
Apple, wtf is wrong with you? - od2m
http://daniel.morrione.net/2013/03/20/apple-wtf/
======
pkaler
"I’ve been struggling with my baby, a mid-2010 27″ iMac for months now. She’s
been unstable for better than a year now, and it keeps getting worse. After a
few minutes, or hours the screen gets corrupted. Little discolored squares
appear and flicker and dance, eventually she hard locks. I have been meaning
to take her to Apple but honestly… dragging an iMac through South Coast Plaza
to the Apple store is a fucking miserable proposition, so I’ve been putting it
off."

Your fault.

My daily machine is a mid-2011 MacBook Air and it works like a dream.

My old machine was a late-2007 MacBook Pro. It's logic board started acting up
about a year after I bought it. I didn't buy AppleCare. Apple fixed it out of
warranty at no cost to me.

Take it in. Apple will most likely fix it. Most likely at no cost to you. The
machine has been acting up for a year. You chose to write a whiny blog post
rather than take the machine in. That's your fault.

~~~
Tmmrn
> logic board

I'm not an apple user so I had to google what that means. Apparently it is a
synonym for mainboard and it seems to be mainly used for apple computers. Is
there a reason to use "logic board" instead of "mainboard"?

~~~
josteink
Probably the normal Apple marketing reason: make the things they use seem
unique, and also trademarkable.

For instance, you can only get Apple-equipment with "Retina-display". Ofcourse
you get higher DPI displays from a lot of vendors, but they cannot offer you a
"Retina-display".

Same for the "Facetime-camera", or front-facing camera as the rest of the
world calls it.

~~~
sbuk
No.

------
eridius
Phenomenally stupid article.

Dude obviously has graphics card issues. Refuses to take it in to be serviced.
Acts all surprised when an OS update includes revisions to the graphics
drivers, which caused the bad behavior to worsen. Decides the right course of
action is to pen an internet screed against Apple because, well, I have no
idea.

The funniest part is, NVidia and ATI produce the graphics drivers, so if he
wants to be mad at someone, he should be mad at them.

~~~
smith7018
Thank you for being the sane one here. This "engineer" didn't even understand
that Apple doesn't write the drivers and "BIOS" for the card; how can I take
his rant seriously? Not to mention he started it with "my computer has been
acting up for the last year but, y'know, who has the time to take it in?
You'll never guess what happened... it got WORSE!!" Feign surprise.

~~~
georgemcbay
I don't see how it makes any difference who writes the GPU drivers. Apple's
entire business model is selling all-in-one solutions and the price you pay
for that as the vendor is the whole box is your problem from the customer's
perspective.

GPU driver issues? I don't care if they are Nvidia's (or AMD/ATI's) bugs,
Nvidia (or AMD/ATI) is your GPU vendor, you have them fix that shit and just
deliver that to me in an OS update. Otherwise your shit is busted.

If my Honda car had some firmware in it programmed by some 3rd party shop in
China and it started acting up, I would damn well demand Honda figure out how
to get it fixed regardless of whose bug it was. They are the ones who sold me
the integrated solution, it is now their problem. Same thing with Apple
devices, especially since they've chosen to create an ecosystem of computers
with no user serviceable or replaceable parts.

~~~
eridius
But the problem isn't shitty drivers. The problem is the hardware seems to be
failing, and all the drivers did was alter the observable behavior for the
faulty hardware (unfortunately, making it worse, but that's not the salient
point here). It's not reasonable to blame a company for a supposedly bad
software revision, when the fundamental issue is bad hardware.

------
beloch
I hate to break it to you, but Apple is very focused on increasing product
turnover. Every other PC and laptop vendor is going through rough times
because the obsolescence curve on Windows PC's has gotten so slow to fall off.
A five year old PC can run Win8 (or Linux) pretty fine actually, so sales are
in the scuppers.

Would you want to install Mountain Lion on a five-year old Mac? Hell no!

Apple saw that hardware was starting to last longer and took steps. Part of
their solution was to try to innovate. Retina screens, multi-touch trackpads
and an increased focus on gestures to justify their use over mice, etc..
Another part was to drive costs, and prices, down. Besides placing price
pressure on the competition, occupying a lower price-bracket means people are
more likely to upgrade more often rather than trying to nurse their old
hardware along for as long as possible. This is the good. The other parts of
their attack on long obsolescence cycles are not so good.

All traces of easy upgradeability have left Apple's product line. You now need
special tools to get into pretty much any Apple laptop, and they use propriety
connectors for everything. Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not
gonna happen. Yes, you can order Apple compatible parts and tools online, but
this is not by Apple's design. They'd probably sue those guys into oblivion if
they were really doing a lot of business.

Apple laptops feel great in the hand, as if they're built to last generations,
but they're actually horribly delicate in some respects. The Air can be
bricked by a mere drop of liquid in the wrong spot (this actually happened to
me. One drop. I'm not kidding.). The proprietary screws and integrated battery
mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and
then clean things up yourself. It's a horrible feeling watching your laptop
fry itself knowing it could have been saved if it had been designed with a
removeable battery. You'll get no sympathy from Apple either. Their warranty
does not cover spill-damage. When this happened to me, the repair bill was
literally larger than what I paid for my air in the first place! Subtle hint?

Software glitches and poor support for older hardware are only the latest in a
long sequence of Apple's moves to keep you buying new hardware. Have the geeks
looked at your obsolete macbook, tsk'd, and subtly hinted that while you could
continue suffering with that old beast, a new laptop would be very cheap and
work much better!

Apple is not stupid. They're actually really freakin' smart. I'd be willing to
bet OSX users replace their laptops, on average, more than twice as often as
Linux or Windows users.

~~~
taligent

      Want to pop an off-the-shelf SSD into your Air? Not gonna happen.
    

A typical SSD is larger than the MacBook Air. But you can add third party SSD
modules:

<http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2012>

    
    
      The proprietary screws and integrated battery mean you can't remove the potential to stop the damage before it happens and then clean things up yourself.
    

You can buy a pentalobe screwdriver for $10 from iFixit or $2 from eBay. You
can also buy third party batteries off eBay.

~~~
vacri
I hope they deliver before the liquid hits the critical circuits!

As opposed to just about anywhere else, which will have standard screwdrivers.
Visiting another office? What do you mean you don't carry around your
pentalobe screwdriver?

~~~
taligent
Are you suggesting that most people have micro screwdrivers suitable for
opening cases ?

Because that doesn't seem right at all.

~~~
fpgeek
Screwdrivers capable of opening up every Thinkpad I've ever used are included
in every generic screwdriver set I've ever bought for "jobs around the house"
(tightening screws on furniture, opening up toys to replace batteries
[sometimes requires pretty small screwdrivers], mounting WiFi routers on the
wall, ...).

I believe the exact opposite is true for the two MacBooks my wife has owned.

------
charonn0
When talking about his unreliable iMac:

> When a tool has served me well and needs to be taken care of, I feel I owe
> it that kindness for all its done for me.

and then, when he wants to bash Linux:

> A computer is a tool, that’s all. When it ceases to work reliably we have to
> move on.

Why the double standard?

~~~
josteink
I reacted to this as well:

> Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the
> absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux
> on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use
> it.

He even mentions Windows 8 as a more viable option. WTH?

As someone who actually uses Linux on the desktop I have to very much
disagree. I install it. It works. Every time.

Ofcourse he came from Gentoo Linux which has been rideculed internet-wide time
and time again for their incessant need to über-optimize ever single little
thing way beyond pointlessness.

His error in is generalizing this onto the rest of the Linux-world, and guess
what? That's just so extremely wrong and not even close to a normal user these
days. I haven't even bothered compiling my own "optimized" kernel the last 5
years. Shocking! I know!

This guy is a hardcore Linux geek converted into hardcore Mac-fanboy (polar
opposite), sold on the "it just works" idea, because things _didn't_ use to
just work in the world of Linux.

The transition must have been wonderfully liberating. But now he finds that
his newfound hero has abondoned him and that it was not the saviour he had
hoped for and he is lost.

Had he only known he could return to his roots and find everything he wanted
right there.

~~~
jack57
"This guy is a hardcore Linux geek converted into hardcore Mac-fanboy (polar
opposite)"

I disagree that these are polar opposites. I have been a Windows guy most of
my life, but after switching to Linux, I have learned to appreciate the merits
of the UNIX basis of OSX.

~~~
josteink
> I disagree that these are polar opposites

What I mean by that statement (which seemingly wasn't completely obvious) was
that he went from a "I want to be in control of and tinker with absolutely
everything"-stance (Gentoo, enough said) to "I want everything working, done,
out of the box"-stance (Macs).

I'd argue that is very much polar opposites.

------
lake99
"and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s
the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux
on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use
it."

Yeah, right. Say that to my many linux-using friends who can't write a simple
"hello world" program to save their lives. Despite "[helping] found Gentoo
Linux", the author comes off as a moron when he makes such comments about
"Linux", whatever the heck it means here.

~~~
sagarm
Gentoo was the first distro I used, hell, I even did a stage 1 install
multiple times, and I understand his perspective perfectly. "Ain't nobody got
time for that" indeed.

I'm a happy Ubuntu user now (right now, actually). I hope he gives Ubuntu a
try sometime; it's leaps and bounds more reliable and tinker-free than Gentoo
ever was.

edit: she => he

~~~
wutbrodo
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but who are you talking about when you say
'she'? I thought it may be the author, but his name is "Daniel" (and there's
an avatar picture of _him_ in one of the comment replies).

~~~
sagarm
I somehow got the impression that the author was female. I've corrected my
post.

------
rozap
This article is just plain stupid. Apple's service isn't what it once was,
their hardware is lower quality now, blah blah blah...we all know that. Have
you been living under a rock for the past 3 years?

"and Linux… Well, as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s
the absolute best thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux
on the desktop, you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use
it."

You kidding me? For the vast majority of OSS development and use, linux is by
far the easiest solution. People (including me) use linux because they DON'T
want to fuck around with shoe-horning software into running on a Mac or
Windows. It's just the simplest solution for using and developing open source
software. The above quotation may have been true about 6 years ago, but it
sure as hell isn't true now.

Welcome to 2013.

~~~
jjkmk
Agreed, as some one who has extensive admin and dev knowledge in OS X/ Win /
Linux I find Linux to be the easiest to manage and install in a desktop
environment.

------
humbledrone
> The exact moment I quit Linux was when an emerge pulled the latest raid-
> tools and broke my raid array.

Yeah, that's Gentoo. Such is life when you're running locally-compiled
binaries that, depending on your USE flags, have been compiled with a
combination of settings that nobody in the whole world has ever tested before.

I'm running Ubuntu Precise right now, and can quite honestly say that I have
not done a single system maintenance task in the six months since I installed
it and set it up. It just works. Granted, I'm not doing anything too fancy
with it, just basic software engineering.

~~~
YokoZar
Yeah. I hate to sound snarky, but a Gentoo user swearing off desktop linux for
good is exactly why we shouldn't be using Linux as a brand name. Ubuntu and
Gentoo are miles apart in terms of how well tested they are on the desktop,
and lumping them both under the Linux brand leads to this sort of confusion.

~~~
wutbrodo
Exactly. I expect this from people who don't know anything about Linux or the
concept of OSes in general (e.g. when people hear I use Linux they assume it's
for "servers and programming" only), and frankly it's quite understandable in
that case. It's a damn sight more odd seeing someone who "helped found Gentoo"
be seemingly incapable of distinguishing between Gentoo and other Linux
distributions in terms of system maintenance.

------
kayoone
Why is it that Apple users are so damn opinionated ? Jeez, just use what works
for you.

Guess what ? I use a Windows Desktop and really like it. Its fast, i can built
it myself and works with everything. My web development is done on an ubuntu
vm in the cloud so i dont care where my tools run. Id probably run Linux but
as i do some game programming and my tools arent availabe there, i cant.

I also own a Macbook Air, i really like the hardware and battery life. Its a
really solid mobile device. I dont like OSX too much but it runs my tools so i
dont care. As PC laptop makers have catched up alot in the past 2-3 years id
probably buy an ultrabook next as there are more choices and they are a bit
cheaper.

So what ? No hardware/software is perfect, just use what works for you.

~~~
r00fus
Most Apple users actually aren't that opinionated - it's just that the
opinionated Apple users are more vocal than the Windows crowd. I'd say the
Linux crowd are more opinionated than Apple users.

------
DannoHung
My experiences with Apple hardware in the past 7 years do not mirror this.

In total, I have seen three serious problems with mine and my families
computers: 1) Failed hard drives 2) RAM that went bad 3) A clusterfuck of
problems on a 17" MBP pre-unibody (Apple eventualy got it working, but it's on
its last legs in general now because the owner refuses to install patches).

This is across, I wanna say... approximately 20 Apple devices ranging from
phones to iMacs.

They're not perfect, but compared to the amount of problems from when everyone
I knew had Windows PCs, I take a lot fewer support calls.

------
megaframe
I've been running the same install of Ubuntu since 2007 with 0 issues. I've
replaced the main hard drive doing a dd to migrate, swapped the entire
MB/CPU/RAM and Video card, booted right up no issues. I run a raid 5 mdadm
setup, with 0 issues took 5min to setup the first time been working since.
Upgrading to the latest mainstream releases and package updates automatically
along the way.

I get the anti Linux sentiment I use to use Gentoo before Ubuntu/Debian became
so viable and it was/is painful to say the least. I'm not going to say I
always agree with everything Canonical does with Ubuntu but I could make the
same argument for OSX and Ubuntu has been amazingly stable.

So to anyone out there on the fence with OSX and fearing Windows, Linux is so
much better these days. Approaching the ease of OSX.

~~~
robocat
Similar experience - desktop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with mdadm Raid has been
brilliant. Could still get up-to-date packages for most things I need.
Recently replaced with a laptop, wanted faster CPU+SSD, not because of any
issues with Ubuntu.

------
mrilhan
Didn't read your rant since it was impossible for my human eyes. I may bill
(!) you for the temporary loss of productivity. Your BG and color scheme are
horrible, I would rather blend and drink my left foot than read your blog
again.

~~~
visarga
I use Readability in Chrome. It makes the text nice with one click, everywhere
I want to read an article.

~~~
mrilhan
You're right, I actually have it installed too, I should've just done that and
moved on. This particular blog with the patterned/hypnotic background really
hurt my eyes in the morning, and I guess I was cranky enough to take it as an
insult :)

------
burnblue
TL:DR: "My mac broke. I didn't actually bring it in to get it fixed, but fuck
Apple for not fixing it anyway."

~~~
Margh
Do you actually think that taking it into an Apple store would have ended in
the tech reflashing the GPU?

Besides the fact that transporting it could damage it further, he would
probably would have just been told it was end of life or needed a new GPU
altogether and the chances of them having said GPU in stock would be next to
nothing.

Maybe it's just my area but Apple stores here do not actually repair products,
they just tell you to buy a new one.

~~~
r00fus
> Besides the fact that transporting it could damage it further

This is just silly - a computer is not a trauma victim, it's a piece of
hardware.

My experience has been that they've spent two days isolating a problem on my
2005 iMac which I caused by using 3rd party RAM with the wrong timing - issue
didn't appear well after I replaced the RAM (I replaced the RAM again, it
worked fine).

------
unimpressive
I can't remember the last time that my Xubuntu install broke.

Though somehow it makes perfect sense for one of the people who helped build
Gentoo to be disgusted with Linux.

------
batiudrami
This guy writes about operating systems the way I used to when I was 12. There
is perhaps a valid point (I don't know, I don't use a Mac) hidden in terrible
writing and fanboy opinions.

------
tluyben2
My 2008 Macbook really works like a charm, always has, always does. That was
my second Mac after I tried them in the 90s (and hated it). I was very happy
so in 2010 I bought, for a very large wad of cash, a MBP with an i7. Nothing
but problems; problems which don't appear when you go into the store except
the lousy battery life which they said is because I run too heavy software
(which I don't mostly and the 2008 had/has no issues with it).

The magsafe internal part of that MBP is also of much lower quality; one of
the pins 'disappeared' and Apple replaced the magsafe and the external
charger. Now the same pin disappeared but I'm out of warranty and they want
E600 to repair it.

Thinkpad, here I come.

------
auctiontheory
Likewise the new iTunes. But at least that's not a key component of my daily
wage-earning. I feel your pain.

~~~
endgame
iTunes has always been a dog.

------
szc
There is a prevailing assumption that this problem is "caused" by bad
software. This might be the case, but bad hardware could also be part of this!

A lot of modern hardware has programmable parameters, "core voltages", PLL
parameters that control running frequencies and the timings for DMA / memory
access state machines.

Who's fault is it if the hardware vendor says use X, Y and Z for these
parameters. _And_ they include the same parameters in the software they supply
and....

What if some %'age of the hardware doesn't actually produce the timings the
configuration parameters specify, or does "really bad things"?

In reading the "source" article, there is a pointer to a discussions.apple.com
thread. The "fix", if you go and read the thread, is on page 21 from Andrew
Humphreys. What his solution does is change the timings and clock speeds for
low power and idle modes of the GPU. Reading between the lines, the low power
/ clock speed settings don't work and will cause corruption. His changes are
derrived from people having problems running Windows 7. The same changes seem
to help people running OS X.

Perhaps someone from the Linux community will be willing to force the ATI GPU
cards in question into low power / performance modes and see if corruption
occurs.

I've no knowledge of what the parameters Andrew is overriding actually do, but
for a portable platform "faster" almost always results in higher power usage,
heat and therefore shorter battery life.

This might not be such an issue for desktops, if you can tolerate the noise of
increased cooling.

Getting pragmatic about this, how could you design a Q/A test for this? Do you
really afford to wait X number of minutes before / after each test to make
sure the GPU is cold enough to go into low power mode? What if you decide to
use hardware that can cool the GPU faster so you could get through all the
tests -- doesn't that make the tests invalid as you are no longer using HW
customers will get?

As a final note, there might be evidence that some graphics drivers were
updated ~1 week before 10.8.3 was shipped. The evidence is in
/System/Library/Extensions/

------
visarga
I can't tell how many times I have went to Apple forums to find threads
hundreds of posts long and spanning multiple years without a fix.

Why don't they send some of those geniuses to fix these problems? Can't they
afford to support their products?

------
jsz0
From what I've seen Apple still does a far better job than other PC makers in
this area.

------
cremnob
>I have been meaning to take her to Apple but honestly… dragging an iMac
through South Coast Plaza to the Apple store is a fucking miserable
proposition, so I’ve been putting it off.

There's your problem.

~~~
geuis
Why is that a problem, beyond a desktop being heavy? I don't see any
Dell/HP/Samsung/Lenovo/etc stores around for him to drag a pc desktop to. If
there happens to be a Microsoft store around, he'll meet nice people but not
get much help.

~~~
smith7018
He's saying the "problem" was that the author was too lazy to fix it in the
first place, I believe.

------
drivebyacct2
For all the things I dislike about Apple and iOS, I really can't say enough
good things about their hardware. Even so much that I will wait until Q3 just
to see if they release Macbook Airs with a high(er) res screen instead of
grabbing the XPS13 today with a 1080p 13" screen. (And I doubt the XPS13 is
any more serviceable).

> which is scary because Windows 8 is unadulterated bullshit, and Linux… Well,
> as someone who helped found Gentoo Linux, fuck Linux. It’s the absolute best
> thing for servers, AND NOTHING ELSE. If you’re running Linux on the desktop,
> you’re a person who would rather fix his computer than use it.

What a steaming load of shit.

