The High Cost of Mac
Dear Apple,
I love your computers I’m sitting here right now hammering out this post on OS X Tiger with Safari, checking my email in Mail.app and generally lapping up the entire Mac experience. I love you guys.
I also recommend you to my friends, at least the ones I like. My friends and family all get wonderful tales of how great my Mac is, so much so that I’ve been banned from giving any toasts at get-togethers and endured an intervention from my parents two weeks ago.
But my recommendations to them are not just because I love Macs, but because I’m a selfish bastard. Among most of my friends and family, I’m the computer guy. They have a question about computers, they come to me. They get viruses, spyware, a hard drive crash or leprosy of the motherboard, I’m the guy they call.
And they call a lot.
From my father who can’t understand the intricacies of broadband to my coworkers that don’t grasp that an out of date virus definition is bad, I get a lot of calls.
I figure that my Mac has given me the least trouble of any system, it comes with great support, if I can shovel these otherwise intelligent people over to Mac, I’ll get less calls and that gives me more time for Desktop Tower Defense.
However, despite my speeches, praise and those snappy Mac ads, I haven’t been able to convince one damn person to switch. Why? Well, they’re just too damn expensive.
Need proof of the problem? Let me see if I can shed some light on the situation.
In Search of a Close Shave
Dear Shaving Companies,
I am a man. Since I don’t want to look like a Scottish bagpipe player, I have to shave at least somewhat regularly.
However, like most men, shaving remains one of my least favorite morning rituals, ranked somewhere between bathing in scalding hot water and drinking burnt coffee in the list of things I’d like to be doing after I wake up.
Yet, the other day, as I was taking a Bic razor to my freshly prepared face, a thought flashed across my mind. In the past fifty years, man has been to the moon, we’ve turned the “supercomputer” into a “personal computer” and built this whole newfangled Internet thing, why the Hell do I still bleed after every shave?
Then it dawned on me, it’s YOUR fault shaving companies. You, the purveyors of foams, gels, razors, lotions and more, you are the reason shaving still sucks. Your laziness and/or incompetence has kept this ritual of manhood every bit as painful and violent as it was hundreds of years ago and, dammit, I want that to change.
It’s time you got off your collective asses and brought real change to this industry. If you need some advice, I’ve got a few suggestions.
Smooth Move coComments
Dear coComments,
I leave a LOT of comments. Outside of my charm and good looks, of which I have none, comments are probably my favorite means of promoting my various sites and blogs.
However, keeping track of all of those comments is a huge pain. I don’t want to leave a comment on a site only to have some troll take a snipe at me unscathed. No, I want to return and bring down upon him the wrath of a nuclear flamewar using language that would make the Angry Video Game Nerd blush with shame.
Actually, I’m just usually just saying thank you for the help, but it was nice to pretend I’m some kind of comment warrior.
Anyway, as I was saying, keeping track of those comments is a major pain. So many sites, so little time. In that quest though, your service is, or at least was, a complete Godsend. It was like a little inbox for all of my comments. It was great and it beat getting an email from every comment follow up I got.
However, your “V2″ of the comment system shares a lot in common with the famous V-2 Rocket, a tactical failure that never should have left the launchpad. You’ve taken what was one of my favorite Web services and squandered that goodwill, sending me, and others like me, running to the competition.
But since I’m such a nice guy, I’ll give you my thoughts on it and a second chance, but first, I want these issues fixed.
Falling Out of Love With Linux
Dear Linux,
I love you, or rather, I used to love you. However, lately I’ve been having an affair.
You knew that I’d been keeping Windows around, He’s like my drinking buddy. He plays all my games and we like to hang out on the weekends. It was never a “love” thing between us, just a way to escape. Besides, he’s one of the guys.
But no, lately I’ve had a new fling. I met Mac.
Actually, we’re old friends, I knew her all the way as a baby Apple II and we practically grew up together. She’s always been dependable, stable and competent, but she also grew up into something quite beautiful. We started dating a few months ago and, well, it’s getting serious between us.
Sure, she’s not perfect and I can’t say if I really love her or not, but we have to face it, things aren’t the same between us anymore and, well, she and I have been enjoying each other’s company a lot more these days.
Still, I am a gentleman and, as such, I have to be honest with you. Perhaps you can grow from this and, perhaps, some day, we can get back together again.
But first you have to listen to me.
Gizmo Has Gremlins
Dear Gizmo Project,
I have a bone to pick with you. Sunday morning I had a podcast to record and, well, Gizmo Project is my main VOIP tool. Your built in call recording and overall good audio quality makes it a logical choice for these P2P calls.
However, Sunday morning, your entire service was down. Not only was it down, but had been down for at least about an hour remained down a two hours afterward. We tried to jerry-rig something using Skype but we ran out of time before we could get everything completely in place.
However, what bothered me about the whole ordeal wasn’t that Gizmo Project and your SIP server went down at an inopportune time, but that no one at Gizmo Project was doing a damn thing about it. Sure, there was a forum posting about the outage, one started by a user and maintained by other users, but no one from Gizmo Project itself posted on it until today, over 24 hours AFTER the outage was resolved.
Still worse is that there is no system status indicator. Skype has one. even Cox Communications, the bane of my customer service existence, has one. Why don’t you?
However, the ultimate slap in the face is what happens when you Google for “Gizmo Project” and “System Status”. You find this forum post where an admin tells a user requesting a system status feature that “We are NOT going to create a public status page any time in the near future.”
That, my friends, is bullshit and I’ll tell you why.
Death to the CD Key
Dear Game Developers,
There are only a few greater joys in my life than popping in an old favorite computer game and making it new again. Whether I’m enjoying a rousing round of Age of the Empires 2 or Max Payne, there’s a lot to be said about playing a (slightly) older computer game.
First, the games work, the first time, every time (unless it’s made by SEGA). There’s no worries about RAM requirements, bad performance or hangups. Your modern system can play these games flawlessly at the same time its downloading recipes from Argentina and cataloging your ten gigabyte porn collection.
Second, they’re still fun. If you enjoyed a game five years ago, you’ll probably enjoy it today. You can’t tell me that Half-Life 1 isn’t more fun than Doom 3 (of course, gluing your finger up your ass is more fun than the latter). Weaker graphics aside, everyone still gets giddy about the gameplay of older games, even if they won’t admit it.
Finally, they’re free or dirt cheap. If you don’t have them already, you can pick them up from the bargain bin in a flea market for a quarter and a can of Raid (I usually throw in deodorant to sweeten the deal). You don’t have to blow fifty bucks on a game that might not work or will probably suck. You can get a good, working game for a fraction of the cost.
So imagine my joy as I sit upon a literal mountain of old computer games. Classics from all genres and all walks of life. Now imagine my frustration since I can’t install half of them. Their CD keys have long since gone the way of the dodo and they are on their way to becoming Christmas tree decorations, and I don’t even celebrate Christmas.
I Want the Wii I was Promised
Dear Video Game Developers,
I read in a recent article that many of you have finally woken up to the popularity of the Wii and decided to shift resources to developing for it.
I think that’s great news. Sure, it took you the better part of a year to catch on but, hey, that’s still faster than FEMA right?
But since you’re throwing all of those millions of dollars toward the Wii, I’d like to make a very small, humble request/recommendation on how to spend it: I want the Wii experience I was promised when I bought it.
To prove my point, let me tell you a story.
My Life Without Flash Player
Dear Adobe,
It seems that your Flash Player for Intel-based Macs has a pretty serious problem. Whenever I first start out using it, things start off fine but, as time wears on, my browser moves slower and slower until it eventually hangs altogether, destroying whatever I was working on at the time.
I can confirm definitively that the problem is with your player. How? I tested it on nine, count them nine, different browsers (Safari, Webkit, Firefox, Flock, OmniWeb, Shiira, Opera, Netscape and Camino). For anyone who is counting, that is four Webkit and four Gecko browsers along with Opera.
Every single one of those browsers experienced the exact same problem. They’d run great for a while, slow after visiting a few sites with Flash and then die an undignified death.
The only thing that made the problem go away was uninstalling Flash player or disabling the plugin, two things I had been hesitant to do.
Worse still, your own support section makes me pine for Microsoft support. Your guide on troubleshooting Flash Player on Intel Macs has only one suggestion, running the browser in Rosetta and using Flash 8. Great, rather than you fixing your stupid plugin, I have to slow my entire browser to a painful crawl and use an outdated version of Flash.
No thanks.
