Except when it doesn't.

how dare you use non-apple devices!!!

Now you know the price of being an apple 'tard

With apple the computer owns you (well pwns you)

didn't I read exactly this article a couple of days ago except it wasn't Apple it was Panasonic and it wasn't HDDs it was batteries?

Ah, the power of branding.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/06/25/panasonic_battery_drm/

But trying to catch-up with Microsoft in terms of errors and cock-ups probably isn't the best type of competition to be entering into (still got away to go before their level pegging methinks).

When Apple introduce the BSOD let's hope they choose a nice trendy colour or colours blended together.

Title says it all

The stability of Apple's machines is mainly due to the fact they have full control over the internal hardware and therefore can test everything against a very small range of hardware (peripherals excluded).

The moment "non-Apple approved hardware" is used, there's a risk of it not working - as we've found out.

Now, MS on the other hand have to support hundreds of motherboard combinations, with hundreds of different hard drives, with hundreds of memory suppliers/sizes/typres... which, in all honesty, they do pretty well.

Cue fanboys defending Apple for preventing people from upgrading their own machines in

3

2

1

Bloody apple

If the firmware upgrade was to enable >1.5Gb/s, Apple don't actually fit any 3Gb/s drives and won't support any third party drives at all, then what the hell was the point in bothering with a firmware upgrade?

Oh, I get it...silly me. Apple will now come along and sell a 3Gb/s HDD upgrade, complete with Apples hardware tax.

wonder why I dislike that companys attitude so much.

They have raised arrogance to new levels.

.....who is of the opinion that yes, Apple can make computers that 'just work' out of the box when you have just a limited and tightly controlled range of hardware to support. Not that difficult.

Easy streets, yet I'm amazed at how often they seem to cock that up.

Whereas MS gets the flack for making software that has to work with billions of combinations of kit of all varying degrees of quality. Yet on the whole manages to get it to work pretty well.

Which is the greatest achievment/technical challenge?

It's no wonder Apple never lets OSX out into the wild open. It would die a death out there.

I upgraded my drive to a 500GB 7200 drive - no issues here.

nuff said.

Exactly what I was thinking.

I thought Apple said they didn't have plans to make notbooks.

Huh, what's that? Oh, netbooks.

Never mind, move along, nothing to see here

"Now, MS on the other hand have to support hundreds of motherboard combinations, with hundreds of different hard drives, with hundreds of memory suppliers/sizes/typres... which, in all honesty, they do pretty well."

Meh, it's not Microsoft entirely that supports these devices, a lot of support comes from hardware manufacturers. For instance, try installing XP on a motherboard with a newer SATA controller in AHCI mode and you'll find that you will probably need a driver disk.

Now if you were talking about Linux, well the Linux developers have to support more devices, motherboards and hardware types as the Linux kernel runs on just about anything from the latest x86-64 based PCs and Macs, and ARM/MIPS back down to the old Atari ST and Commodore Amiga computers. Try doing that one Microsoft.

In fact I'm sure I read that Debian is available for 12 or so different CPU architectures and that's before including revisions.

Rob

Why I dont buy into thier game, f them and thier marketing.

but surely Linux developers support so many devices because Linux developers have nothing else to do???

I am looking for a new Laptop, and have been leaning towards Apple. The only reason so far not to is the expense, but I was starting to think the build quality/reliability etc. validated the premium, I guess I have to rethink that now!

It's quite stunning. Standard drive spec + standard SATA ctrl chip + noddy connector and four (?) PCB tracks should just work. How on earth have they managed to screw it up? They've not gone and built their own chipset have they? That way madness surely lies...

Has anyone noticed if XP installed on these machines has the same trouble? Oh how ironic it would be if XP just worked...

until you fuck about with it. This is like whining to the electricity company that you got a shock when you stuck your finger in the socket.

who has noticed the mentioning of apples own going down too?

this would mean, they just simply f$%d up (providing some apple gear really went down after the upgrade.)

This would just mean to me:

Another reason not to support this chewed off apple

What's amazing is the lack of logical thinking ability among the Mac bashers on this board.

Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and reliability of ANY computer vendor in virtually every survey ever done. There's another one in eWeek today - The number of 'very dissatisfied' customers from HP and Dell was 3-4 times the number for Apple.

There will be some failures. No one every said that Apple was perfect (except the strawman arguments presented by the Mac-bashers). First, why don't you show what percentage of systems had a problem. Then, figure out a way to show how many of them are drive problems that just came to light (take the drives out and put them in another system that hasn't been upgraded, for example).

It really amazes me the crowds of people who are always willing to immediately assume the worst and blame Apple for problems that may or may not be their fault.

Anyone call for an antitrust case yet? Seems anti-competitive if you cant upgrade your hard drive.

No, it's not like that at all. It's more like selling a car, in theory all the parts are capable of getting it to 100mph, but it falls apart as soon as you get it there.

But Windows users have a life and therefore do not have the time or patience to build their own fucking drivers

Apple is a extremly bad company who's design for hardware is so poor that it as been sued for just about every single piece of hardware they made. Obviously those poorly design Apple laptop are really not SATA 2 the patch only give you the illusion of it. so when you try to use a quality HD (as oppose the low quality Apple one) the drive can't work.....

Solution: Buy a REAL Computer (A PC) and forget Apple and it's grossly over price junk

This just proves why having a system you can upgrade yourself is important. Nobody wants someone dictating what hardware they can run...

Apple doesn't sell computers, it sells appliances. You buy it with it's firmware installed and don't change it yourself. I mean it's like a TV, you don't mess with it, usually.

<quote>

Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and reliability of ANY computer vendor in virtually every survey ever done. There's another one in eWeek today - The number of 'very dissatisfied' customers from HP and Dell was 3-4 times the number for Apple.

</quote>

Like all such surveys, it says much more about the Apple's *users* than their hardware...

"Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and reliability of ANY computer vendor in virtually every survey ever done. There's another one in eWeek today - The number of 'very dissatisfied' customers from HP and Dell was 3-4 times the number for Apple."

Having to support HP, Dell and Apple at work I've found Apple to be the least reliable out of the bunch. We deployed around a dozen Unibody MacBook Pros only four months ago and two have had their powerpack fail for no apparent reason (not frayed or kinked) another one has had the trackpad button jam on. Also we've had a few batteries on the previous model MacBook Pro swell up, according to our Apple service agent these are quite common problems that he deals with regularly. We also have had to replace the optical drive on dozens of G4 iBooks due to a design flaw that prevents the disc from ejecting, fortunately most have been under warranty but there should have really been a product recall, or a warranty extension like Microsoft has done for the XBox 360.

I had to call Dell for the first time ever the other day for a warranty repair, I was on the phone for less than 10 minutes in total, and they sent a technician out the very next day to fix the problem on-site. My experience with HP is also similar.

As for the reason why Apple top these surveys I think it's very much a case of the Emperor's new clothes.

In related news, heroin users have the highest drug satisfaction and reliability of ANY drug users out there as well...

Not a swipe at Apple per se (though I have no love of the company and my mate's week old Macbook Pro is a lovely paperweight pending a visit to the genius bar), but rather the company I work for, who troop out this line all the time. All it shows is that you can create enough branding and cult status that you can delude your users into loving you!

It's amazing how ignorant people are about Apple. Of course Apple didn't intentionally cause this error... it just is a bug in conflicting HD firmwares. Less than .0001% of people will ever experience this when updating HDs in MacBook Pros so it's a non-event.

Apple stuff works extremely well, it's near perfection... but 20 people out of 370,000 is not something to get worked up about.

"Like all such surveys, it says much more about the Apple's *users* than their hardware.."

That's just plain absurd. Some of the surveys are things like "did your computer start up when you took it out of the box". If you were correct, either Mac users have some kind of telepathic power forcing broken computers to work or are incapable of telling whether a computer is turned on or not.

It is about 10 trillion times more likely that there is some truth to all the surveys and you are simply too narrow minded to believe reality.