Thursday, February 28, 2008

Case against Macs

I recently had to get a new power cable for my powerbook. It cost me $80. Eighty dollars for a power cable?! So in some ways, four power cables = 1 phone??

My DVD superdrive stopped working -- DVDs just won't go in at all. I looked online for possible things, and nothing worked. So I went to an Apple store. Without even bothering to look at it, their solution was to replace it and get a new one. $330. Ouch.

It isn't under warranty so I have every intention of prying it open to see why it won't work. If nothing else, I might be a little bit better off knowing something I didn't earlier.

Replacing batteries in an ipod isn't a simple matter of turning it over, popping the sucker open and putting in a couple of AAs. Apple wants you to send in the ipod.

Agreed, you are trying to get the world back from Windows, but for crying out loud, do you have to make it this hard?

2 comments:

Harmanjit Singh said...

well, i have stayed away from macs for this reason as well. If I remember correctly, even to connect a projector, you need a special VGA adapter cable which costs a bunch.

It looks cool, the screen is nice, and it has snazzy features, but then it is about twice as expensive as well.

Windows works fine for me. Yes, many things in it could be better (better command-line tools and scripting) but nothing that can't be fixed with a couple of 10mb downloads of cygwin and perl.

Many people advise me to switch to a mac, and when pressed for a reason, can come up with nothing better than: but it's Unixy, or it is cool, or it is fast, the keyboard glows, etc. Duh.

WIndows has more apps than the mac, windows supports more hardware than the mac, and by running a stripped-down xp pro on simple hardware, i get very good speed at a low price, without any learning curve.

Vikas said...

You make good points, Harman.

But I think there is more value to Mac than what your friends have been able to point out. I personally find the interface on Mac a lot better than Windows. As a developer, Mac is a much better place to be than Windows -- the tools you are used to are available more on Mac than on Windows. And I just absolutely cannot do without a shell interface.

But I think the case I am making for Mac is also the case for Linux. The problem I have had with Linux for most part is that it is clunky at best to use as a home computer. There are times when you want the set of apps for music, photos, video to just work and work with some elegance.

That bridge between dev-friendliness and user-friendliness is where I think Macs work well.

I just hate the fact that I am being suckered into another monopolistic product line. And the price tag.

I've been told Ubuntu is the answer. But I am not sure yet.