Advocacy¶
680 words
John Gruber is spot-on with his latest report on the world of plumbing. There's not much to add to this. It even sparked what could be mistaken for a discussion at 2lmc.
While John's text looks more at the reasons for purchases and the 'professionals' involved in them, the discussion takes up Johns initial remark that people pick a friend or family member who is “into computers”, and ask that person what they should buy
– elaborating into experiences with personal computer recommendations from there.
I used to be and am still considered a Mac advocate. No doubt about that. I am more or less directly responsible for the sale of at least a dozen Mac systems. I got nothing for this. Except, perhaps a decrease in product quality and bad service.
Given the small samples that I took – the samples that matter for me, that is – we never had any problem with the first generation of Macs I, my family or my friends owned. In fact, my trusty LC III is still working fine when asked to do so as is its original 14" display. I can't say the same about anything we bought since – our family had two AppleVision 1710 displays that caused a lot of trouble. Mine is broken by now – despite being replaced twice before. My brother's isn't quite broken yet but looks like it's very short of breaking.
Our Powerbooks have a tendency to lose those little plastic feet and mine had to be sent in for repairs. In short, for the five Apple machines worth more than €100 I owned, there had to be three repairs. I find it hard to tell anybody about high quality standards or superior engineering. I am sure, buying IBM hardware will get you at least the same degree of dura- and reliability. They won't run MacOS, though.
Those needs for repair, made me meet another weak spot at Apple: Customer service – or the poor excuse for it that they run in Europe. On good days, Apple seem to be clueless – on normal days they're a bunch of incompetent liars, though. This means, that should your hardware go bad, even while under warranty or AppleCare, you can be in serious trouble.
[In my case serious trouble meant not having my Powerbook for two weeks for the initial repair. The problem neither recognised nor fixed in the repair. But the main board exchanged – apparently the standard procedure in case they don't know what they're doing. The computer shipped back with a wrong hard drive, smaller and containing ancient software. It taking many weeks and even more calls with constant changes of my hard drive's state from 'broken' to 'lost' to found to 'being shipped back today' (laughs bitterly) before they finally sent me a replacement drive.]The question is whether I can recommend this to people. And I can't. I am happy to let friends try out my Mac and to give them a tour, but I won't tell them to get that machine. That's a decision they have to figure out themselves. If I talked people into getting their first Mac – which invariably meant they'll spend more money than they intended to so far – I would feel responsible if something went wrong later on and Apple fucked things up. I don't want that.
I know that for most purposes a Mac will be the better system: for your sanity, for your efficiency and possibly even for your purse on a long time scale. These things are all non-obvious, though, and I think it's Apple's job to communicate them rather than mine.
If people ask my opinion on buying a new computer, I'll happily give them some information about – and more importantly the possibility of a hands-on experience with – the Mac and tell them it works better for me. But that's it. It's their own decision.
I'll also happily sneer at them when they did The Wrong Thing™ and suffer problems afterwards. Those are not my problems then.
