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From my father who can’t understand the intricacies of broadband to my coworkers that don’t grasp that an out of date virus definition is bad, I get a lot of calls.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.
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.
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.
