(Read this Wikipedia entry or load up this very long FARK.com page if you are confused by the above…)
Just like last December I’ve had to get a new hard drive for my PowerBook, and its battery—which currently holds about a 7-minute charge—is probably due for a replacement as well. Anybody who knows me has had to endure my Macintosh zealotry on at least one occasion, yet if you peruse the Mac-related posts on this humble site you’ll see that I’ve had more than my share of issues with the platform.
In my decade of Mac experience the software has gotten better and better, but the hardware has gotten steadily worse.
Consider my recent history with Mac computers:
- October, 1999 – iMac DVSE: FireWire not working out of the box.
- January, 2001 – Power Mac G4: Unable to sleep out of the box.
- May, 2001 – iBook: Built-in speakers busted out of the box.
- December, 2003 – Powerbook: Dead pixels out of the box.
- April, 2004 – Power Mac G5: Logic board not working out of the box.
Not a great track record if you ask me…
And yet, my few shares of Apple stock are still skyrocketing while folks everywhere are touting the touting the superiority of the Mac platform.
My dream come true would be a release of Mac OS X that I could run on any machine I want. Sadly, even though Apple is switching to the Intel chip-set, we’ll likely not see a generic OS release until Steve Jobs finally decides to retire on a big bed of money from faithful fan-boys like myself.
I’m waiting to see what gets announced at the MacWorld keynote in January. If it’s not a generic release of OS X for Intel or at least an iBook that can run Windows, I’m buying me a notebook with XP Pro. Give me some time with it, and I’ll be able to say with at least some certainty which platform, if any, is ultimately better, and for what. Oh, and if I have enough hard drive space left over I may even install Linux on a separate partition, just for kicks!
