Yes, I’m going for a massive amount of hits for this one.
Full disclosure: I am a newbie to Macs. I bought my first iMac in 2007 right after they switched to Intel. I went in to get a Mac Mini thinking it would be fun to play with, but when I looked at the cost of adding a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc., I decided that a 19″ iMac might be a better deal (especially since they were on sale at the time).
We took it with us on vacation, and I fell in love the moment I took it out of the box. Apple knows what they’re doing with the purchasing experience. I had never (I’ve owned approximately 30 computers dating back to the Commodore PET! that loaded programs from a tape deck, and could only play Space Invaders.) opened a box, plugged in the power cord, mouse, keyboard and had a fully usable computer within 20 minutes. The first thing most PCs require at setup is a clean install to clear off the crapware in order to make the system usable. (This is, of course, not true of the systems I’ve built myself, but those systems take days to purchase, build, and setup.)
The iMac was a thing of beauty coming out of the box, but it wasn’t enough to convince me to switch. That occurred when I bought my first iPhone, but that’s a different posting. This is about windows.
Even though I switched to Mac during the Vista era, I am not a Vista hater. I was an early adopter. As soon as it was available preinstalled on the Lenovo ThinkPad (T61), I ordered Ultimate and was quite happy. Yes, I had trouble with drivers for printers (All-in-Ones from HP were notoriously slow being released), but I was quite happy with the laptop, and with Vista as a whole.
Here’s the problem. I’m setting up a desktop that’s been sitting in the corner collecting dust for my brother-in-law. (Yes, I’m that guy, but then the “Geek” in the title of the blog really should have been a giveaway.) This is a machine that I built, so I’m not blaming any manufacturer other than myself. As I said, this machine has been sitting in a corner, so it needed to be updated. There were approximately 60 critical updates that needed to be applied, including Vista SP1.
Everything was going along slowly but surely until I finally got to SP1. Then, I got the dreaded Windows Update Error message stating that the SP1 patch could not be applied.
It seems that there are many people who have had problems with this very same issue. It also seems that the only way to fix this issue is to disable everything that can be disabled in Windows, and reinstall them from the Setup disk. In short, to install a service pack to make Vista secure and stable, I need to reinstall Vista again.
As ridiculous as this is, it by itself isn’t why Windows sucks. Windows sucks not because it breaks sometimes. It sucks because one of the richest companies in the world, which is owned by one of the richest men in the world, decided that it needed to be just a little bit richer and require that costumers who had paid for the software jump though hoops of “Authentication” when trying to fix problems that Microsoft itself should have fixed long ago. SP1 was released nearly 2 years ago. (Authentication only affects honest customers. The dishonest ones have long since circumvented this problem.)
Why should I have to go through this trouble of proving to Microsoft that the software I bought, and authenticated three years ago, needs to be shown to be authentic again? Especially just to update the software to the latest version?
This is why I switched to Macs: Microsoft is a monopoly that has no reason to be concerned about the User experience. If they lose one, so what! We have millions of others who are willing to put up with being hassled for no reason whatsoever.
Apple is all about the user experience. If you read the Fake Steve Jobs Blog, they make fun of that all the time. But Apple is the only big company that seems to get it.
I look at the new droid commercials, specifically the ones called “DriodDoes.” Now I’m an iPhone lover, I adore my iPhone. But I look at that phone and I’m unimpressed. Apparently the Droid “does” things that the iPhone doesn’t. Impressive techie things, like run two programs at once. But you know, people… the users, don’t really want a phone that does two programs at once. They want a phone that works.
Apple works. When I sync my iPhone to my MacBook Pro, it does more than charge or update my playlists. Everything syncs. My latest podcast downloads move to the phone while the ones I’ve listen to are deleted. The latest pictures of my children are added to my phone. The pictures I’ve taken with the phone are downloaded to the computer. The computer itself automatically backs itself up too, so all my information is save. It isn’t a phone, a computer and a back up hard drive… it’s a full system that does what I want. Easily. Simply. And reliably.
With Windows you get a powerful system that can do lots of things. But those “things” aren’t always what I want. And the phone I got may or may not talk to my computer. And it may or may not update all my files. It may not may not grab my latest pictures. Heck, I’ve yet to find a system that catalog my pictures half as well as iPhoto.
That’s why people who move to the mac tend to be loyal. Because it all works. Not one part, or another… but the whole system.
Dvorak just wrote on PCMag, “There’s no connection between the company [Microsoft] and the end-user anymore.” http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357628,00.asp
This is Microsoft’s primary problem and the reason why I’m no longer a MS fanboy as I once was. Apple, despite their issues, does still seem to take the end-user into consideration when they are designing hardware and software.
Thank God ive been a linux user for a decade now
I was wondering when the Linux crowd would show up . . .
windows and the word geek don’t mix 🙂
Yeah..I figure you know what I run, not only on my desktops but on hundreds of servers!
Actually, I think they do . . . You have to be one to get them to run properly.
OS-X is a superb GUI based on solid Unix. Nuff said.
Agreed.