Does anything ever go wrong with a Mac?

Factual Questions
41

OSX can be installed on a non-Apple computer, although it’s not quite a simple as just popping in an installation CD. You can see how to do it here.

Personally, i think that OSX is an excellent operating system, but i really don’t think it’s better in many substantial ways for the end user than Windows 7. Both operating systems have their own ways of doing things and their own little quirks and idiosyncrasies, and i think that preferences for one or the other tend mainly to reflect which one you are more accustomed to. I prefer Windows in many ways, and if someone handed me a honking powerful Mac Pro, the first thing i’d probably do is install Windows 7 on it.

Apple’s big market is really in hardware, and more specifically in laptops, iPods, iPads, and iPhones. Those are the things that have driven Apple’s incredible success over the last decade, along with stores like iTunes. Mac desktops constitute a tiny percentage of the market.

You’re right at some level that Apple desktops (i’m talking mainly about the Mac Pro and not the iMac here) use components similar to many other desktop computers. For the most part, a hard drive is a hard drive, and you can buy hard drives and motherboards and memory of the same quality that Apple uses simply by going to an online retailer like NewEgg.

But one area where Apple seems to do better than a lot of other companies is in putting their hardware together, and making sure it works. The construction of their laptop chassis is also very good quality. Also, if something does go wrong with your system, my reading suggests that Apple is often much better with their customer service than other computer retailers like Dell, HP, Gateway, etc.

One of the greatest things about Mac desktops like the Mac Pro is the design of the case itself. If you’re the sort of person who wants to be able to add his own hard drive, the Mac case makes stuff like this incredibly simple and neat. Look at how well-organized it is. Yes, you can buy third-party computer cases that are just as good, but this isn’t the sort of case you’ll find on a typical turnkey desktop computer.

Actually, for this reason, if i bought a Mac Pro, i would order it with only a single hard drive. Because Apple is a hardware retailer, they tend to shaft you on the price of add-ons. If you want a 1TB second hard drive in your Mac Pro, it will cost you $150; if you want a 2 TB drive, it will be $300. I can go on NewEgg right now and grab 1 TB drives from good manufacturers for well under $100, and 2TBdrives for not much more. Combine this with the ridiculous simplicity of adding a hard drive to Apple’s fabulous case, and you’d be crazy to pay the price that Apple charges for extra drives.

42

[QUOTE=Hennessy]
It has to be the operating system because the cheapest desktop apple offers is $2,500…
[/QUOTE]

Try again. The least expensive iMac is $1199, and the Mini is even cheaper, starting at $699.

43

I specifically used the the term desktop, as to most people, desktop refers to the computer in a case.

44

Well, of course. All computers come in a case. By “desktop”, most people mean that the case is something designed to sit on a desk. I’ve never heard anyone say that something doesn’t count as a desktop just because the case is part of the same module as the monitor, or because the case is really small.

And you can’t say that “Macs use the same hardware as all other PCs”, since not all PCs use the same hardware, either. Sure, you can get a PC for $300, but it’s going to be a $300 system. Apple just doesn’t make anything to compete in that market niche. If you look at an actually comparable system to any given Mac, yes, you’ll find that there’s still a markup for the Mac, but it’s a small one, and personally, I’m willing to pay a little extra for a really good operating system on a computer that will run it seamlessly.

45

okay, how about cheapest upgradeable computer? Or cheapest computer designed to upgrade to avoid the “you can upgrade iMacs” comment. My point about the hardware is that it isn’t special Apple hardware and the same hardware can install Windows. Which led me to say it is a battle of the operating systems which a lot of people don’t understand. Both operating systems are equally the same as in not one is better than the other. For the answer to the question, yes things go wrong with OSX, the same way things go wrong with Windows which is equally rare nowadays especially if you know how to use a computer…

46

I’m not trying to be difficult, but I just upgraded my Mac Mini a few months ago. (I don’t understand the second part of your quoted text.)

47

he means “where is the Mac equivalent of the typical single-CPU-socket mini-tower with at least a couple of expansion slots,” OK?

The answer, of course, is “there isn’t one, there will never be one, so stop asking about it.” You either get the integrated-display iMac (I refuse to call it an “all-in-one” because it isn’t) or the hideously overpowered Mac Pro. The mini is a curiosity at best.

48

The second part was referring to the inside of the Mac Pro (designed to upgrade). I never seen the Mac Mini before and it is awesome. I’d actually buy one but I would like to know if it’s possible to upgrade the video card…? It has the power of a $400 laptop but without the worry of having to charge your battery. Mini Mac sounds much better though.

I guess my problem is that I’m referring a full computer as a computer with a full size tower (Mac Pro). A full size tower has benefits, you have no limits for upgrading and upgrading is made easy. It is the standard for a full computer. When discussing computers I tend to refer to full computers, not miniature ones.

I’m sure that’s hard to understand as well, here is an example. I have an old Gateway 2000 with a full size tower presuming atx. I can easily make that as fast as the iMac or your mini Mac. I can make it faster then next years iMac or mini Mac because it was designed that way. Your mini iMac requires you to buy a new mini iMac or spend $1000 dollars more for the “Pro”.

Apple has ridiculous prices and there is no denying that unless your clueless. That being said I will have nothing but Macs in my house when I have money to blow on them (I have a flat screen sitting next to a flat screen 42’’ each). Calling them a wise investment is not true. Be happy you can spend money like that but don’t try to say cause it was worth it

49

I’m not clueless. I have both my iMacs, my home-brew tower, a little Zotac box, and I’m about to purchase a Mac Mini. None of the prices are “ridiculous,” because “ridiculous” means it invites ridicule, when clearly the prices doesn’t, except for people too poor to pay the price, I guess. My home-brew tower is running Mac OS X, so I guess I was too cheap to buy a Mac Pro, because the price wasn’t worth it to me for its use (it lives in the basement as a server and whole-house HTPC).

Fair enough, unless one uses them professionally. On the other hand, I’ve never had a problem selling my old (authentic) Macs at a high price (even the broken ones!), but it always takes forever to get rid of a random Winbox (to the point where the Salvation Army got my last two; no ROI of my time).

The incremental cost isn’t all that much. If you can already afford a computer, you can probably skip latte’s for a few weeks and get a Mac. As I describe above, in many cases, the purchase of a Mac is worth it to me, and sometimes it’s not. But you can’t ever say that it’s never worth it.

50

I’ve never understood the high quality components argument. If your computer lasts until it needs to be upgraded, the components are already of sufficient quality.

51

There isn’t one now, but I wouldn’t be so confident as to say that there never will be one, since they used to have them: My office computer is a big-box tower with lots of room for upgrades and expansion (i.e, the kind of computer Hennessy is referring to), and it was at the lower end of Apple’s price scale.

52

Yes, PCs tend to have more issues than Macs. But, a MacBook Pro costs $1200 while you can get a PC Laptop for only $450. The cost difference isn’t just for the glowing white Apple logo users can use to show off their superiority.

The body of a MacBook Pro is carved from a solid piece of aluminum. It’s a process that Apple created which makes for a very sturdy notebook body. The Apple keyboard is highly praised as being responsive. The hinge is a single piece that goes almost across width of the entire laptop while most of the cheaper laptops use smaller, cheaper double hinges. The internal components on a MacBook Pro are much higher quality than you’ll find in a $450 PC.

This isn’t to say that all PCs suck and Macs rule. There are many well made PCs with high quality components and parts. You just have to shell out $1200 for them.

The problem for the PC reputation is that for every $1200 PC, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of those cheap $450 PCs. Meanwhile, Apple simply doesn’t build the low end stuff, so there are none of the bottom of the barrel machines that pull down Apple’s quality rating.

Do Macs have any issue? I did a Google search and didn’t find any. Of course, I was Googling “Double Jointed Babes” and not “Macintosh Problems” which might have made a difference.

Macs do have problems, and if you pay $1200 for a computer instead of $450, you’re going to complain about any issues loud and wide. You’re going to have online petitions, and find bulletin boards dedicated to the issue. You’re going to find your fellow consumers who have Mac troubles and become convinced that a conspiracy is underfoot to prevent the world to know The Truth.

However, over the years, I’ve had many Apple and non-Apple PCs. In the last ten years, the quality of Apple products have simply been much better than 90% of the PCs on the market. They’ve had fewer problems, and Apple’s service is usually excellent. There’s a reason why someone is willing to pay $1200 for a laptop when they could have bought one for $450 – and it’s not just because you look way cooler while you sip your organic, fair trade, latte.

53

Well, OSX did use emulation and a virtual environment to support old applications — it was called Classic, as I’m sure you know. Developers wanting their apps to run under Carbon needed to make a special effort, albeit a small one, to tweak their source code and then re-build. (The Carbon API and the Classic API overlapped a lot, but were not identical.) Many old programs in fact never made the leap to Carbon.

But enough did. In particular, Microsoft and Adobe were on board with their big titles, and that was the main thing.

54

Did you swallow a marketing brochure whole? Maybe Apple were the first to machine a notebook body out of aluminium, but saying “its a process Apple created” is like saying I made a cake in the shape of my initials and that this is “a process I created”.

I’m not a student of machining history but if I had to guess I’d say machining stuff from solid pieces of metal is a century old and probably way, way older.

55

nevermind

56

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had a patent on some part of the process which might add validity to the claim, even though certainly it could have been made without that specific process.

57

I will deny it, with cites, being completely clued-in. This is just one of many sites that examine the price difference between comparable systems you can find on the web.

[QUOTE=Harry McCracken]
Venture into the computer department of a store like Best Buy, and you’ll find scads of computers priced well under $1,000 and a handful for a grand or more. The former are almost all Windows machines, and many are respectable choices. The latter, however, are nearly all from Apple — hence the common perception that Macs are way overpriced.
Every time I do the math, though, I come to the conclusion that the cost of Macs isn’t out of whack with that of similar Windows machines. Apple isn’t selling $750 notebooks for $1,500 — its portables tend to use higher-end processors, mostly have aluminum cases rather than plastic ones, are typically thinner and lighter than garden-variety laptops and run longer on a battery charge than many of their Windows brethren. The Microsoft-powered laptops most directly comparable to Apple’s MacBook Pro line, HP’s Envy models, actually cost more than roughly equivalent Macs.
[/QUOTE]

58

For me, whatever premium there may be (and I personally think it is overstated), the Mac has been worth the price, for the mere fact that I never ever had to bother with any type of virus protection since I got my first Mac five years ago. As I said above, I don’t care if it’s security through obscurity, the net result is that I have never lost a minute of work due to trying to rid my computer of some stupid virus. Not a single minute.

Even when I briefly worked at a law office on a Windows machine six years ago, I had anti-virus software installed, Windows Defender, everything up-to-date, never ever surfed porn or any obvious high-risk sites, yet still I found myself having to go through Hijack This registry logs every few months, deleting registry items and suspicious files, because somehow shit still found its way onto the computer. One particularly nasty virus had me spending nearly six hours trying to fix my boss’s computer before I finally figured out all the nasty malware that was causing the problems. None of the anti-viral software with current updates was able to kill it, I had to go through directories manually, deleting suspicious crap, and constantly Googling on my laptop before I was able to get everything off that computer.

The fact that I’ve not once had to deal with this crap in the last five years is reason enough for me to pay double what Apple wants for their machines. I understand Windows may be more secure now, or perhaps I wasn’t doing all that I could to keep malware off my computer. Regardless, I don’t have to do anything now to keep my computer healthy. Maybe it will change soon, with Apple becoming more of a target for virus writers–I don’t know. But for the last five years, it was worth every last penny.

There’s plenty I dislike about Apple. I have never told anyone that Mac is inherently better than a Windows box. I can only speak from my own experience with both, and my preference is clear, and it’s based on its worth to me.

59

Sure Macs have hardware issues (which I take to the the OP’s core question). Having heavily used everything from Apple ][ to the first PCs to recent PCs to Mac Pros and iMacs, I feel qualified to give a fair series of generalisations.

Macs have more reliable hardware than comparable PCs. My sum total of hardware problems with all my Apples and Macs over 20 years is one power supply about two years ago. And that was 100% covered by Apple Care, including two home visits by a tech. Well, I was having an issue with my Mac Pro hanging in WoW (and nothing else!) last year but that turned out to be that my video card’s air intake was 100% blocked by dust, caused by this weather eventa year before. Cleaned out the vent and it’s been perfectly fine since.

Mac OS is more reliable than Windows. There are IMO two reasons for this, neither specifically implying that Apple are better programmers than Microsoft. One is that most crashes on Windows are due to drivers, not the OS per se … Apple simply have fewer vendors to deal with, and take more control over the quality of those drivers - nVidia and AMD get each driver tested by Apple before release as part of an official Mac OS X update, whereas MS have no effective visibility or control over third party driver updates. UAC in Vista and Win7 a shameful, pathetic attempt to shove responsibility for your computer’s security back onto the poor user, I believe as a riposte to Windows’ ongoing reputation for continual security lapses. Now they can say “but you allowed that virus access by clicking Yes! It’s all your fault!” without having given the user the information necessary to make an informed decision.

Second is that almost all hardware you have is also Apple-sourced - again this does not provide immunity from bad hardware or poor choices on Apple’s part, far from it, but keeps you from the cheap shit components you are tempted to buy and build into your PC. More expensive, sure, but in the larger frame worth it.

Thirdly a higher proportion of the apps you run are from Apple, than from MS on the PC, so there is simply more opportunity for meaningful testing. The single app I have problems with on Mac OS is Safari, and it is always - always - the Flash plugin, not Safari itself that causes the crash. And to recover from it I don’t even have to restart Safari, let alone the Mac - just click OK.

And lastly there is the security situation. I have no real idea whether Mac OS is intrinsically more secure than Windows - being based on Unix it certainly ought to be, as user space simply doesn’t have access to root. As much as anything it’s that hardly anyone is writing malware for the Mac as it is simply not worthwhile to them. The practical upshot is that you don’t need to bother with AV protection (another noted source of PC problems) on a Mac. There is no registry to corrupt. Applications typically consist of a single .app file, not hundreds to thousands of .exe, com and .dll files.

Macs are simpler, more reliable, more comprehensible, and work more like you expect (or would if your expectations are not that it work exactly like you are conditioned by Windows to think all computers should).

60

A perfect tautology!

“Macs work more like you expect, as long as you expect things to work like Macs.”

Brilliant!