Sunday 22 July 2012

Apple can f- off, seriously.

My old Mac Mini, with which I had always been very happy, from the word go, had slowed down a fair bit sine I bought it nearly five years ago and yesterday it started seriously crashing.

Fair enough, I thought, I'll not begrudge Apple their pound of flesh, I'll just buy a new one. The assistant sold me a new one happily enough, that's when the problems started.

I'll not bore you with the details, but here I am six hours later further back than this morning. The new Mac Mini doesn't even have a f-ing CD drive, you're supposed to magically sync it with your old Mac Mini (which is on the blink) only to do that I need to be able to plug my screen back into the old one, but the VGA-to-old Mac adapter wasn't quite compatible with the old Mac-to-new Mac adaptor that came in the box, as a result of which various things follow:

1. The old VGA-old Mac adapter is buggered beyond recognition (there were four extra pins which got bent out of the way) and once the two adaptors had been forced into line, didn't work anyway.

2. I wasted another hour going back to the Apple store to buy the correct VGA-to-new mac adaptor.

3. Having got the screen to work, I realised that the new Mac mini doesn't have a CD drive, what's the bloody point of that, it's like buying a new car and discovering it doesn't have a steering wheel?

4. Not an issue, trills the booklet, you can magically transfer everything from your old Mac to your new Mac, provided you install some software or other on the old Mac first. Fair enough, but having buggered the VGA-to-old Mac adaptor (see step 1 above) I can no longer plug the screen into the old Mac.

5. I'm particularly peeved about the new Mac mini not having a CD drive, as I told the man in the shop that the only software I needed to install was Mac Office which I had on a CD. He could have f-ing well mentioned that the CD was no good to me any more. Or pointed out that the fancy adaptor thingy was about as much use as a missing sock.

6. For the past five years I have been blithely telling people how great Apple computers and iPods are, but never again. My tip: buy the cheapest laptop you can find, plug in a keyboard and mouse (cost you a tenner at places like Comet), keep all your files on an external hard drive and when the laptop goes on the blink, just chuck it in the bin and start again.
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UPDATE: Thanks for all your comments re USB and so on, but file-document storage is not a problem, I have always saved everything I ever created on an external drive, so my last seventeen years' work is on a Porsche 2 TB hard drive which works fine, it's just updating the software (primarily Mac Office) and sticking in CDs and creating MP3's that's going to be difficult. I guess I'll have to double up and buy a CD reader device thingy.

27 comments:

A K Haart said...

"buy the cheapest laptop you can find......"

That's what I do. No point having favourites.

Barnacle Bill said...

Sorry to hear of your problems with your Mac Mini, I've got three of the older ones, with the inbuilt DVD drive!
Certainly seems crazy not to have one in the latest version.
I was amazed that my new Mac Book Air didn't have a Firewire port, had to buy a USB - Ethernet adaptor as a workaround; also my 16GB USB stick has been getting a hammering.
Apple beginning to loose the plot?

Mark Wadsworth said...

AKH, if I'd known this morning what I know now...

BB, I'm left with the following options:
1. Try and get my money back.
2. Buy a laptop and start again.
3. Buy a new VGA-to-old Mac adaptor and a Fir Wire (whatever that is) and try to transfer stuff from old to new.
4. Something else.

What I fear is that I will spend the next few weeks popping back to the Apple Store to buy one last piece of must have connection gadgetry, armed with which, it is guaranteed to work, all I now need is just one more bit and then I'm, sorted, apart from popping back again for one final expensive piece of inter cabling tomfoolery which will solve all my problems for once and for all, provided I'm prepared to shell out another £100 for an eternal CD drive ad infinitum.

Barnacle Bill said...

Mark when I installed Office on my Mac Book Air I copied the DVD to my USB stick.
I did the same with my iPhoto & iTunes libraries.
So any chance you know someone who would let you go down that route?

Shiney said...

Mark

"Turn away from the dark side...."

and install Linux on an old PC. You won't regret it.

Tim Almond said...

How is it "seriously crashing"? Can you reinstall the operating system to fix it?

Other than that... unless you need it for work, your advice is quite sound. Dell Outlet have some very good deals on refurb machines. For work, I only buy Thinkpads.

Physiocrat said...

Put what you want to copy on a USB stick. CDs are going obsolete.

When I need a new computer I buy a former top of the range IBM/Lenovo, usually about three years old, and put Ubuntu or SuSE Linux. M$ will run virtualised if you need it for applications.

This has the advantage that the entire virtual machine is one Linux file and can be copied easily complete with all the settings.

Commercial operating systems are best avoided. Closed architecture hardware ditto.

Barnacle Bill said...

Just another thought Mark, the Mac Minis are very easy to get into, a couple wallpaper scrapers will do.
Whip the old hard drive out put it into a cheap USB enclosure.
Bob's your uncle you're away with the cement mixer!

Mark Wadsworth said...

BB, S, TS, Ph, that all sounds very plausible but anything involving "scraping" "Linux" "operating system" "reinstall" "DVD" "refurb" or "USB" is way beyond me. I thought that new Mac would like be old Mac (brilliant), but they're not, they are extremely shit and I wouldn't recommend one to my worst enemy.

Lola said...

And it's taken you HOW LONG to work this out?

(Tip. The boxes are just commodities. It's the data and software that are the important bits).

Physiocrat said...

Get your USB thingy from Aldi, they are next to the batteries and condoms by the checkout, or WH Smiths, plug it in the USB socket at the side and the computer thinks it is a disk drive, open the window and copy whatever you want into it, then eject when you have done. They don't have moving parts to go wrong and disks that get scratched.

Sarton Bander said...

Then buy an SSD for your laptop.

It's a bigger faster version of a USB drive.

Robin Smith said...

Well I have been telling you this for years.

The law of monopoly is:

Higher prices, lower quality.

The law of freedom (LVT) is:

Lower prices, higher quality.

But you do not like this idea. Its weird.

Apple are a monopoly. Same as Wondoze and Google and eBay and Amazon and Paypal and so on.... Robbers.

The twats who think they are great are just fast asleep slaves.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, five years ago, Mac Minis were brilliant. Now they are shit. Once I'd bought a shit one, it took me half an hour to work out.

Ph, to be fair, I know what a USB stick is, but i prefer external hard drives. The problem is that to download stuff from a computer to a USB stick or external hard drive, you need to be able to plug in a screen to see what you are doing, which I can't (see post).

SB, sounds groovy, but what is the point if I can no longer plug a screen into the old Mac because the f-ing stupid adaptor they included in the box is not compatible with their old adaptor and has completely buggered it?

So for a start, I have to go crawling back to those f-ers and buy an adaptor just to see whether the cunning plan involving external hard drive works, which it won't (I spent half this evening trying to make the new f-ing Mac recognise my existing external hard drive).

Mark Wadsworth said...

RS, well you've got an iPad and I haven't, so there.

Kj said...

We've got a Powerbook in the household that's lasted longer, and without a hint of hiccup, than three windows based laptops of mine, but I figure that since the Mac cost about five times much as each windows based laptop, I'm still out on top.

Physiocrat said...

I never pay more than £120 for a laptop and that leaves enough over to buy a new disk drive and max out the memory.

Tim Almond said...

Kj,

You can't generalise about "Windows PCs".

Macs are pretty much the same hardware as what Asus will sell you in one of their mid-range laptops, because that's who designs the boards that go in them, and everything else is pretty standard.

In fact, in 2009, Asus laptops had a lower failure rate than Mac over 2 years at around 9% compared to around 11%. Dell and Lenovo were at around 12%. Considering it was a random sample and variances with that, there's nothing in it.

The one big plus for Apple is external build quality. They're very solid in that respect.

Bayard said...

"what is the point if I can no longer plug a screen into the old Mac because the f-ing stupid adaptor they included in the box is not compatible with their old adaptor and has completely buggered it?"

I'd suggest you get yourself a new old-Mac to VGA adaptor off eBay and a big USB drive (if you haven't already got one) and you're away.

I'd also recommend the Thinkpad/Linux combo, but it is handy to know someone who can be your Linux guru, or have a Mac/Windows box to access the internet for advice when/if the Linux box can't for any reason.

Tim Almond said...

Bayard,

Not sure I'd recommend Linux for a technophobe like Mark. Buy a PC and you get Windows 7 which is a fine OS (unless you're really committed to Linux/Unix).

Kj said...

The Stigler: mine was purely anecdotal, but repeated experiences, yours was enlightening. But what's the failure rate past two years? Leaving hardware aside, I've gotten used to having to reinstall Windows every year, but Windows 7 seems to be holding on quite well, keeping my fingers crossed.

Tim Almond said...

Kj,

I don't know. Those are the only figures I can find.

I doubt they're much different because, as I say, nearly everything in a Mac is the same stuff in a PC.

Personally, I like Windows 7. Absolutely rock solid in my experience.

Physiocrat said...

A Windows reinstall is a nightmare in my experience. You have to reformat the partition, which means that you should have put all your data in a separate partition. Normal practice with Linux, it goes in /home and stays there, and you back up that partition when you want.

With Windows you then have to reinstall all the software, renew all the settings, type in all the 25-digit security and activation codes and all the other crap. And for why? Because commercial software producers have to protect their IPR.

Linux install. Download the distribution, copy to a CD. Start it up, select the partition arrangement to keep your home partition and format all the others, select the software you want, and, this is the clever bit - you can go away for a couple of hours while it does its job of installing everything you have chosen.

The down side is that some exotic hardware is not compatible so you have to check things like your graphics card, scanner, ethernet and wireless cards. Which can be a bugger. Some firms like HP, Lenovo, Radeon and D-Link tend to be reliably compatible.

Proprietary software is an outdated business model. But how do Linux developers make a living? Support and installation. Many projects are developed in an academic environment.

There is a more serious public interest issue here. HMRC, for instance, does not support open source software for its tax returns. More importantly, huge amounts of public funds are forked out to commercial software suppliers in licence fees to the US giants by public authorities, when there is perfectly good open source free software available for the task, and the user base is so big that consortia could develop it within the public sector and give it away. In some areas, such as architectural CAD, the commercial software is hugely expensive and a major barrier to small firms and individual practices trying to compete.

Related issues are that firms working for the public sector must supply documents in M$ format, and the same applies to many other instances where the public has to use public sector IT services.

This is a scandal of anti-competitiveness. The EU has taken a bit of an interest in this but it could usefully implement a policy of migrating all its own institutions to open source/Linux software.

Physiocrat said...

One option might be to take the disk out and fit it into one of those USB cases you can get for about £15

Bayard said...

"Related issues are that firms working for the public sector must supply documents in M$ format"

I use Openoffice, which is quite happy with working with .doc and .xls files. Mind you, I recently submitted a tender to a public body and there was no question about compatability issues: it had to be hand-written and posted!

Tim Almond said...

Physiocrat,

Proprietary software is an outdated business model. But how do Linux developers make a living? Support and installation. Many projects are developed in an academic environment.

The problem with Linux and most open source is that most of the software is built around what developers want - as they're spending their time doing it, they write for themselves.

Which means that open source developer tools are often very good - I develop on Microsoft .net using Visual Studio, but I still use Filezilla, jQuery, and so forth (there's also some open source software for .net like Paint.net and Rhino Mocks).

It means that there's really very little in the way of open source games, high quality graphics software or tax packages. Developers don't need those much, so they don't put effort into them. Go into a design company and see how many people are using GIMP instead of Photoshop.

Physiocrat said...

Stig - yes I know what you mean. Pity the academic community has not got more involved at that end. There is potentially useful synergy - academic institutions often have both an IT faculty and design faculties.

I think it will come but pity it has taken so long.