I am just so happy to see that Apple is having their own issues. (See next paragraph) Very similar to what Microsoft has been experiencing for years.
I want all tech companies to succeed but I am quite tired of the smugness of all the Apple commercials. Way to take it on the chin.
By the way while I am ranting, I will boil down the Apple vs Windows debate.
With the first you get a great piece of hardware with a great OS that will run everything that Apple certifies to run on it. If it breaks you will have to use their official parts to have it fixed. Their parts are not universal with other computer manufacturers so you will pay more for them. (This is beginning to change since they adopted Intel processors and boards, although they insist on special non-standard versions) For that matter to work on one is a very painful process so go ahead and send it back to Apple or find an authorized Apple repair person. Biggest plus for Apple is reliability of the hardware. Biggest negative for Apple is flexibility of hardware.
With the second you get an Operating System that can be used on 1000s of different computers that are made by 1000s of computer manufacturers. Or even computers that you make yourself. The parts follow industry standards and even you can work on your computer. The Operating System will work with thousands of more varied systems that Apple could ever dream of. Biggest plus for Windows is flexibility of hardware. Biggest negative is the reliability of the hardware.
Bottom line is that Apple is a hardware company that makes an Operating System just to sell more hardware. Microsoft is a software company that makes an Operating System that is flexible enough to be installed on 1000s of different configurations. Which company is more open and flexible with regards to hardware interoperability with the operating system? It would have to be Microsoft.
Both companies have their plusses and minuses. The more popular Apple becomes the more issues that will come to light with their operating system.
I could go on for days....... Maybe one day I will post my definitive Apple vs. Microsoft blog posting.
As a follower of your tweets for the past few days I must confess I haven't conversed with you as much as the other people I follow (or those who follow me). I wanted to get that out of the way as I hope you'd like to know who (out of the blue...) was posting some comment defending a company many people love (to death) or hate (despise as much or worse than MS).
ReplyDeleteI retired my last MS laptop over a year ago. I had the tablet version of XP. Wonderful laptop, great hardware, no real complaints. I went to an Ubuntu desktop. My own hardware (wow that OS can run on anything) was assembled from many computers that have had previous useful lives serving me. After that I moved to my current computer, my iMac.
Now to be honest I love this machine. Since Apple went to Intel hardware I have been much less hesitant about purchasing one of their PCs. PowerPC sounded great in theory but never really seemed like the best idea. Especially when you consider that choice as bucking the entire PC trend.
With all of my PCs I have had to get into the OS and hack it up. This was to get the machine to do what I wanted it to do. Various shell hacks made my life as a programmer much easier (they still do professionally). Hacking the OS goes without saying in the Linux world. Admittedly, I've also had to get down and dirty in the terminal in OS X as well. From all my experiences I can say that when you do these things there is a risk that your system, no matter what the hardware and OS combination, will have strange issues when large parts of the OS change.
What I am getting at in this reply to your post is that I think you have read the news too quickly. Yes, people are experiencing an abnormal amount of issues with this update. Largely I think the issues boil down to customizations done to OS X and, ironically, the result of Apple having to support more hardware. Both from forum posts and blog posts it seems like many of these errors have to do with silly issues such as PGP plugins in mail causing it to hang to plist adaptations not working well with new configs. Also, Apple recently through out some new hardware. I don't want to get into an argument over hardware support at the device layer but I think we all could say that Apple could (if they wanted to) expand support for more hardware through drivers. It is a simple fact of OS X's BSD heritage.
I will give you this, and really I think you should have focused on this more, is that Apple has been shipping more and more machines. It's popularity has increased. Some of their claims in their ads have become petty due in part to their market share. However, in my humble opinion I still believe that Apple still has a leg up on its competition through the reasons you list in your post.
I really intended to list several other facets that I find important about the OS X and Apple coupling, but I feel that I have hijacked your post enough. It is important to be critical of many aspects of software and hardware; that is why I liked this article. I also just wanted to through out some other helpful info.
Thanks!