Apple - big moan!!

Sorry, guys, but I need to moan a little here and vent some steam!

I work on Apple products all day as part of my job as technician for a firm that uses Apple!

Am I an Apple fan....NOPE! Not by any means, I hate their laptops, but I do appreciate their well made and pretty user friendly iPads and iPhones.....though they are a dictatorship and very greedy little buggers!!

Anyway, I had been using the Operating System Lion OS 10.7 for quite some time and found it to be fast, reliable and does the job (not half as good as a decent PC setup running Windows), but this is an Apple operating system we are talking about. My laptop runs 4GB RAM, and decent CPU etc.....its only about a year old.

Recently I upgraded Lion to ....wait for it...Mountain Lion....and just like the name suggests it was a face lift of Lion, but under a whole new name. It was buggy, slow and basically a load of crap. I had to have it though to be able to run some of our latest software.

Now only last week I HAD to upgrade to Mavericks 10.9. I was surprised this was yet another face lift and surprise surprise runs like a crap, is slow as hell, unstable, does dumb things and is well....just god damn awful.....but its Apple so I have to smile because it makes me cool!

BUT what has really pissed me off was last night, I heard that IOS had released their new operating system! IOS 7! Now I ALWAYS recommend people wait when a new Operating System comes out to give it time to mature and programs to catch up. Well my partner has an iPad I bought it for her a while back and only she used it (I have my PC). Anyway, I thought I would check to see what version she was using as she had not updated for a while. I clicked on More Info when it said 'Update Available', naturally I thought it would give me some info, but NO! Stupid Apple thought I had given it full permission to restart and install the new OS! WTF! So as it was updating I thought, oops, oh well she has not updated for a while so maybe it will add a few nice things and make it faster etc.

Well after it was done, the iPad was a totally different system. Surprise surprise, ir runs like crap, its unstable, most of her Apps don't work including her Words with Friends and the worst, its looks bad....worse then bad, crap....worse then crap....total shit.....actually its the worst looking portable Operating System I have EVER seen....OMG.....its sooooo bad!!!!

Lets just say my partner was less then happy with me....and damn right she should be....I had totally fucked her iPad up. There is NO way to roll it back and its just useless now.

WAY TO GO APPLE!!

Im so angry at Apple now, its been hell with Apple this month......what the hell is Apple doing!!!!

So if you have an Apple laptop, DONT upgrade to Mavericks
If you have an iPad or iPhone DONT upgrade to IOS 7

I promise you 100% you will regret it!!

Rant over!

Oh, are you mad?

bcwood16 said:

Recently I upgraded Lion to ....wait for it...Mountain Lion....

Well, there's your problem. The Lion is, as everybody knows, the King of the Savannah and much more powerful than a mountain lion, which is not really the king of anything. So how could an OS named after a lesser beast be better in any way?

And of course, it is a well-known fact with any OS that is NOT Windows, major app incompatibilities between successive OS versions are the norm, rather than the exception. Microsoft has traditionally pursued a policy of "backwards compatitiblity at all costs" with DOS, Windows 1/2/3.x, Windows 9x, and later on with XP, Vista, 7 and even 8, and IMO the ROI was positive over the year: Windows and DOS form an unprecedented compatibility continuum record on ANY computing platform.

The only major deal-brakers in this longstanding tradition is the 64-bit mode, managed Metro apps and -probably in the future- the ARM versions of Windows. Of course there were problems when upgrading e.g. from Windows 98 to XP or from XP to Vista, but compared to the shafting that Mac users were used to (including even radical changes in the CPU architecture or to the kernel of the OS itself), it's like a fart vs a punch to the face. The only accepted "cure" in the Mac world is waiting for new versions of the apps, completely tailored to the new OS to come out.

bcwood16 said:

I clicked on More Info when it said 'Update Available', naturally I thought it would give me some info, but NO! Stupid Apple thought I had given it full permission to restart and install the new OS! WTF!

Ugh, that sucks. Most of my familiarity with OS X is from 10.4 - 10.6, and it seemed all right, but even then it was very much a case of "do things the Apple way or use a different platform." I've heard lots of horror stories about upgrades breaking or removing features, and the lengths people have to go to in order to continue using old versions sometimes.

Do people have an Apple Superiority attitude where you work? You make it sound like you have to put on a front about liking their stuff.

plums said:

I've heard lots of horror stories about upgrades breaking or removing features, and the lengths people have to go to in order to continue using old versions sometimes.

There's nothing to be surprised about : this was always considered the norm on non-Windows platforms in general. Ever heard of successive e.g. UNIX revisions being 100% backwards compatible (save for very trivial programs)? What about successive e.g. SunOS or NeXT or BeOS releases? AmigaOS? STOS? GEM?

Macs are simply more notorious for that because they are the "number two" platform of choice for personal computers (practically, they are the only other choice ever since the mid 90s). This concept may be hard to grasp for Windows users, which are used to Windows' "compatibility at all costs" design decisions. Of course, it doesn't help that Macs are marketed as premium/superior products....if they are so superior, how come they can't even run last years' programs while my "shitty" Windows PC can run something from 20 years ago -quite literally-? ;-)

Maes said:

The Lion is, as everybody knows, the King of the Savannah and much more powerful than a mountain lion, which is not really the king of anything. So how could an OS named after a lesser beast be better in any way?

Listen to this man.

Maes said:

There's nothing to be surprised about : this was always considered the norm on non-Windows platforms in general. Ever heard of successive e.g. UNIX revisions being 100% backwards compatible (save for very trivial programs)? What about successive e.g. SunOS or NeXT or BeOS releases? AmigaOS? STOS? GEM?

Macs are simply more notorious for that because they are the "number two" platform of choice for personal computers (practically, they are the only other choice ever since the mid 90s). This concept may be hard to grasp for Windows users, which are used to Windows' "compatibility at all costs" design decisions. Of course, it doesn't help that Macs are marketed as premium/superior products....if they are so superior, how come they can't even run last years' programs while my "shitty" Windows PC can run something from 20 years ago -quite literally-? ;-)

The difference is that new versions aren't pushed on you the same way. If you don't need new features, don't upgrade. If you do upgrade and don't like it, it's easy (relatively) to go back. Well, maybe not for commercial (i.e. non-Linux) UNIX, I have very little experience with that.

But it's a different way of working I guess. Apple is all about managing things for you, which if you don't like the hassle of dealing with computers is fine... when it works. And mobile platforms are unfortunately more closed than desktops.

Backwards compatibility is one thing that Windows does quite well, although from Vista onwards they had to sacrifice some of that. I have a few obscure sound programs that will not work properly on any version of Windows past XP, and I found old games can be quite unstable, sometimes.

Linux in theory lets you run any version of old software. In practice, it's not easy at all unless you know how to manage multiple versions of the same libraries or update source code yourself -- assuming you have the source. Last time I tried to play Heretic II I found it much easier to run the Windows version through WINE than trying to coax the Linux version into working. :P

Maes said:

Well, there's your problem. The Lion is, as everybody knows, the King of the Savannah and much more powerful than a mountain lion, which is not really the king of anything. So how could an OS named after a lesser beast be better in any way?

LOL - your right....never thought about that....it totally makes sense now.

Maes said:

And of course, it is a well-known fact with any OS that is NOT Windows, major app incompatibilities between successive OS versions are the norm, rather than the exception. Microsoft has traditionally pursued a policy of "backwards compatitiblity at all costs" with DOS, Windows 1/2/3.x, Windows 9x, and later on with XP, Vista, 7 and even 8, and IMO the ROI was positive over the year: Windows and DOS form an unprecedented compatibility continuum record on ANY computing platform.

Totally agree, but I had to update to keep some of our software functional, I tried to put it off for a long time. I still have machines running Snow Leopard 10.6 because I find that the best OS I have used....on a Mac of course! I even had to get new licences for Photoshop as our current ones don't run on the new OS....that hurt the budget along with other licenses I had to get. If this was windows, no problem, everything just continues to run fine.

Maybe people are just used to buying software and binning it after a year or so? Consoles even do this, buy and play your games, get new system, chuck away all your games and buy new ones. Im sorry, but I still love playing some games I got ages ago....hell thats why I'm here because I love Doom. Im so glad I can still play and use my software :)

plums said:

Do people have an Apple Superiority attitude where you work? You make it sound like you have to put on a front about liking their stuff.

Oh I do indeed!.....AND work with the 'sort' of people who love Apple products.

Yeah I'm not a fan of Apple either. I used to have no reason to hate them, now I just do. 2 years of using Mac ProBook laptops and now I have a dozen reasons to hate them that I've already posted on other threads. I feel your pain. Macs are just so cumbersome to use.

I'm not used to Apple computers, but some of my cousins (industrial designers) use them, and they told me two things:

-Macintosh isn't good for Internet. Use Linux (or was it Unix?) or Windows.
-Macintosh is great for design/engineering/graphic design.

Is this true?

Zed said:

I'm not used to Apple computers, but some of my cousins (industrial designers) use them, and they told me two things:

-Macintosh isn't good for Internet. Use Linux (or was it Unix?) or Windows.
-Macintosh is great for design/engineering/graphic design.

Is this true?

Well I'm no industry expert, but I hear that all the time. However, I think its the other way around. Macs are pretty good connecting to the internet, surfing pages, getting info and there tends to be lots of Apps plug ins that help to make this experience even more powerful.

As for design and graphics stuff, I find them slow, laggy, buggy, crashy, unstable and a good amount of the time just a bad experience. I use Photoshop a lot at home with my PC and I mess about at work too, Windows to far better, I think its because it just works faster, you seem to have a lot of power under the hood, with Mac on the same sort of hardware you feel like your stuck in second gear, you just don't seem to get that 'power' feel. Same with 3D graphics, I have used Maya on all sorts of Macs and it just lags and everything is just sloppy....I hate the experience. I just don't understand why so many people say its great for design....really don't get it.

Maybe its because of iMovie and Garageband, you know its easy to put cool photos into a slide show, then add some different music tracks on top of each other then combine them together with maybe some basic effects like rain and stuff, then easily convert it to Quicktime....cool!!

Zed said:

-Macintosh is great for design/engineering/graphic design.

I remember in 2002 when my school decided to shove a load of Macs in the art department, to replace the somewhat ageing Windows machines.

Yeah, great fucking fun trying to edit images when the mouse only had one fucking button. It was a slow, tedious task to get anything out of those pieces of shit.

bcwood16 said:

Totally agree, but I had to update to keep some of our software functional, I tried to put it off for a long time. I still have machines running Snow Leopard 10.6 because I find that the best OS I have used....on a Mac of course!

Hmm...one thing I remember about Macs is that they have a very nice built-in disk image management system (IMO superior even to Linux's direct image mounting, and ages ahead over anything you can get on Windwos), and that's its trival to set them to dual/multi-boot from different disks, partition or even disk images. It was even possible to have a dual-booting MacOS 9/MacOS X G4 back in the day. Why don't you use a dual-boot option?

BaronOfStuff said:

Yeah, great fucking fun trying to edit images when the mouse only had one fucking button. It was a slow, tedious task to get anything out of those pieces of shit.

And nobody, NOBODY figured out Ctrl/Option+Left Mouseclick or, you know, just plugging in a -gasp- three-button mouse? Or you needed a special permit in triple form to do the latter, as it would constitute "altering the hardware"? *grin*

There has been a very long-standing attitude that "Macs are better for design," but I've never really heard a good explanation as to why. My suspicion is that this may have been true at one point, like back in the era of Mac OS 8 or 9, and it's just been an idea that's has carried forward through the ages, aided by Apple's emphasis on the looks of the hardware and UI. However I'm not an artist or graphic designer, and I certainly could be wrong.

Older versions of Windows definitely had issues with some things like font rendering.

So apparently THIS is why I don't use Apple products.

In all seriousness, though, I don't use Apple products for the sole reason that I can get anything Apple makes that another company makes and sells for a 50% cheaper price.

plums said:

There has been a very long-standing attitude that "Macs are better for design," but I've never really heard a good explanation as to why. My suspicion is that this may have been true at one point, like back in the era of Mac OS 8 or 9, and it's just been an idea that's has carried forward through the ages, aided by Apple's emphasis on the looks of the hardware and UI. However I'm not an artist or graphic designer, and I certainly could be wrong.

This was sort-of-true in the late 80s/early 90s. Macs were pretty much the only non-workstation grade PCs which had a reasonably functional "photorealistic" display (at the time, that meant at least 256 colors on-screen chosen from a 24-bit palette, without resorting to trickery like Hold-And-Modify modes, and without reducing the resolution to that of an arcade game) AND a fully GUI-driven OS.

Of course any software having to do with DTP, graphics, etc. would first and foremost be released on such a platform, and then drip down to less capable (Amiga, Atari ST and finally PC). However already in the mid 90s there was practically no difference, hardware-wise, between the best Macs and the best PCs, though the choice of OS still determined the market: you REALLY wouldn't like to have a DTP or video editing program running in DOS (Windows 3.x was meh), even if the rest of the system was up to snuff.

IOS 7 is pretty crap, but I didn't update to the version before that either. I like my current IOS, which is plain 6.0

Spot on!

I have to work with MacOs because I develop iOS software, but it's always a hassle. and yet, the Apple fans can't be made to see the problems.
They seem to be happy in their isolated niche but what they tend to forget is that these constant incompatibilites are one of the main obstacles for porting software to such a system. Why even bother if 2 years down the line, everything has to be adjusted again.

Of course Microsoft didn't fare much better with their new Metro GUI. So far we got 4 systems (Windows Phone 7+8, Windows RT and Desktop) and they are all mutually incompatible. Some real stroke of genius. Had they seen to have one system for all they would be in a much better position now.

Graf Zahl said:

Had they seen to have one system for all they would be in a much better position now.

"Web apps" are the closest you can get today to a common system, but even those are still plagued by differences in the browsers (which became platforms on their own) or by platform-dependent features/lock-ins, so that's merely moving the problem away from the hardware, through layer after layer of abstraction, virtualization and managed runtimes, at best. "Pure" web apps also do not seem to function well with ANY current generation of smartphone, thus creating the need for specialized webpage-surrogate apps.

Mobile OSes are the worst, IMO, as they were pressured to mature really quickly (just see how frequently e.g. new Android versions and Android SDK revisions are released).

When Vista or 7 was released, I even read some starry-eyed idealists claiming that "Microsoft should have based them on the Linux kernel, rather than keeping that bullshit NT kernel and all of its backwards compatibility quirks alive". Okay, whatever....

I upgraded to Mavericks and iOS 7; no issues with compatibility or stability from either of them. I don't doubt some people are having problems, but it's far from universal.

I think it's easy to see the past through rose-tinted glasses. The stability of Microsoft's consumer OSes prior to XP was garbage, and for all the talk about their commitment to compatibility, running old software, especially games, always required endless fiddling with DOS extenders, autoexec.bat and, later, Windows compatibility-mode settings.

Even if you hate OS X or Windows 8, you have to recognise that they're still a million times better than what we suffered through in the nineties.

Mavericks seems faster than Mountain Lion, especially on high-PPI MacBook Pro. The multimonitor fix is also real welcome.

As for iOS 7 I agree it's kind of ugly, especially when I see the flat featureless new themes some apps are sporting. Are all these companies going "flat", just so they can fire their graphic designers? A programmer can do all that simple Windows-8-like interface without the help of any artists.

I like developing apps in Objective-C, coupled with Xcode it's really elegant and I like its direct compatibility with C.

On desktop I prefer Windows and Linux distros that imitate its interface. On OS X I'm too accustomed to using the laptop's keyboard and trackpad.

Stop saying "ProBook" unless you're referring to some run-of-the-mill HP laptops. Eww.

Maes said:

And nobody, NOBODY figured out Ctrl/Option+Left Mouseclick or, you know, just plugging in a -gasp- three-button mouse? Or you needed a special permit in triple form to do the latter, as it would constitute "altering the hardware"? *grin*

Correct on the latter. This was the sort of school which insisted that floppy disks were checked by staff before we could use them.

As for the former, it wasn't a case of not knowing. It was to do with being so used to simply right-clicking on demand that it was just a fucking bastard of an annoyance to always end up with a big fucking smudge on whatever we were editing every single time that we let it slip from our mind that we were using a POS catered toward the PC-illiterate department staff.

I just got an iPad Air. It's an awesome tablet. I know they've been doing the whole 'retina display' thing for a while but this thing looks gorgeous. The form factor, design, and weight are all just right in my opinion.

I use a MacBook Pro for work, but I've got boot camp on it, so whenever I'm not at work I almost exclusively run Windows 8 on it.

Oh, and I rock an HTC One android smartphone and my desktop computer is a PC. Needless to say I've never really understood brand loyalty/exclusivity, seeing as there's lots of good hardware/software out there.

plums said:

Last time I tried to play Heretic II I found it much easier to run the Windows version through WINE than trying to coax the Linux version into working. :P

Weird. My hacked up demo version from 4 years ago seems to still be working fine on Kubuntu 13.10 with fglrx. I just run the heretic2.x86 binary, no library trickery needed.

plums said:

Backwards compatibility is one thing that Windows does quite well, although from Vista onwards they had to sacrifice some of that. I have a few obscure sound programs that will not work properly on any version of Windows past XP, and I found old games can be quite unstable, sometimes.

Linux in theory lets you run any version of old software. In practice, it's not easy at all unless you know how to manage multiple versions of the same libraries or update source code yourself -- assuming you have the source. Last time I tried to play Heretic II I found it much easier to run the Windows version through WINE than trying to coax the Linux version into working. :P

On this note though, there are some old Windows games that run better in WINE than they do in newer versions of Windows. Good enough to make me want a Windows version of WINE, but the last time I looked into that it seemed like getting it to work would just be such a convoluted process that it'd be simpler to just dual boot...

Blzut3 said:

Weird. My hacked up demo version from 4 years ago seems to still be working fine on Kubuntu 13.10 with fglrx. I just run the heretic2.x86 binary, no library trickery needed.

Huh, I'll have to give that a shot sometime, I can't remember what the problem was exactly, just that an hour into trying to fix it I thought "to hell with this" and tried installing the Windows version through Wine and it worked. IIRC the Linux version of Heretic 2 has been flaky for a while, I think it ran but it was prone to crashing. I have all this written down, somewhere...

Dragonsbrethren said:

On this note though, there are some old Windows games that run better in WINE than they do in newer versions of Windows. Good enough to make me want a Windows version of WINE, but the last time I looked into that it seemed like getting it to work would just be such a convoluted process that it'd be simpler to just dual boot...

This page says they're working on it, but as it stands right now, "To get Wine working on Windows will require lots of work."

Maes said:

Hmm...one thing I remember about Macs is that they have a very nice built-in disk image management system (IMO superior even to Linux's direct image mounting, and ages ahead over anything you can get on Windwos), and that's its trival to set them to dual/multi-boot from different disks, partition or even disk images. It was even possible to have a dual-booting MacOS 9/MacOS X G4 back in the day. Why don't you use a dual-boot option?

Yes Apples are super easy to image, I actually use third party software to make the process even faster, I also have some duel boot systems for Windows as some of our business software is Windows only, large business tend to ignore Mac as they are school boy systems not for serious work. Though this is changing a little I guess.

I don't want to duel Boot two OS X though, it just complicates things. Besides I'm sure Mavericks will settle down, at the end of the day I guess every Apple update is a pure nightmare for a year or so until everybody catches up.

As for IOS 7.....whats peoples thoughts for those who are using it now?

I messed about on my partners IO 7 iPad last night and it kept restarting its self, its super unstable! Nothing is unturitive any longer, I had to keep googling to find out how to do the basic things. Some stuff is cool, but I'm not enjoying the experience at all! Its just horrid! I really am trying to keep open minded!

I've been hearing tell that the iOS 7 update was pushed in the same way as a hotfix, with no confirmation or anything of the sort.

bcwood16 said:

Nothing is unturitive any longer, I had to keep googling to find out how to do the basic things.

Heh, like Windows 8/RT i suppose :P