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I think apple quality control has gone downhill in the last few years. I've been an apple customer on and off for a long time. And I've been totally on the da

by uuilly 19y ago

I think apple quality control has gone downhill in the last few years. I've been an apple customer on and off for a long time. And I've been totally on the day they went back to OSX. 1) The wireless on my MBP has been an on and off disaster. When I first got it, wireless transfers from machine to machine were way slower than my old PBK. When I click the wireless signal button to choose a network it takes a full second+ for the networks to show up. Used to be instant. Their latest wireless driver (their 4th version!) dropped me from my network every 15 minutes requiring an archive install to get back to the last version. Wireless on my PBK was NEVER a problem at all. 2) I got the airport express for my parents a few years ago. It almost never worked. The music would incessantly drop out and no amount of network settings tweaking would fix it. Magically in Tiger the problem disappeared. 3) When the latest airport extreme came out I HAD to have the airdisk feature. I've had an old G4 tower as my file server and itunes repository for a while and it was annoying to move around. But my recent experience taught me to wait. I routinely monitored the forums and it turned out that the airdisk wasn't even close to ready for prime time. Hundreds of messages were posted about dropouts or their disk not even working at all. It took two firmware updates for the forum complaining to subside. I now have it and it works but... 4) If I leave my house w/o dismounting the network drive, the machine hangs for a full minute before it says the drive was disconnected. 30% of the time I wait two minutes and have to hard reset. On my PBK it was a consistent 15 second wait w/o ever having to hard reset. Perhaps there is something rotten with the wireless engineers at apple. But really a bit of testing should have smoked these problems out. It used to be unusual for something to come out of apple so rough around the edges. As for the iPhone, I really love mine. I haven't had time to play with the hacks and I'm glad I didn't. But I went to the iphone hacks sites yesterday and saw how prolific the extra apps had become. This phone only came out a few months ago and they have lots of useful apps with mature package management systems. It was sad to see such a promising developer community squashed at the dawn of its life.

inklesspen 19y ago
The developer community hasn't been squashed at all. The 'hacking' that causes the iPhone to brick is tampering with the SIM card interface. That's in firmware, and it's sort of to be expected that if you change things there, and then apply an Apple patch without changing things back, things might break. But third-party apps still work, by all reports I've read, as long as you haven't tried to unlock the phone to work on other providers.
dcurtis 19y ago
Yeah, you might have those problems, but believe it or not, Apple's quality control has actually gone up. I had a 400MHz Titanium Powerbook back in 2001, and by 2003 it was a 1Ghz PowerBook G4 due to the seventeen times I had to send in various computers that were replaced. One of them even melted (http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/another-melted-g4-mac-laptop-231620.php http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/another-melted-g4-mac-lap...). So with my MacBook Pro having only a few minor problems (the power button has fallen inside the case, and the isight randomly stops working), I'd say the quality has improved significantly. The networking systems in the Finder are so bad that when I use Vista, I actually breathe a sigh of relief that I can "map" network drives and have automatic discovery. Leopard somewhat fixes this, though. As far as the iPhone debacle, I'm really amazed at how poorly Apple is handling the situation. Maliciously destroying their products and punishing their most geeky customers is retarded. Those geeky customers are the ones the non-geeky potential customers go to for advice. Hasn't Steve Jobs read The Tipping Point? When you've pissed off Brian Lam, you're really in trouble.

by uuilly 19y ago

inklesspen 19y ago

The developer community hasn't been squashed at all. The 'hacking' that causes the iPhone to brick is tampering with the SIM card interface. That's in firmware, and it's sort of to be expected that if you change things there, and then apply an Apple patch without changing things back, things might break. But third-party apps still work, by all reports I've read, as long as you haven't tried to unlock the phone to work on other providers.

dcurtis 19y ago

Yeah, you might have those problems, but believe it or not, Apple's quality control has actually gone up. I had a 400MHz Titanium Powerbook back in 2001, and by 2003 it was a 1Ghz PowerBook G4 due to the seventeen times I had to send in various computers that were replaced. One of them even melted (http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/another-melted-g4-mac-laptop-231620.php http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops/another-melted-g4-mac-lap...). So with my MacBook Pro having only a few minor problems (the power button has fallen inside the case, and the isight randomly stops working), I'd say the quality has improved significantly. The networking systems in the Finder are so bad that when I use Vista, I actually breathe a sigh of relief that I can "map" network drives and have automatic discovery. Leopard somewhat fixes this, though. As far as the iPhone debacle, I'm really amazed at how poorly Apple is handling the situation. Maliciously destroying their products and punishing their most geeky customers is retarded. Those geeky customers are the ones the non-geeky potential customers go to for advice. Hasn't Steve Jobs read The Tipping Point? When you've pissed off Brian Lam, you're really in trouble.