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Apple - Think Twice

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Re: Apple - Think Twice

#391

Post by akeck »

MartinCron wrote: post #298
akeck wrote: post #205

"The second mouse gets the cheese." - Since my iBook died multiple deaths via its BPGA socket, I've learned to buy rev. 2 or rev. 3 products for all my Apple purchases, when possible. It's consistent with my experience in avoiding x.0 software releases. It's really cool when a company treads new ground, but if you need reliability, it's best to let others test the first round.

I've learned to buy rev. 2 or rev. 3 products for all my Apple purchases, when possible It's not just Apple products. A few years ago, I bought the first model year of a new car. That's not something I'll ever do again.

Yep. Toyota seems to release their Corollas in three year design cycles. I wonder what the distribution of 300 kilomile Corollas is across those years. My guess is that the 300 kilomile population is highest for the rev. 3 cars.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#392

Post by jtheory »

moostapha wrote: post #368
jtheory wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine it's that clearcut. What's the "intended purpose" for a general-purpose laptop? Editing text, watching video, playing music, etc.., plus the long tail of more unusual things that may be possible depending on what software you install. Are there any relatively common tasks that will actually be prevented by this level of ghosting? I don't mean "it's a bit annoying", I mean "this task is no longer feasi…

>Are there any relatively common tasks that will actually be prevented by this level of ghosting? I don't mean "it's a bit annoying", I mean "this task is no longer feasible". Apple bills their computers as "the computers you do stuff with". They have a long history in the professional media/content creation business, and their marketing campaigns and advertizements for the last several years were based on bringing t…

I know all that; but I'm looking for at least one specific use case that would become unfeasible.

Mild ghosting -- e.g., if you leave a static image up for 3 minutes with no change, then switch to a gray background you can see the outlines of the old image -- is pretty obviously not going to affect GarageBand (!).

I doubt it'd be detectable in any video work, but I don't do much of that.

I do occasional image editing, and doubt I notice it there (I don't normally have any single view of an image up unmoving for more than 30 seconds or so, max... I'm constantly changing the zoom or shifting the view).

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#393

Post by FireBeyond »

jad wrote: post #344
FireBeyond wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have a friend with a base model rMBP who took it into the Apple Store, and they replaced his with the maxed out model because that's the only configuration they had left in stock." That surprised me - I was looking at an MBP purchase at an Apple Store (fairly large one, Tacoma WA). My options were only 4GB and various sizes of HDDs. They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not. Th…

> They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not. This is a Retina MacBook Pro, not the "traditional" MacBook Pros with the optical drive. All Retina MacBook Pros have SSDs, so I'm not sure what models you were looking at. In any event, Apple does carry the fully maxed out Retina MacBook Pro in the stores. I know because I bought one myself.

This was approximately two months prior to the rMBP release.

I have no doubt that varying stores have different stock policies, but at the fairly large store I was at, it was suggested I order online.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#394

Post by icarus_drowning »

timbre wrote: post #189
icarus_drowning wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add to the anecdotal evidence bandwagon, I'm another very happy long term customer, with almost a decade of happy purchases. I've never had a problem nor experienced anything but excellent service. I've had iPhones replaced for free (without Apple Care), free repairs for faulty components in 2 MacBook Pro's (performed immediately and at no cost). I don't blame you for you dislike of the Apple brand given how…

This may just be a difference in attitude. For myself, I would count having multiple iPhones and MacBook Pros replaced or repaired as a terrible experience. Good service is better than bad service, and occasional defects are unavoidable, but the iPhone is only 5 years old; multiple replacements within that span would give me doubts about a company (unless you're buying lots of them, e.g. if your at a company that sup…

I would agree, but do note that one iPhone was dropped in a cup of tea, which I can't really blame on Apple, and the other on cement, which I likewise can't really blame on Apple.

The macbooks both had bad video cards, which I do blame Apple for. But one was fixed in less than an hour, the other RMA'd and returned in 48 hours. This after almost 3 years of continuous use. I can put up with 2 or 3 days of repair after that many years of trouble-free life.

This kind of service and reliability led me to buy an iMac from them as my work computer and I haven't had a single problem with it.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#395

Post by nileshk »

greedo wrote: post #317
rozap wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he's going for is that, had you kept your original MBP, you would be unsatisfied. Not saying he's right or wrong there. However, I think it is fair to say that the majority of Apple fans often have a pretty frequent upgrade cycle. Consequently I don't think there are too many "long term customers" of Apple products in his sense of the word. I think Meaty is really going for "long term" customer as in - i…

In my circle, I would disagree. I'm using a 6 year old Mac Pro, have a 2006 Mac mini as an HTPC, another as a fileserver in the basement. Our household has an original iPad, an iPad 3G, two iPhone 3GS used as ersatz iPod Touches for the kids. I did recently upgrade to the iPhone 5 from the iPhone 3GS, but that's because I don't want to be on a two year treadmill. The only issue I ever had was with a balky videocard i…

If you have the right video card, you can get Mountain Lion running with these instructions: http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47

This worked for me with my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 w/ an ATI HD5770 graphics card. I do have an issue where it often doesn't come back from sleep, so I never put it to sleep, but other than that it's been flawless so far. I haven't spent any time looking into the sleep issue, maybe it's a solvable problem.

By strictly hardware performance standards, the Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 did not deserve to lose support so soon, and are still more than adequate. Especially the 8-core versions, which have benchmarks higher than many 2012 Macs.

If you have a 4 core model: I researched putting in replacement CPUs a while back (but never went through with it). Replacing a CPU in a Mac Pro is not the easiest and is a bit of a pain from what I hear, but it is possible, and if you have 4 cores right now you can get a serious CPU performance boost with the right 8 core CPU upgrades (2 x 4-core CPUs, that is). There are many options that will will work. If you're interested, I can give you more details on which CPUs work.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#396

Post by meaty »

whatusername wrote: post #361
astrodust wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point. It's not about benchmarks. That's like buying a car based on horsepower or quarter mile times. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think. It's about build quality. About vendor support. About durability. I can't be the only one disappointed that there aren't many options if those are the things you value.

When it comes to cars -- the Macbooks are like BMW's. Look good, drive fast, even the door makes a solid thud when you close it. You can tell it's been well engineered. The T-Series thinkpads -- more like a Toyota Hilux.

Yes BMWs are just like MacBooks. They catch fire too!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17514172

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#398

Post by jonathansizz »

moostapha wrote: post #367
baddox wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone at Apple would claim that the test magically changes the state of the world. They probably wouldn't even deny that there is a ghosting problem on your machine. It's clear that the test is meant to determine whether the particular machine's ghosting problem is within Apple's acceptable limits. It's just like the dead pixel guarantees you sometimes see on monitors, whereby you get a replacement if…

Am I weird for returning a monitor to best buy for 2 dead (glowing green) pixels? It's not like it was a high end display. It's was a $130 1920x1080 LG that kept it's black-friday pricing for at least a week, probably because it's old. I mean…they didn't bat an eye, they just gave me a new one. It's almost like they want their customers to be happy with their purchases.

Wow. If your company provides worse customer service than Best Buy, this is certainly a problem (especially when it's a long-term customer who paid extra for an extended warranty)!

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#399

Post by wjamesg »

Void_ wrote: post #204

I'm so glad this issue is finally getting some attention. I returned my rMBP after experiencing the issue. It looks that getting a Samsung screen is a game of chance.

Doesn't Apple have a reasonable no-questions-asked return policy? 14 days, or maybe 30? I wonder why the OP didn't take advantage.

Re: Apple - Think Twice

#400

Post by kamjam »

mullingitover wrote: post #334
kamjam wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I would have dumped it and never used them again. I was having a bit of a "debate" with a friend of mine who bought the new MBP a few months ago. We are both C# developers so we have no real use of the Mac features, and he was running Windows 8 in VM. His laptop cost over 3 times more than my Dell XPS, which granted is thicker and the screen is not as high res etc, all features which I did not care about to be h…

Here's what make the cost easy for me to deal with: resale value. A two year old Mac will easily fetch 75% of its retail price. Paying 25% of retail price for two years of use is pretty reasonable.

That's true. I just can't justify the high price when I won't use the features, especially since by that stage things in my possession are pretty broken :-p
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