Saturday 11 December 2010

Rant mode on

As a loyal Mac customer, you have to put up with the digital equivalent of Steve Jobs urinating on you on a regular basis.

Case in point: I've just bought my wife an iPhone 4. I have always owned Mac laptops, instead of PC laptops but the last one I purchased, about 3 and a half years ago, is still running fine on Tiger.

The iPhone 4 cannot be used with Tiger. It can however be used with XP, which is the direct competitor's product, which has been around for 9 years, that is 5 years before OS X could run on Intel CPUs.

With my current iPhone 3G, I can't tether the phone in Tiger to use as a modem and I can't run Steam natively (but Wine runs absolutely fine and I was playing Counter Strike and Day of Defeat years before Steam play came out).

Cost to upgrade to the latest OS (were I interested in doing so): a third of the price of a new iPhone 4.

(Don't get me started on Linux. I'm still waiting for the operating system to actually do what an OS should: which is work flawlessly without me having to spend a single second thinking about it).

/rant off

7 comments:

The Mad Tinkerer said...

Every OS Sucks: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/loadingreadyrun/2516-Every-OS-Sucks

That should brighten your day. :)

x said...

Microsoft rarely gets credit for the stuff it does right. Maybe you should give Windows 7 a try?

Peter said...

Stop being loyal customer then. I know you're in a golden cage right now, but step-by step, you can get out. Windows 7 and even XP after all those patches work OK.
Plus Android phone will work with any OS and you're not forced to buy HW and SW to develop on it.
PS:
Mac is a PC.

Andrew Doull said...

All: I'll change to Windows when they sort out the UI for turning a computer off. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html)

(Not to mention a working sleep/hibernate mode: my requirements are laptop specific).

Thanks for the suggestions though.

x said...

Actually, Windows 7 has 3 shutdown options: shutdown, restart and sleep. My sleep works well on my laptop, but I use a fairly standard issue netbook, so YMMV of course.

David said...

It's 27 bucks on Amazon. If you can get iPhones for 81 bucks, please sign me up for 10 :)

But seriously, as an Apple enthusiast, you should know that every notebook has a 50% Apple tax built in. One of the things we accept as Mac fans. For the first time since the 80s, I recently sold a used computer - a first gen Intel Mac Pro tower, and got about 1/3 what I paid for it. Not a prayer of getting that for my Windows machines.

nornagon said...

Just pirate Snow Leopard, or borrow it off a friend. There's no DRM.