It just works...except when it doesn't.

The BBQ Pit
1
  • or, An account of a PC-guys first experience with a Mac.

There’s no real vitriol here, but threads like this have a way of getting out of control.

So I bought my first Mac yesterday, specifically an old g3-based iMac. In fairness, the craiglist ad did say it doesn’t boot, that it just goes into a flashy-question-mark screen. But for $20, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. A couple of quick web searches suggested it wasn’t fatal, so I thought I’ll bang on it & get it back up & working. Then I’ll have a mac to play with! Yay!

So I brought it home & sure enough, it doesn’t boot. it just comes up to a grey screen with a flashing question mark - and nothing else happens. There are no POST messages. There are no hardware probing messages. There is not one single text character. Somewhat discouraged, I begin scouring the web for clues. My first stop - apple’s web site, where the number 1 reason to switch from PC to Mac is:

1. It just works.

What?? I’ve got a broken Mac here that, simply put, just doesn’t work, without giving any hint why. “It just works.”, my ass!

Hold C while powering on the system to boot from the CDROM.
OK, I try it with the Software Rescue CD - still nothing but a flashing mark. Next tried with the Software Install CD - same thing. I download a PPC Linux cd - same thing. System won’t boot from either hard disk or cd, and doesn’t even give me a clue why! Something is wrong. But what? What can I do? Back to the web!

HOLD COMMAND-OPTION-DELETE while powering on the system to get a list of bootable devices! OK, reasonable - but does it give me a list of bootable devices? A message of any kind? No, it just comes back to the same alternating-question-mark-and-smily-faced-mac-guy icon. C’mon, Steve, give me a fucking hint, wouldja?? Back to the web.

HOLD COMMAND-OPTION-P-R while powering on the system to reset your PRAM
O…k, how do we do this? Let’s see, pinky goes here, ring finger ther…no wait, this pinky there, this…nope I’ve got it, Left hand pinky on option, thumb on command, index finder on R; Right hand index finger on P & power on with pinky. Jeez, you have to be a damn finger-gymnast to work this. And still…NOTHING. No boot, no message, not a damn thing. What the fuck, apple, you assume nobody will bother trying to understand what’s wrong with their hardware? D’oh! It stopped working! Guess I’ll have to run out and buy another one that “just works” - until it just stops too! Back to the web.

Hold COMMAND-OPTION-O-F while powering on to get to the OpenFirmware prompt
Eureka! A prompt! Finally, something I can work with! Trying to boot from either CD or Hard drive gives me sweet, sweet error messages! Nearly informationless messages like “can’t open hd” or “unable to read block 0 from cd” or “load size too small” - oh, beatufiul cryptic geek-speak, how I’ve longed for your glyphs to grace my monitor! I knew Apple couldn’t remove you entirely!

Will you boot over the network? Yes! It will boot linux! So it’s probably a combination of dead hard drive & CD-ROM drive. If I can find a way to boot from a USB CD drive I can probably get you running! Hah! Take that Jobs!!

I used to complain that PC error messages conveyed little meaningful data - until I met a Mac.

2

You haven’t gotten cryptic, frustrating error messages until you’ve tried to cross-compile python. I had this lovely back and forth with MSYS just the other day:

Me: make
Computer: arm-elf-ar NOT FOUND.
Me: Okay, I’ll put it right in front of you to make it easier.
Computer: arm-elf-ar NOT FOUND.
Me: What!? It’s right there! Let me check the make file and see where it’s looking. Ah. I’ll change the path to where it’s actually located and…
Computer: arm-elf-ar NOT FOUND.
Me: FUCK YOU!
Computer: sh: FUCK: command not found

This was how I spent the afternoon.

3

I used to support Mac software back in the day. It drove me nuts because there were about 6 things you could do to fix the software. If those 6 things didn’t fix the problem, well, you were screwed. Granted, one of those things fixed the issue most of the time (like 90 percent of the time) but the rest of the time the user was out of luck.

Slee

4

I’m thinking that “It just works (unless it’s a seven year old piece of junk that you picked up on Craigslist for $20.00).” isn’t much of an advertising slogan.

5

Or a rant, to be honest about it. :wink:

6

Yeah. As a PC guy with virtually no interest in the Mac — although I think their ads with the cool Mac guy versus the tight-ass PC guy are great — I don’t think this rant makes much sense. It’s like pitting George Bush for pronouncing nuclear like Jimmy Carter. You really can’t blame the OS for pre-boot messages. That’s what booting does: it brings up the operating system. Honestly, you should find something more worthwhile to Pit than a system for not booting that you already knew wouldn’t boot.

7

The last time I broke a Mac, it gave me a frowny face.

I hate the current “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial where the PC is giving useful (if a bit cryptic error messages), and that’s supposedly a lot worse than what Mac does (frowny face? I can run a search on blahblahblah.dll error. But frowny face? What am I supposed to do with that?)

8

Maybe it’s time for Mac to come out with I-Error.

9

Never send an elf to do a hobbits job.

10

As a Linux user who will never, ever, buy a Mac, who also runs some AIX on Power, this is the dumbest rant against Apples that I’ve ever heard.

20 bucks? And the guy told you it doesn’t work? And it’s a dead disk and/or CD-ROM?

Are you serious?

You’ve got a legit complaint about Apple’s tendency to obscure the internals to the detriment the poor sucker stuck with troubleshooting one, but the context makes you look pretty ridiculous.

11

Meh. Try troubleshooting an htaccess problem on a Unix account. No error messages whatsoever. Either it works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you are on your own.

12

Speaking as a guy who routinely slogs through application & system core dumps from AIX, HPUX, RHEL, and Solaris:

Oh come on! The “It just works!” slogan was sitting there taunting me! Even if was advertised as broken, it’s like apple was mocking me. “Good luck trying to figure out what’s wrong with it! Nyah nyah!” But I guess some people are too hard core for a couple of helpful pixels here and there.

I say as Fedora slowly installs on my unhelpful peice of $20 junk :smiley:

13

Apache does have an error log, you know.

14

I don’t have a problem with it, and I love my Mac. The complaint isn’t that the computer didn’t work, it’s that it offered no information on what was wrong. Yeah, I can understand that a frowny face is more friendly than a hex dump on a BSOD, but only for people who can’t fix the problem. For people who can fix the problem, having to root through obscure documentation to figure out how to get some kind of real error message out is stupid. If the system works well enough to power up the screen and display a little question mark/frowny face animation, it certainly works well enough to ouput some kind of “Unable to access /foo/bar: failed to initialize hd device, Register dump…” kind of error message.

15

Come on, get a modern Mac and give it a whirl. Then do a write-up of your gripes.
Put some effort into it!

Like my own gripe list I posted a few weeks back about my shiny new MacBook Pro.

16

Well, most Macs do come with a diagnostic disk that’s pretty good – helped me diagnose some bad memory on an iMac once. And, at least back in the day, the start up chimes would actually convey useful information – there were a couple of distinctive “something-bad-happened” chimes.

17

Despite being the type of guy who likes both Macs and PCs, I gotta agree with the OP. When a Mac fails (and I mean fails HARD), and you get the question mark or sad mac, it’s extremely annoying. It’s akin to the Windows problem I get sometimes when I change motherboards and try to boot up my existing copy of Windows without reinstalling it, where it gets to the Windows startup screen (with the logo and the moving bar), loads for a moment, then flashes some error message up on the screen for an instant and then reboots before you can read it. ARGH!

And while I find those Mac commercials amusing sometimes (although some of them are ridiculous – “Yeah, there were a zillion viruses for PCs last year but not for Macs.” “Wow, you Macs must have vastly superior antivirus and security features, eh?” “Well … uh … it’s mainly because the Windows user base is gigantic compared to mine.”) the new “Macs don’t have cryptic error messages” one irritates me for the same reasons. Not only is that not a good thing, but I got cryptic error messages on my Mac all the time, usually things like
“Error -1084984382.” (Of course, that was back in the bad old days of System 7 and System 8.)