Inspirational Technology

Apple Support

Well I've been a bit out of touch lately as I'm up in Phoenix right now. I finally have access to internet connectivity, but email is still a problem so if you've sent me mail and I haven't replied, that's why. I'm staying at my parents temporarily and they use crappy MSN DSL which I guess tries to force all SMTP access through their servers. Ugh, anyway I normally use Cox SMTP servers and those of course block relaying from outside their network regardless. I may need to just setup my own.

Oh well, so how about this Apple support. I'm currently trying to get my brand new dual 1.25 Powermac fixed so that it doesn't freeze when I push the CPUs for more then a couple hours. They keep trying to blame software and today the guy in the Apple store told me you can't expect too much out of these machines, and then added "it's not like they're meant to do computations for Nasa". Ugh, yeah. Apple's selling to the UNIX crowd and well there's a little problem. Those of us in the UNIX crowd expect our machines to work, 100%, all the time no matter how hard we push the CPU. To say you should expect otherwise is very, very troubling to me. In fact if I wanted a machine that was unstable I could spend a lot less money and use something running Windows, or I could spend even less then that and go back to using Linux which never crashes the way that Powermac does.

Now I know this isn't really Apple's official line, but the people in these stores are supposed to be Mac experts and they simply can't be telling people this kind of thing.

Now I also understand what a friend was complaining about with Apple. He'd been having some problems with a Powermac too and wasn't too happy with what they were doing about it.

At this point I don't want to criticize them too hard, the support in the Apple store is good. I just carried the machine to the door, a guy came over and carried it to the back and then they just dove in and hooked it up to run tests with no questions about ownership or anything. That was nice, but I'm still troubled about Apple's ability to truly deliver a 100% solid professional computing experience. Seems there's still a bit of the old Mac OS legacy that needs to be shaken out of their employees. Here's a tip, no it isn't acceptable for the machine to freeze when placed under a heavy load and yes the machine should be perfectly capable of running calculations for Nasa. Just about any other Unix box can do it, Macs should be able to too. This kind of thing is even more frustrating because I know Macs are stable, my Powerbook is extremely solid. Well, OK, it did kernel panic one time, but so far that was an isolated occurrence.

They have the machine now and we'll see how it goes. Hopefully it will be a positive experience the rest of the way.