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Macs. You love them or you hate them. Up until recently I had been firmly in the love them camp – my trust Macbook pro has barely missed a step in the 4+ years since I bought it. I recently got into a facebook argument with a friend on the merits of Macs vs Windows PCs, but really it is not much of an argument at all. His position was basically that even tho there are a myriad of problems with Windows machines – such as viruses & malware, driver bugs and incompatibilities, general protection faults, blue screens of death, the constant and endless stream of patches and security updates required, and the fact that you have to re-install every 6 months since performance has inexplicably deteriorated to the point where the machine is essentially unusable – that because there are lots of tools available to help you deal with these problems that they werent that big a deal and that made windows better. Of course that doesn’t really wash against a platform which has none of those problems to begin with. Say what you want about Macs and OS X – it provides a slick, well integrated and low maintenance user experience. The slogan ‘it just works’ is well deserved.

Or it used to be anyway. In recent years the online buzz from Mac owners is the quality has been slipping. Hardware problems have started to become almost common place, software bugs and gotchas have started to rear their ugly heads. Arguably, since Macs have become essentially just PCs in shiny Apple cases, they have started to develop all the same problems. If you compare the specs of the latest Macbook Pro to a Sony Vaio or a Dell XPS you wont find much to differentiate them except the branding and the chassis. I’d also argue that Apple’s new focus on the iPhone and IOS has taken the best developers and testers away from OSX and so now we are seeing the results in a product that has not been engineered to the same degree as it used to be.

The long and short of it is that Macs break now when they never used to, and with this development a new problem arises – that Macs are a pain in the ass to fix. For all the problems of the PC world, almost any dork off the street could pull one apart and put it back together, and any geek worth his salt can repair a faulty system. When it comes to fixing a Mac tho, its not so simple. Even tho the hardware is now essentially the same, the guts of what is going on under the hood is still hidden from the users, usually giving you no more clues than a flashing folder symbol or the dreaded Sad Mac Face. Determining what the problem is requires essentially requires a trip to the Apple store – go ahead and take a look at any article on the Apple knowledge base for know issues, most of them end with ‘please contact your closest Apple store for assistance’. When the screen in my macbook pro died a few months back, I had to make an appointment to see a ‘Genius’ before I could get my machine looked at. The ‘Genius’ had some ipod looking gizmo which diagnosed the problem I suspected straight away, then they carted it out back and told me to come back in 2 weeks. 2 Weeks! That’s a long time to go without your computer, especially when you are used to being able to fix a hardware problem in a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

If you read my posts from a few months back you will know I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion recently, and mostly regretted it. Last week I decided enough was enough – I wanted my laptop to sleep when I closed the lid and I wanted the bluetooth to work when it woke up again. So I decided I would go back to Snow Leopard. I wanted to do a fresh install anyway since I had been having a few glitches before I upgraded, but it turns out that was the only option anyway, OSX will not let you do an in-place downgrade. Unfortunately even a clean install was a pain in the ass, I spent probably 3 hours trying to get the install DVD to boot with no luck, using both the internal superdrive – which it seems is cactus, and an external USB drive. In the end I had to download a new dmg file using bittorrent then restore it to a usb stick and boot off the usb stick to get the OS to install. It was a lot of fucking around, and once I did get it up and running I discovered that Apple changed the mailbox format in Lion and I just restore my old mailbox in snow leopard, I need to export it in lion and then re-import it…. So now I’m trying to find a Lion VMware image just to get my mail back

Still… now that is over, hopefully I wont need to be doing any of that shit again for another 4 years….