Friday, October 20, 2006

Some people are cat people and others are dog people. Naked Jen is a dog person.  

Milverton Wallace: How the Web is socialising journalism. 

PodcastConUK in London, November 18. 

Dan Conover has a wonderful block diagram that explains how the Internets work. 

Harry McCracken, a reporter at PC World, has a long story of MacBooks that randomly shut down. Apparently it wasn't just the earliest ones that suffer from the flaw.  

Apple and its customers 

A brief report on my MacBook. Two days after it returned from repair, it hasn't shut down randomly, not even once. It is still running hot. And it could be my imagination, but it seems to be using the battery less efficiently. I will be able to measure this by trying to watch a 1.5 hour movie straight through. It used to be able to do this.

Now I have some thoughts on the apparently escalating problem with randomly shutting down MacBooks. It appears the problem worsens over time. I bought my MacBook in the first week it was out, and I was one of the first to experience the problem. So it doesn't seem that Apple is out of the woods yet, only they know how many Macs suffer from the problem, and apaprently it isn't just the first ones sold that do, based on McCracken's report. And it raises bigger questions about the relationship between Apple and its customers.

First, does the company have pride in its product? And second, does it think its customers are smart for choosing it? If both are true, it's up to the company to make the second statement true. A computer that doesn't work, no matter how much better the software is, or the basic design, is not a smart choice.

So by not taking care of it quickly, as if the customers matter, Apple makes the customers stupid for having chosen the product. Sooner or later the smart people have to go elsewhere, even if they would prefer to use a Mac.

In the almost two months that my MacBook didn't work, I was forced to use a Windows XP laptop. Now I'm trying to integrate the MacBook back in my life, but it's just as difficult now as it was when I first made the transition from Windows to the Mac. One of these days (I hope) one of the PC manufacturers will figure out how to make a machine that's as nice to use as a Mac and as reliable as PCs are. Then Apple will have to take these issues seriously.

Of course I would think better of the company if it took the issues seriously before they had to.

And one thing I'd really like to see -- no more commecials about how Macs are more reliable than PCs. That adds insult to injury, and it shows how totally out of touch the company is with its own product.