Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge iOS7

Macs remind me so much of Harleys. They both survive more on marketing than performance. I've never understood the loyalty they maintain with their 5% market share that has pretty much stayed the same forever.

An old friend convinced me that, if I gave Apple a chance, I'd never go back to Windows (or Android these days). I bought a G4 Powerbook when they were the latest thing. I gave it over a year. All Apple all the time (as much as possible with their tiny market share). Right after I started I migrated to OSX. First off, I was astounded that the OS wasn't backward compatible and all my software was now worthless. Start from scratch. Buy everything all over again.

My shiny new Mac was sooo slow, too. I was always waiting for it to catch up with my input.

Nothing in the OS seemed to follow any logical sequence. It all seemed random. When I'd ask someone 'in the know' a how-to question I'd get an answer like, "Well, just hit question mark, pound sign, F2, and plus sign."

"How am I supposed to know that? It's not in any help file and there's no manual."

"I don't know. You just do. I learned it in school."

"The schools quit using Macs 15 years ago."

"Maybe you should take one of those Mac cruises."

Or, after trying forever to find a document I'd just completed I'd be told, "Click on the 'hard drive' icon. It's in there."

No $hit. It's on the hard drive. Thanks.

It rarely connected to WiFi spots. I'd hit 'connect' and it didn't. All the help file offers you is 'hit the connect icon'. If that doesn't work? Hit the 'connect' icon. You aren't allowed to access the settings. To be fair, it was nearly flawless connecting to Apple routers (Airport) but nobody uses those because they are so expensive for a low power router and have poor security.

One of the offices I frequented only had a Mac desktop I'd access to print from. I carried a thumb drive for such occasions. The Mac had USB ports galore. The problem was, it only provided enough 'USB juice' to handle the keyboard and the printer. The other 4 ports were useless as the keyboard and printer were all the computer could handle at a time. I had to unplug the printer to download off the flash and then plug it back in to print..

My current ultrabook has the same processor, a better high end dedicated video card, more RAM, more ports, better battery life, as a MacBook Air for less than half the price. The only difference between the two is that awful Mac operating system that I was cursed to use for over a year. The MacBook I use for comparison has great hardware...for an $800 computer (what I paid for my ultra). But they want $2,200 for it.

Apple had an ad campaign a while back and their tag line was 'it just works'. Well, in my experience, they interface well with other Mac products. They perform miserably with products from other manufacturers. I'm sure you Mac 'lifers' out there get better results because you know the tricks...but doesn't that defeat the whole claim of ease of use?

I'm always amused when I hear a Mac aficionado (my friend who talked me into my Mac experience is a prime example) say something about Windows machines 'crashing all the time'. I'll bet I haven't had a Windows machine crash in ten years. Maybe more, it would have been a machine running Windows 98 or earlier. Nothing past XP has ever crashed on me and I have computers all over the house (I'm a gearhead and, as they are all backwards compatible, they interface fine). My Mac used to lock up once a week...on a good week.

I even gave them another shot with the iPad as it seemed like a logical direction to take. All the same issues.

The new Nexus 7 tablet (2013 version) also leaves the iPads in the dust. You can do pretty much anything a laptop can do on it whereas the iPad is very limited if you try to use more than one program at a time (who only has one program open at a time?). I bought an iPad for traveling but it just sits in my shop and I use it for internet radio now. The Nexus 7 even has a better display than the highly touted 'Retina' display. Once you get used to Android OS (which, by and large, feels just like Windows to me) you have a full fledged computer in your hand. I was just reading an article that claimed that, by 2016, Android will be on more new machines than any other operating system.

I also got a Kindle Fire HD as a gift and I prefer it to my iPad as well.

Interestingly, Macs are, at this moment in time, at a higher risk for viruses than PCs. They had always been ignored in the past but, this is a guess, the iPad has enough numbers that they've drawn the attention of the bad guys. As there isn't an infrastructure in place for dealing with the issue, as with PCs, Apple has been scrambling to catch up.

Different strokes for different folks. If Apple wasn't out there innovating (and, by gosh, they do innovate) everyone else probably wouldn't push as hard. From my observations, Apple is frequently the first but they are rarely the best.