Fuck Apple
I know, it’s a harsh thing to say but “Fuck Apple.”
I attended Photoshop training today (all day and all day tomorrow too). I came home where I had left my Macbook running. As happened last time, the little swirly rainbow of death was showing (this is the “I’m very busy, you must wait” OS X icon). I’d left a browser open and nothing else.
After waiting and waiting for the rainbow wheel of doom to depart, I finally turned off the laptop without shutting down. When I attempted to reboot, I could hear the hard drive making a whirring noise followed by a click, over and over again, before it gave up the attempt to read my hard disk. Apple disk utilities do not recognize the presence of the disk (nor do they want to give me my install CD back now).
For those that forget, this is exactly what happened a couple of months ago when the hard drive that came with the Macbook died. The little rainbow was running on the desktop when I returned from being away and it would never boot again after a hard shutdown. Obviously, the drive went south while it was running on both occasions. This time, the drive is the 120 GB SATA drive that I bought for myself after the last hard drive failure.
So, I’ve had this laptop for almost seven months. In that seven months, the hard drive has completely hard failed twice. This cannot be blamed on my behavior or treatment of the laptop because it spends 99% of its time sitting on my desk at home. I almost never take it anywhere and I don’t do anything like drop the hard drive from my desk all of the time.
This Macbook is a piece of shit and I’m not giving Apple any more of my money. They’ve gotten enough from me for faulty hardware and frustration. I’m very glad that having learned my lesson from last time, I backed up my data on a regular basis. My external drive has a backup from a week ago and I store most of my data (like my music) on an external drive anyway.
I’m writing this on Kubuntu on my old Intel Mac Mini. (OS X has recently decided that it does not like the grub-based bootloader on this so I may or may not be able to boot OS X on this box.) I will need to figure out how to read my OS X formatted external drives but I ordered a new desktop PC in components last week as a Christmas present to myself so I will have a new computer in the next couple of days anyway.
You know, in more than a decade of running Windows, I lost data a single time ever and only had two hard drives go south. Apple managed to meet the same bar in seven months. I think my new box will dual boot Vista and Linux and that will be it.
March 15th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Here’s a reply to a rather old post. Dude, the HDD died. Apple doesn’t make HDDs. The HDD manufacturers are Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi GST, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Samsung. Blame one of those guys. I’m no Apple fanboy since they make their stuff in China, I just want to set the record straight. Incidentally, I work for one of the above companies as an engineer — some of the other manufacturers have rather low quality standards. Now it’s possible the heat management on Apple’s laptops is less than wonderful. Still, it should be within the environmental spec on the HDD.
Actually, I was searching for “fuck apple” to find legitimate horror stories. Unfortunately, I’ll have to keep searching. ;-)
May 19th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Well I don’t think it’s a secret anymore that Apple had some serious issues with Seagate HDDs and Macbooks, but although Seagate is to blame, mostly, it’s not like Apple users get a whole ton of control of what goes into their machines. In fact Apple is so nuts about their image that they censor employees private lives, as I explain in one of my blog post. The point I’m getting to here is that Fuck Apple is a totally legitimate response to the MacBook HDD situation. Especially because if you go to get your HDD fixed with Apple, whether it’s their fault or not, they may or may not even have the part in stock. Say at a store, and you may wait many days to have a part replaced that is very simple to repair simply because Apple sometimes runs out of parts and repairing your machine, with or without new parts, is totally at their discretion. Read the fine print on the contract on this one. Plus Apple Care doesn’t cover accidental damage, and offers no option to upgrade to a version that does. A Genius will probably say something along these lines if you spill something in the notebook, “Spilled something in the your MacBook, have Apple Care, oh well that’s too bad but it’s still about 3/4 the cost of a new computer to repair, and we have to send it out so you’ll be without it for at least a week.” Plus the Genii are so busy repairing phones now that who knows if they can get to your computer and if so how often they even get to work on them in general. Of course stories will differ on this point, whether competent management is at a store and allotting time for repairs to be performed, etc. but overall your broken machine may be a stain on their image so unless you’re a Pro Care member, they often won’t even let you retain the machine while they order a part for your machine. Often leaving you without your machine for days, even weeks in some cases. Pro Care is another additional approximately $100 service on top of anything else you bought. In general Apple is responsible partially for HDD issues lately because there have been so many. Seagate admitted to issues a few months ago. Still it’s tough to believe that if Apple was really testing the machines to a higher level, you know the level that you’re supposedly paying more for, they wouldn’t have picked up on this issue. In general they’re OS is nice, but their hardware is nothing to write home about, and you loose your control over being allowed to touch it, for the most part. Of course who wants complete hardware control, but a closed source OS, and viruses? The only logical way to look at this is that neither Apple or Windows based computers are good in the long run. They are a proprietary, temporary solution, to getting everyone into something Open Source so we can get past all of this crap once and for all and have total software and hardware control, but until we stop bending over for Apple and MS it’s not going to happen.
July 20th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
apple is bullshit, charging people $300 for $99 products
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:17 pm
'm a recording artist. I was told to buy an Apple for music and all other applications. In lest then 3 years, I've had 67 freeze ups, I have gone through nine hard drives, six mother boards, three logic boards and a bunch of misc. crap. Also, I'm on my third Imac, all free because Apple knew that their computer is horrible piece of junk and I have the Apple protection plan. All bullshit!
The Imac is the worst flawed piece of shit on the planet. I cannot believe that the public buys into this bullshit about Macs being superior to PCs.
I hate Apple computers, I loath them, I have the deepest hatred for their products. I would like to legally box Steve Jobs in the fucking ring If I could. Fuck Apple!
January 25th, 2009 at 12:20 am
I was a hard core die hard Mac and Apple Fan until I worked for Apple. The dream job became a nightmare once I found how messy the internals are. The managers and directors there are mostly useless people, with the exception of Steve Jobs. When I used Windows, I actually felt happy because I felt in control for once. Using Macs, once you get a problem, you are screwed.
Nobody can convince me to use a Mac anymore because I know all the dirty secrets of Apple.
Surprisingly, it is Microsoft that cannot get away with anything as the PC is an open architecture.