Bliss to Frustration, a 20 year trek
 

Hi,

I've been using Macs since their very beginning 20 years ago. I used to really enjoy amazing my PC friends during the first 12 years. Near instant boot times, system crashes MAYBE once per year, a Microsoft Excel that was always one release ahead of the PC version, FREE system software from Apple all the way to System 7.

Then actually with System 7 annoying problems began to creep in. Crashes jumped to once per month or so, and the startup times lengthened to match the PC environments. Macs were still the bomb then, everyone referred to Windows as Mac86 because Microsoft "pirated" the Mac GUI theory and because for years Windows was not any better than Mac OS 1, more or less.

I think I'm my 7th mac now, a fancy G5 iMac I got in October with OS 10.4. And I have never seen a Mac that required more trouble shooting and maintenance! Thanks to Mac OSX Hints I know what to do, but geez.... I've had to reload the operating system twice and reinstall Excel twice because the frameorks preferences keep failing. I have had more down time on this one machine and system software in the past 4 months than in any 3 or 4 year period on my other 6 macs.

Right now I'm extra frustrated because I'm waiting for advise in the System forum because it looks like my hard drive might be dead and the OS Install disk won't even give me a desktop to look at.

Arrggggh!

Thanks for listening,
Avalon

I understand your disappointment that using a Mac does not overrule those damn laws of physics, but the sad truth is that hard drives break, even in Macs, you'll have to deal with it...

Yeah, but why is it that Macs have become increasingly unreliable and buggy as time has gone by. I have 3 macs in my house right now and the correlation of newness to problems is smack on 1.0. (There are also 3 PC's and 2 laptop PC's.)

And the hard drive being the problem is only a guess, anyway. But thanks for your condolence.

I suspect you are just suffering from a small sample size. I.e. bad luck

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm using a G4 iMac at work which had its MLB replaced 3 (in words: three) times because of unrelated failures (first, graphics card, second, the ethernet card, third, the USB) and now the display is dead. That's not what I spend the money for.

Cheers, pink

For some perspective, here's an excerpt from PC Magazine's 2005 reliability survey (sample size: 26,000 machines):
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1851291,00.asp

That's true when comparing to the nonMac. But I do so miss the days of zero to one percent.

Don't forget that those days were likely before wide-spread Internet access - and hence defects were likely under-reported.

Well, if you look at the report published at macintouch (http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/laptops.html), things look a bit different (It is laptops only, but includes more than 10,000 reports): There on average you have repair in the first year in 21 % of the machines and another 18.3 % within the next two years.

cheers, pink

Off the cuff and without any scientific factual data to back this up - so why bother, right!! I'd say the increased failure rates are related to the push to grab higher technology and get it out to the public as fast as possible - else you risk becoming the follower, not the leader.

Fairly new to Macs, I have always seen how they were IMO always pushing the envelope. These days, I guess the price is paid with a little less reliability....

... I wonder where all these are made.... and has that changed over the years!

Mike

If I were to venture a wild guess, insisting on only 'pick of the litter' components would probably mean a 2-3 fold increase in the pricetag.

Is that OK with people?

If not, then we're stuck with the same quality of components as everyone else, and need to trust to superior systems integration and design to make our stay an enjoyable one.

In contrast, I've got an original revision (you know what they say about buying the first edition of something) iMac G4 and (touch wood) it has had zero hardware problems in almost 4 years.

Rob.

There certainly has been a slight change due to things like going from SCSI to commodity IDE disks, but the complete system is still more reliable than the PC world. It's just that with PCs there are so many more companies to blame when something does go wrong that it's not as easy to point the finger -- when something goes wrong with a Mac, it's Apple's fault, which is both a curse and a blessing.

No system crashes in the early days? Are you kidding me? I had a Mac Plus running 6.3...or whatever...and I would get freezes all the time back in the day.... Maybe not as many as in windows, but still...

Oh and Mac Plus's had a power supply that required fixing...long after their warranty expired....and that cost poor undergraduates like $100...and it didn't last either....

Then I had a powermac 7600 maybe? Good machine, but still...memory crashes all the freakin' time...requiring a reboot. Maybe I was doing more than most people (physics grad student), but still....

Nowadays on my new powerbook 17" I don't reboot very often at all...though little annoyances like the help menu disappearing and system sounds going away do require a reboot from time to time. Most programs don't crash too often..and if they do..I don't have to reboot the system....

Can't talk about hardware issues (as my machine is only like 3 months old) except that the previously mentioned stats show you are in the minority for problems....

I had a IIci that I bought in 1989 that never had a hardware problem. I bought one of the Mac clones in 1996 (7?) that did have one problem, I can't remember what. My Cube in 2000 had no hardware problems and I sold it when I bought my G5, which also has had no issues. My wife's iMac (Dec. 2004) had it's logic board replaced under warranty, but after the warranty expired, so I don't know how to rate that one. ;)

On the software side though, OS X wins easily. The Cube started with OS 9, but it and later models have all had various versions of OS X. Crashing is so rare that when it does happen, I'm shocked. I leave the system running 24/7 with no crashes. It isn't ever idle either, since I run folding@home http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/ as a screen saver and two instances of D2OL http://www.d2ol.com/ in the background. XGrid also is set to allow a Stanford University project http://cmgm.stanford.edu/~cparnot/xg...ord/index.html to run when it chooses as well. I've got no less than 6 devices that I routinely connect to my system, and while I don't think it's humanly possible for me to use them all at once, I doubt the system would have any problem. This has me feeling that all previous versions (OS 9 & before) are almost as bad as Windows.

Like others have noted, avalon, I think you just stumbled onto a round of bad luck. My experience with Apple hardware and operating systems has improved through the years, but system stability took a quantum leap forward with OS X. I do things on this OS that I would never have dreamed of doing on previous systems, and I've had very little trouble with it or the hardware. I can't even remember when I last had a crash; I've never had to re-install the OS. Troubleshooting is minimal; if I left it on all the time like cwtnospam, I wouldn't really do any. But I use Onyx weekly to run permissions repair and do the periodic maintenance runs and that's about it.

Too bad you've had such a bad run.

It's Avalon again; Ihave an update.
I backed up my HD using T-Boot and another Mac. Then before reformatting I checked out the SMART status of the drive and it reports being fine. So I reinstalled to 10.4.4. Now I knew this next part was risky.
I had been able to get my desktop and mail and evertyhing else just the way I liked. I knew it would be a super pain to reinstall everything fom zero... finding all the right freeware and shareware, finding old serial numbers, etc. So I knowingly risked copying all my old non-OS prefs and stuff to the newly OS'ed Mac. Well almost all. Notably since the Framework prefs on Excel seemed to lead the way last tiime, I reinstalled Excel from scratch. I've recently been taxing Excel a great deal via their drawing capabilities.
Everything was splendid for almost a week. SMART HD always good, only reinstalled Excel once more due to the degraded frameworks file. Then I was loading aLOT of new somgs into iTunes en masse. I was not surprised that it would take awhile to process so I gave it some time. But made the mistake of trying to resize the iTunes window while iTunes was getting the volume of all the somgs. It was during the 305th song...
Spinning Beach Ball o' Death for over an hour with the volume check process frozen on 305. I was able tp reboot from the power button and had a viable system running. However the next time I started iTunes, it brought up the same stuck screen, stuck on 305. Weird.
So for the last two days Iafter taken as many notes on the way I like the Mac as I could, I've re-re-installed the OS and new installs of my old programs, completely from scratch. Except I kept my user data from Netscape.
This time I'm being more ready: I'm saving a copy of all the .dmg files I'm redownloading. So next time it should be easier. My DragThing prefs are still not good enough but in a month or two I'll have it presemting on the desktop in a reasonable fashion.

So don't ever change an iTune window size while iTunes is thinking!

The SMART status only tells you how the drive is physically, not the status of the information on it. I would have at least run Disk Utility before reinstalling.

By the way, just yesterday I was importing songs from a cd while browsing the music store in another window. No problems moving/resizing either, and I'm sure I did both without even thinking about it.

Dual 2 ghz G5 with 1 gig RAM.

So, do they say the same things about buying the last edition of something ? ;) (That's what I have). I think it wasn't for nothing that Apple dropped that highly praised "lamp design" so fast.

cheers, pink

I think the main reason I hung up while resizing was that I was putting in more than 500 songs in batches of 150 or so, but in rapid succession. And then while it was still crunching through all that data, that's when I resized the window and froze.

I would never have guessed that window resizing would have crashed the thing but if it is ever going to be a problem, I would certainly think that processing 500 songs at once would be a contributing factor.

Sure, apps do crash, sometimes annoyingly so. That was certainly the case with OS 9 and before, the difference now being it doesn't bring down the whole OS in the process.

Err, nope. The difference now being it doesn't always bring down the whole OS. The whole OS still falters plenty.

I'm thinking you have a hardware problem.

Same here. We've had seven Macs in our home since OS X came out and, collectively, haven't experienced but about 4 kernal panics. That's not unusual, from what I hear on boards around the net.

Random KPs point to hardware problems indeed:
You might want to run Apples hardware test, check your RAM with memtestosx.org and make sure that your files are ok with applejack.sf.net.

A flaky PSU is another possibility among lots of others, but you definitely have quite a bit covered once you're done with the three suggested above.