Frankly, I've never really been that frustrated with computers until I decided to switch to Mac. I've used alot of PC's in pro and home settings and altough they do suck to use sometimes and are prone to viruses, I think they are relatively reliable if you know your way aroud.
Here's why I'm not liking my mac experience:
-Macs are ultra expensive. You can get a cadillac of a PC compared to the price of an entry level Mac.
-I'm taking a music analysis class at university so now I'm using a Mac for what it does best, right? music! However, 10 days before my final project is due, my hard drive just quits and I send it to inso (the mac resellers in Montréal) and spend 150 bucks to get my data back and it doesn't work. I was putting off buying an external HD (to back up) until the end of classes, but my barely 9 month old computer crapped out first. Oddly enough, in my same little class of barely 15 students, another girl's G4 will not turn on anymore and she has to submit her project today, but it will lack certain components she wasn't able to back up to a USB data key. At least my mac turned on. Her's might have a dead motherboard and is no longer under warranty.
-All my friends that have owned macs have had critical problems with the hardware. Most got their parts exchanged except one who's logic board failed a week after his warranty expired.
-The customer service people at Apple Canada are not very helpful and are really unkind. They tend to be really snappy over the phone and they are not well trained. My friend had just bought a new MBP and we couldn't figure out how to get exposé to work. We kept hitting the F9 key and a semi transparent square with an X kept appearing on the screen. Since the computer was days old we called apple care and they first had us reset the pram by holding down certain keys and rebooting 4 times, then they had us DO A FULL REINSTALL OF MAC OS X. It wasn't a big deal because she barely had any data since the Mac was so new. So about 2 hours later the os is reinstalled and still we can't use exposé so we call back and the person says "oh, you just have to hold down the function key and then press f9"! When you consider that Mac has 6 models of new laptops out (really only 2 models: Macbook and MPB) and they can't help you with a simple keyboard operation question... that's pretty hopeless.
-Apple champions bootcamp. It's on their TV adds, it's on any of their add campaigns at my university. Run windows on a Mac! It works! Better than on a PC! Yea. Mine worked until they added support for iSight. After that update, never again was I able to connect properly to the internet with airport. I fiddled with it for about three weeks and gave up. Every time a new update came by, I would reinstall my windows partition to see if I could connect but it was still really buggy and didn't work. Try calling apple about bootcamp, they won't even hear you out. They keep barking "NOT SUPPORTED, BETA SOFTWARE"! Yea, it is a beta release, so why do you wear it like a badge of honour if it barely even works and isn't supported?
-Every time I get a problem (like the one above), I have to go to these community forums. I use the Mac support forums and this forum. Out of all the questions I asked (many) I have almost never gotten a solution from a poster. Often, people won't even respond to your post! So your question just sits there. I had the Bootcamp discussion forums bookmarked in my browser and kept posting and checking for help but I kept getting nothing for over a month before I gave up.
-Mac's aren't compatible with much. Altough Apple again champions the fact that you can plug a food processor into your mac and it will work, a mac user knows this isn't the case. Your new camera doesn't work, your special mouse drivers come on a CD with EXEs on it etc. Every new product that doesn't have an apple logo on it is hours of fiddling and downloading and work arounds. Even my new Sony ericsson (a company that's supposed to be good with mac) required me to pay for a plugin so it would even speak to my mac. I found out AFTER I bought my phone that iSync has a list of compatible phones... there were only a handfull of phones from each company there, not a great selection.
-Mac doesn't have a great shareware community. Need to split a wav file in half? Need to make a fade out on the end of a song? PCs have a wealth of little shareware programs that will do just that. With a mac you need to buy this software and that software for 59.99 that has way to many features and that you only need once.
So there you have it. I'm going to use my Mac until the end of its warranty and I'm switching back. I'm not saying that PCs are better, it's just that I can't solve my problems on a Mac. I get the simplest problems, like trying to view videos outside of my browser and every time its a stalemate, since I'm not getting any answers from the forum community. Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I first though that Apple was an alternative to the evil PC, now I'm beginning to think it's the other way around, with their often failing hardware, expensive price tag and questionable business practices.
Here's why I'm not liking my mac experience:
-Macs are ultra expensive. You can get a cadillac of a PC compared to the price of an entry level Mac.
-I'm taking a music analysis class at university so now I'm using a Mac for what it does best, right? music! However, 10 days before my final project is due, my hard drive just quits and I send it to inso (the mac resellers in Montréal) and spend 150 bucks to get my data back and it doesn't work. I was putting off buying an external HD (to back up) until the end of classes, but my barely 9 month old computer crapped out first. Oddly enough, in my same little class of barely 15 students, another girl's G4 will not turn on anymore and she has to submit her project today, but it will lack certain components she wasn't able to back up to a USB data key. At least my mac turned on. Her's might have a dead motherboard and is no longer under warranty.
-All my friends that have owned macs have had critical problems with the hardware. Most got their parts exchanged except one who's logic board failed a week after his warranty expired.
-The customer service people at Apple Canada are not very helpful and are really unkind. They tend to be really snappy over the phone and they are not well trained. My friend had just bought a new MBP and we couldn't figure out how to get exposé to work. We kept hitting the F9 key and a semi transparent square with an X kept appearing on the screen. Since the computer was days old we called apple care and they first had us reset the pram by holding down certain keys and rebooting 4 times, then they had us DO A FULL REINSTALL OF MAC OS X. It wasn't a big deal because she barely had any data since the Mac was so new. So about 2 hours later the os is reinstalled and still we can't use exposé so we call back and the person says "oh, you just have to hold down the function key and then press f9"! When you consider that Mac has 6 models of new laptops out (really only 2 models: Macbook and MPB) and they can't help you with a simple keyboard operation question... that's pretty hopeless.
-Apple champions bootcamp. It's on their TV adds, it's on any of their add campaigns at my university. Run windows on a Mac! It works! Better than on a PC! Yea. Mine worked until they added support for iSight. After that update, never again was I able to connect properly to the internet with airport. I fiddled with it for about three weeks and gave up. Every time a new update came by, I would reinstall my windows partition to see if I could connect but it was still really buggy and didn't work. Try calling apple about bootcamp, they won't even hear you out. They keep barking "NOT SUPPORTED, BETA SOFTWARE"! Yea, it is a beta release, so why do you wear it like a badge of honour if it barely even works and isn't supported?
-Every time I get a problem (like the one above), I have to go to these community forums. I use the Mac support forums and this forum. Out of all the questions I asked (many) I have almost never gotten a solution from a poster. Often, people won't even respond to your post! So your question just sits there. I had the Bootcamp discussion forums bookmarked in my browser and kept posting and checking for help but I kept getting nothing for over a month before I gave up.
-Mac's aren't compatible with much. Altough Apple again champions the fact that you can plug a food processor into your mac and it will work, a mac user knows this isn't the case. Your new camera doesn't work, your special mouse drivers come on a CD with EXEs on it etc. Every new product that doesn't have an apple logo on it is hours of fiddling and downloading and work arounds. Even my new Sony ericsson (a company that's supposed to be good with mac) required me to pay for a plugin so it would even speak to my mac. I found out AFTER I bought my phone that iSync has a list of compatible phones... there were only a handfull of phones from each company there, not a great selection.
-Mac doesn't have a great shareware community. Need to split a wav file in half? Need to make a fade out on the end of a song? PCs have a wealth of little shareware programs that will do just that. With a mac you need to buy this software and that software for 59.99 that has way to many features and that you only need once.
So there you have it. I'm going to use my Mac until the end of its warranty and I'm switching back. I'm not saying that PCs are better, it's just that I can't solve my problems on a Mac. I get the simplest problems, like trying to view videos outside of my browser and every time its a stalemate, since I'm not getting any answers from the forum community. Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but I first though that Apple was an alternative to the evil PC, now I'm beginning to think it's the other way around, with their often failing hardware, expensive price tag and questionable business practices.