The Laptop From ****

Question

A few months ago Steve Jobs said that Intel chips were better for laptops. I needed a new laptop. Rather than wait for Apple's Intel laptop I bought a laptop from a company I won't name. I'll just say that their name rhymes with "****." (Did that word get filtered? The Greeks called it Hades.) On paper the laptop from **** was better than Apple's PowerBook: faster processor, 30% more pixels, longer battery life. And the price -- a third less than the PowerBook! With Microsoft Office bundled free, the laptop from **** was half the price of the PowerBook. I've been a Mac person since 1984, but I figured that Windows has improved over the years and should be easy to use, right? I bought it.
The laptop from **** almost worked. All that was wrong was a terse error message about messed up SQL. Fixing this required 8 hours on the phone with the tech support from ****. I noticed a fundamental difference between the Macintosh OS and Windows: Windows is designed to stop users who are trying to do stuff. I tried to look at the hard drive. Windows refused, warning me that looking at what was on my hard drive would come to no good. To look if your drivers are installed, you right-click on "My Computer," which brings up a hidden menu, then you choose "Properties." You might think this would show you real estate listings in your area, but instead you get window with tabs such as "Remote" and "Hardware." You click "Hardware," then "Device Manager," and there are your drivers. Simple, huh? OK, so now you have a list of your installed devices. Some devices have checkmarks next to them. You might think that the checkmark means that the driver is installed, but instead the checkmark means that the driver is not installed and you have to install it. But there's no button that says "Install Driver." There's just one button, which says you can read more about a selected driver. To install a driver, you click on this button, scroll down to the bottom of the page, then click a button that says "Extract."
While on the phone with the tech support from **** I had plenty of time to ponder the design philosophy of Windows. Years ago Apple sued Microsoft on a claim that Apple had copyrights on names of things that made sense. Microsoft was forced to change "Trash" to "Recycling Bin," "List of Drivers" to "Properties," and "Install Driver" to "Extract." But there's a deeper difference here. Apple doesn't have hidden menus or warnings not to try to do useful things on your computer. I owned the laptop from **** for two months and never wrote a single letter, sent an e-mail, or downloaded even one bit of spyware. Every time I tried to use it I ended up begging people with Indian accents to help me.
I sold the laptop from ****. Miraculously the next day the friend who'd borrowed my PowerBook two years earlier returned it. This woman had never used a Mac in her life, thought the little 12" PowerBook looked adorable, borrowed it for an afternoon, and kept it. She once asked me to help her set up the PowerBook so she could lie in bed with the computer and control her stereo in the living room to play pirated Alison Krauss MP3s sent wirelessly from the computer while she read the Cosmo website, checked her e-mail, and downloaded more pirated Alison Krauss MP3s. That was all the tech support an Apple newbie needed. It was also the only time I was ever invited into her bed. I'll stick with Apple products.
G5 dual 1.8GHz; 12 PowerBook   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  
G5 dual 1.8GHz; 12 PowerBook   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

Excellent point. A lot has to do with what you're used to. I just started using Macs (with a Mac Mini) a few months ago, and let's just say I'm not impressed. I can run circles inside my PC, and a lot of the "problems" mentioned above aren't (Like the screen denying access to files...all it is is Microsoft's way of saying "Hey be careful about messing with these files, you could mess your system up. But if you REALLY want to, click here and I'll give you full access." In fact, that's one of Microsoft's "problems:" it gives the uninitiated TOO much access, whereas Apple just hides the files from you completely, even if you have an administrator account.
I, for one, have a $150 paper weigth called an iSight camera, because i can't get iChat to work to save my life, and if you read the iChat discussion forum, I'm far from alone.
Nevertheless, in spite of the various issues I'm having with my Mac, I can appreciate it more, and it's becoming easier to use as I learn more about it. So has it been frustrating? Yes; just as it's frustrating for any Mac user trying out a PC. But as Potato says, they've both got their pluses and minuses. Clearly, if one were hands-down superior to the other, one would've gone the way of the Dodo years ago, but that hasn't happened, and likely never will.