18 September 2006

A Mac Conspiracy of Silence

The man commonly referred to as his “Steveness” by the Mac-eratti, Steve Jobs to you and me, made one of his famous product presentations on 12th September.  Inter alia, he announced iTunes 7.0, an upgrade from iTunes 6.0.5.  A geek at heart I quickly upgraded our home Mac.  Soon afterwards SWMBO complained that Entourage (Outlook for Mac) kept crashing.  I switched her to Mail.  Thought nothing about it.

The weekend approaches; time to update iPod so that all those glorious BBC podcasts will keep me happy as I tried not to become another Russian road statistic.  It automatically tried to update SWMBO's iPod, and failed.  I plugged mine in, it failed to mount.

Did the 5R's, reinstall, reboot, restore etc.  No change.

Read the discussion forum on www.apple.com.  WE ARE NOT ALONE.

How can you release a KEY piece of software that fails to interop with key software, that fails to load and has over 2,000 individual readers researching how get back to the previous version?

Now if this was a M$oft the Apple blogs would be full of it; laughing at those less fortunate than us and their unfortunate inability to use software that works.

As it stands so far on the 5 Apple and gadget blogs I subscribe to - SILENCE.

Double standards?


[composed and posted with
ecto]


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2 comments:

Unknown said...

Macs are far from the perfect machines that Apple likes to portray. If they accomodated a larger portion of the computer market, they would be shown to be just as vulnerable and to have just as much glitchy software as PCs. I've worked on both Macs and PCs and at least found that the free-market works a bit better with PCs, as there is always a software or hardware provider with an answer to my problem.

Anonymous said...

It is simply Apple corporate strategy to announce before the fact.

System 8 didn't work at all until rev 8.1. System 9 only worked by rev 9.2.2.

OSX only really became stable with Jaguar 10.2.8 and Panther at 10.3.9. I have no intention of upgrading to Tiger until they've announced a couple more members of the cat family.

The trick is not to upgrade for a few months at least, then you have no problems.

It probably is time for Apple to rethink its policy. But it only climbed out of a huge whole and back into the market by going all out for innovation and forgetting any notions of 'backwards compatibility'.

I'm typing this post on an old 1999 Power Book. It 'works' as well as my 2005 Mac. But only if I keep all the software at exactly the same vintage.

w.shedd said . . .

"If they accomodated a larger portion of the computer market . . ."

At one point in the 1980s, Apple was the world's third largest computer company. It has made strategic errors in the past and maybe it's time for another re-think.

18 September 2006

A Mac Conspiracy of Silence

The man commonly referred to as his “Steveness” by the Mac-eratti, Steve Jobs to you and me, made one of his famous product presentations on 12th September.  Inter alia, he announced iTunes 7.0, an upgrade from iTunes 6.0.5.  A geek at heart I quickly upgraded our home Mac.  Soon afterwards SWMBO complained that Entourage (Outlook for Mac) kept crashing.  I switched her to Mail.  Thought nothing about it.

The weekend approaches; time to update iPod so that all those glorious BBC podcasts will keep me happy as I tried not to become another Russian road statistic.  It automatically tried to update SWMBO's iPod, and failed.  I plugged mine in, it failed to mount.

Did the 5R's, reinstall, reboot, restore etc.  No change.

Read the discussion forum on www.apple.com.  WE ARE NOT ALONE.

How can you release a KEY piece of software that fails to interop with key software, that fails to load and has over 2,000 individual readers researching how get back to the previous version?

Now if this was a M$oft the Apple blogs would be full of it; laughing at those less fortunate than us and their unfortunate inability to use software that works.

As it stands so far on the 5 Apple and gadget blogs I subscribe to - SILENCE.

Double standards?


[composed and posted with
ecto]


Technorati Tags: , , ,

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Macs are far from the perfect machines that Apple likes to portray. If they accomodated a larger portion of the computer market, they would be shown to be just as vulnerable and to have just as much glitchy software as PCs. I've worked on both Macs and PCs and at least found that the free-market works a bit better with PCs, as there is always a software or hardware provider with an answer to my problem.

Anonymous said...

It is simply Apple corporate strategy to announce before the fact.

System 8 didn't work at all until rev 8.1. System 9 only worked by rev 9.2.2.

OSX only really became stable with Jaguar 10.2.8 and Panther at 10.3.9. I have no intention of upgrading to Tiger until they've announced a couple more members of the cat family.

The trick is not to upgrade for a few months at least, then you have no problems.

It probably is time for Apple to rethink its policy. But it only climbed out of a huge whole and back into the market by going all out for innovation and forgetting any notions of 'backwards compatibility'.

I'm typing this post on an old 1999 Power Book. It 'works' as well as my 2005 Mac. But only if I keep all the software at exactly the same vintage.

w.shedd said . . .

"If they accomodated a larger portion of the computer market . . ."

At one point in the 1980s, Apple was the world's third largest computer company. It has made strategic errors in the past and maybe it's time for another re-think.