I wonder how long can Apple get away with ads like this one, with their “Just Works” slogan.
I’m a Mac fan, but they don’t “Just Work”. The hardware is beautifully engineered, with some lovely touches (that magnetic power cable has saved my laptop from being kicked across the room several times, and Macs are so quiet). Yes, the software looks nice. But it is pretty much as buggy as any other complicated piece of software. Sure, it works better than Windows Vista, but that’s like saying that compared to Zimbabwe or post world war 1 Germany, the economy is in pretty good shape right now.
Off the top of my head, here are just some examples of my Macs not “Just Working” that I’ve run into recently:
- MobileMe. If this just works, where’s my email? Mr Jobs, your pants are on fire.
- Apple wireless keyboard? Looks great. Works great. Apart the constant messages about ‘connection lost’ shortly before it stops working and in order to fix it you have to fetch a USB keyboard or screen share from somewhere else.
- Got a mighty mouse with one of those nifty scroll balls? It doesn’t work, does it? If it does, you just bought it – wait a while.
- Is your iTunes library on a network drive over wifi? If so, pull up a seat and admire the spinning beachball. You can also synch your ipod shuffle or iphone if you have a half hour to spare and you don’t need to catch a train.
- Time Machine and Time Capsule? Great interface. It’ll be nice when it works.
- Airtunes? That’ll be nice when it works, too.
- I can share my airport with another computer wired into ethernet? Cool. When will it work though?
- iPhone remote? If randomly flipping between airtunes speaker settings counts as “Just Works”, then yes.
- Bought a second Mac? Did you know you can transfer all your settings and software from your old Mac? That works great. Unless of course you weren’t actually planning to throw away your old Mac.
- Apple TV over wifi? That’s nice when it works. It’d be nicer if it worked all the time.
- Filevault? Doesn’t work. Breaks time machine.
- I have a USB Canon Scanner. On a Mac, it doesn’t “Just Work”. It doesn’t even work with a bit of effort. It won’t work at all. It worked with Windows, though.
As for the claims about Macs not suffering from viruses and security issues etc, that won’t last long.
There is no particular technical reason why a virus would not affect a Mac, once somebody cares enough to create one. For example the browser is as riddled with security holes as any browser, and those holes are generally easier to exploit than a comparable hole on Windows.
It reminds me of Netscape and Oracle years ago and their claims to have “bullet proof” security. No, they didn’t. And nor does your Mac.
Dude… When you are headed into the backwoods, off of the main road, you need to make sure you understand how the equipment works, that you got the right tools for the terrain that you are headed to, and that it is properly maintained.
Every item in your list is pretty far off of the well beaten path…
You do know what the blue lines, red lines, dotted red lines, and dashed gray lines on the map mean don’t you?
I’ve used both Ubuntu and OS X heavily and in my experience Ubuntu is way ahead in terms of “just works” capability.
For instance, Ubuntu supports reading and writing to and from NTFS out of the box, whereas OS X is read-only (although I believe there is a third-party solution available). I’ve also not been able to get my Vodafone mobile broadband USB stick to work on Snow Leopard, but it works straight away in Ubuntu from Intrepid onwards (even before then the hardware was detected, it’s just that Network Manager couldn’t be used to configure it, and I had to use Vodafone’s own software to set it up).
I’ve also never had a mouse that didn’t work immediately in Ubuntu, including my wireless trackball.
I had problems with Vodafone mobile on snow leopard at first, however they (voda) have released new software since which seems to fix it. I think it still doesn’t support all of the modems but worth a try, it may fix your issue.
As far as Ubuntu vs OSX (vs Windows) it seems to me that none of them really have the ‘just works’ feature. I like Ubuntu but any time I try it there is always something that is either a showstopper or too much like a mini-project to get working for my liking – Macs are the best compromise out of the bunch for me at the moment, as they mostly have good ease of use together with UNIX under the hood like Ubuntu. But that probably has more to do with the fact I use other apple products too (iphone, atv etc).
Anyway in some ways it feels like we are going backwards in terms of reliability as the feature sets of all OSes get more complex.