Mac: It just works…err…better!
Now, before I begin, I’ll just say that I’m not going to knock Tom Krazit on his CNet blog post called Problems with the Mac promised land. He made some very valid and interesting points. However, there are a few areas that I feel might be misconstrued. For instance:
“It’s never clear in the early going exactly how many people as a whole run into problems with Macs, since things get quickly blown out of proportion under the intense scrutiny paid to Apple. But the basic complaint seems to be: this ain’t what we thought it would be. Buggy upgrades? Security issues? This is why we switched to the Mac in the first place, right?”
Was Leopard really that buggy? Did it really have security issues galore? Sort of but not really. Compared to a Vista upgrade though, Leopard is probably one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve ever seen. No software product is going to be perfect right out of the starting gate. And, you’re right, how quickly a company can react to problems is very important. However, it’s human nature for people to blow the whistle much harder when they have problems versus when they don’t.
A lot of the issues with Leopard are overblown just as much as Macs are hyped. Many issues were fixed fairly quickly with the first set of patches and fixes. Many others were due to changes Apple made to the security of the OS. For instance, I had a problem sharing a folder out to a Windows machine on my network. The folder simply didn’t show up. It wasn’t until I disabled the default Guest account and set my account to allow for sharing via SMB till it worked. Shared folders is but one thing Apple changed pretty dramatically and thus the way it works is different. As such many people would consider this a bug. It’s not though; it just works a bit different that before.
You’re right about the TV commercials. Are people really that naive that they believe everything they see in a commercial? I mean, think about the truck and Hummer commercials. Do people really think they’re gonna go off-road and travel over a mountain and a bed of rocks? I mean, really?
Tags: leopard
