be making up the difference in time and headaches.
Which is one of the nice things about Apple- for all their faults (and the occasionally bizarre design decision), the hardware they sell is decent and fairly reliable. You can buy (or build) a similarly reliable PC, but the people who do that don’t call us for help because their stuff doesn’t break all that often, so we get a disproportionate impression Re the reliability of PCs.
Does that clarify things?
Jul 6, 2009 - 11:41 pmSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.