Shredding the White Flag - no more MAC

I think it's about time to talk about my change in love of MACs.  Normally I make more of an editorial, but this particular blog is a narration of my battle.  If you want to skip the story and go to the commentary, jump to the bottom you impatient jerk, and no cookies for you!

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Years ago, before OSX, I would never even dream of using a MAC, PC all the way.  MAC was all proprietary, cost too much, had no noticeable reason to use them over PC, the OS was unstable, there were no games on it (yeah, that was a reason too) and many more things.  Graphics were always top notch, but everything else suffered as the CPU was not meant to handle it.  Word processing could have the text still showing up for as much as 20 seconds after I finished typing, the one time I used one.  I was just dead-set against them.

First I heard that OSX was a unix base, then I wanted to start developing for iPhone.  Both reasons to try the Mac OS.  The company now annoyed me even more.  I needed to own a MAC to do both, because the iPhone SDK was free, but not multi-platform, and the OS wouldn't run on non-mac hardware.  So I tried a Hackentosh (For those of you who are not as pathetic as me, I will explain that a Hackentosh is a standard PC running MacOS) and after probably a week of fine-tuning I got it working, went to install the iPhone SDK and it didn't work because I had an AMD and the Intel CPU was required to run the SDK.  I was, at this point, ready to throw in the towel.

Then my job, at the time, told me they would get me a Macbook Pro.  I was floored, and said yes, of course.  It was a Work-owned machine, but I could take it home and do personal projects on it.  Finally I had my way to work on iPhone apps.

I had the Mac for just under a year, and the fan started making this intensely loud buzzing sound.  Took the computer to the apple store and they tried to tell me the fan in the middle of the motherboard was probably broken because there was a hairline crack about 2 inches long back of the computer (on the flat part in the back when the lid is closed).  I said just take it, that's not the problem, so the "Genius" did, and lo and behold, the problem was a faulty fan, fixed under warranty.

I left that job, they kept the computer, but I had really started to like the interface for OSX anyway so I got myself my own Macbook Pro.  At this point I was still liking Mac.  I was liking them so much I was willing to get an iPhone 4 on release day.  Mac ran great, phone worked great, everything was happy. They sync'ed together and everything, no problems in the world, right?

Fast forward 2 years.  The beginning of the end of my affair.  My computer has issues.  To clarify, I was using it, and it turned off.  Dead, nothing happening, no reason, no warning.  The power button didn't do anything.  Dead as a brick.  This is about 9:30 or 10 in the morning so I call the Apple store.  I say I've got a computer that just died, no reason or warning.  I've looked up on line what the basic troubleshooting steps were, nothing helped, and I need to bring it in.  They say great, we've got an opening at 2:30 today, or late tomorrow.  I was a little annoyed that the store was so busy I had to wait 4 hours just to see someone, but whatever, it's not like it was in warranty.

So I take it in, he looks it over, tries the same basic troubleshooting I did, and nothing.  So he takes it in the back and does something.  What he's doing I have no idea, maybe he was using it for a pingpong paddle, or seeing what it weighed, or maybe just trying some freaky zen-based holistic computer repair (I hear it works in india), who knows, but sure as hell wasn't fixing it.  Then he comes back out and says everything looks good, doesn't know what's wrong.  I say it's not turning on.  He says yeah, other than that.  He tells me he can send it off to some repair shop for a flat rate repair of like 200 or so, I think it was.  I say yes, because the other option was to fix it in-house at a higher number.

So I'm waiting my 5 days without a computer, finally get it back.  I go in and he hands it to me, says it's all fixed.  He doesn't even say what's wrong, just that it's all good to go, and they waived 99% of the fee, so I owed less than three dollars.  I said thanks, and was about to come home and praise Apple for being so wonderful, then I read the repair bill.  They replaced my rubber feet (they had fallen off), and tested everything.  It worked, so they sent it back.  That's it.  The FEET?  No, clearly it wasn't that, so they took it apart, which the guy at the store SHOULD have done, then put it back together, and all worked.  Likely pulling the battery out reset it and all was good again.

This annoyed me, but let's step back a little.  While I waited those five days, I read a lot of articles on my stand-in laptop from work.  I read about Apple, and MacBooks, reliability, life expectancy, etc.  I was floored.  The accepted truth was that you should get the applecare warranty which takes your 1 year warranty to a 3 year one, so that you are guaranteed 3 years before your Mac dies.  That's ACCEPTED?!   Are you kidding me?  I spent two thousand dollars on this laptop, and it's only supposed to last about 2 years without the warranty, three with?  That's a thousand dollars a year.  Think about that!  It means you're paying $83 a month on your computer!  Come on, I've had car payments like that!   I bought a year old HP laptop for 700 bucks, then used it for about 9 years.  Now I need to buy a new Mac every two, and people are ok with this?  For $2000 I want this damn thing to be running for 10 years!  That or make me coffee!

Ok, so I'm already getting fed up with Mac, but my girlfriend had already gotten her iPhone 4s before this mess.  A week into owning it, it was turning itself off without warning or reason.  She'd miss calls and texts because of this.  Eventually at one point it shut down and wouldn't go on anymore.  She took it to the apple store and they said "yeah, it's dead, here's your new phone."  So she got a new phone and came home.  Inside an hour, this one was shutting down too.  That's an hour from when she got it, not from when we got home, which, by the way, is an hour drive from the Apple store.  She doesn't even Sync it, she just uses it stand-alone.  Well we didn't have time to go back to the store right then.

On another issue, my iPhone, being 2 years old, was having home-button problems.  It wouldn't work all the time.  I called the apple store and said that the home button didn't always work, and I wanted to know if they did repairs on out of warranty phones.  She said she would have to diagnose it in the store, and offered me an appointment.  I said I just want to know, do you do repairs if it needs one.  She said she couldn't say until she saw the phone.  So I called in and made an appointment for my phone and my girlfriend's phone both.  Tried to make one appointment for both, but the lady on the phone said we couldn't, so I said fine, consecutive?  She said sure, and got my name and my girlfriend's, told us both times, and hung up.

The fated day arrived, 4 days later, and we head over.  Since we're an hour drive, we left early, got there 15 minutes before the first appointment.  Guess what, they didn't even MAKE that appointment, they only made the second one, for her phone, but not mine.  So we had to sit there for 40 minutes waiting for her's, instead of 10 for mine.  While sitting there I got to hear all these fun happenings.  One person came in, said they bought a phone the day before, and it was broken, wouldn't turn on, no idea why.  They said I'm sorry, you need to make an appointment and come back tomorrow.  You need to make an appointment to exchange the 24 hour old phone?  You can walk in and buy it, why can't you walk in and exchange it.  When you can't have walk-ins at your storefront, you're too damn busy, make a new location!  And for a phone exchange, they don't even DO anything.  When our appointment finally happened, and they were nice enough to see both phones, I learned that no, the apple store never repairs phone hardware for any reason, they just swap it.  Seems that was a pretty cut and dry answer the phone girl could have told me.

So my girlfriend gets a new phone, again, and the guy insinuates that it might be her fault that it's not working and breaking so fast, that hacking and jailbreaking phones can cause that.  Did he think she was jailbreaking it with a hairpin in the car?  She doesn't even plug it into a computer to charge, just the wall!  We left very frustrated and frankly, let down.

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So finally to the moral of my story...

I am shredding that damn white flag I hung up.  Yes, I'm using a MAC, and I will keep using it until the day it dies because it nearly cost me my left arm, but I'm not paying them a dime more. Apple has taken what I am told was amazing service and turned it into a mockery.  The store is overheated, overcrowded, and just haughty.  The brand was built on prestige and I understand that, but it became arrogance and that's not good anymore.  There is nothing I've seen that you can do on their phones, and not on an android phone.  Hell, I can even put an "Apple" logo on your android if you want, it's called a background image.

Their OS is intuitive, but now you can get mods for Windows machines that copy most of their higher end functions, even multi-touch.  And the OS was the last straw.  When I got Lion, I saw that it was crap, that they had now OFFICIALLY blacklisted any "PowerPC" applications, which included the only game I played, Diablo II.

Side note: Blizzard said sorry, but MAC changed, not them, and Lion will not support Diablo II as it was a PowerPC game and they'd have to, likely, rewrite the whole game to get it to run on Lion.  There's a published listed of games from them, Warcraft 1 and 2, Starcraft, etc, that won't work.

Lion also killed my NTFS drive accessing program, so the windows partition that the OS let me make, it couldn't read anymore.  Took me almost 2 days of tinkering to get my computer functional after my Lion "upgrade".  It was like I was using windows 95 again.  The only thing I learned back then was stay the hell away from upgrades!

For the record, I've already changed to an android phone, and my next laptop will be something with a windows logo, likely dual-booted to some flavor of Linux like the old days, but you've got to be out of your gourd if you think I'm gonna buy any more Apple devices, or give them a penny more.

I had my fling with Apple, but you changed, lady.  You were hot, sexy, sweet, and charming, but, in the words of Ash:

Honey, you got reeeal ugly!