Macs aren’t Perfekt

  by Adam Kerrison | 08 May 2007 | Permalink | Hardware, Macarati

Like most people, when my job takes to out of the office, I use a laptop. I’ve been using laptops for about 13 years now – I’m old enough to remember the early “portable” computers like the Sun Voyager! – and with that one exception, they have all run Windows (Ok, I confess that I tried running Linux on a Toshiba Tecra once but that was quickly aborted – when the kernel has unresolved symbols you move onto something else!)

All that changed a couple of years ago when we employed Eric Noyau. He used to work for Apple and turned up in the office we a shinny Apple PowerBook G4. He used one computer to do what I needed two to do: Software development on UNIX and the ability to deal with Office documents … After a few weeks of enviously watching him, I became a Mac user.

Fast forward to the present day, and I’ve become a bit of a Mac evangelist. What I love is the way that the Operating System doesn’t get in your way of getting the job done. Its genuinely easy to use, has all the tools you need, whether you are a Software Developer, a Salesman, a Photographer, and its secure. Having using UNIX for 20 years, I know that the Darwin core avoids many of the issues that plague systems like Windows.

However, while the software is great, there is one thing that lets down my experience as a Mac user: hardware reliability. My first 15” PowerBook G4 had a memory chip go bad within a few months of it arriving. Then the hard disk crashed, something I’ve been lucky enough to never have happen to a Windows laptop. A year a bit later, the hard disk crashed again!

Despite those experiences, I persuaded my wife (A professional photographer) to get a 17” PowerBook G4. Within a few weeks it just began to randomly crash – after much diagnosis and support calls to Apple, a hardware fault was found and it was returned for repair. Now, as you can imagine, that made things “interesting” in the Kerrison household!

So, why is Apple hardware unreliable? My friends that have Macs haven’t had the same issues so is it just me? I find it odd that I’ve had so many failures in a short space of time, maybe I was just due?

I thing that really bugs me, however, is that the hardware isn’t cheap when you compare it to the Windows laptop vendors. If I’m paying a premium, shouldn’t the components be better and I actually get improved reliability as a result?