Diary of a Wolfeman

To all you Apple fanboys out there: shut it already, would you?

Here’s a little wake-up call for you. 90% of the world won’t touch an Apple computer because they can’t run their business on it. Yes, there are certain things that Apple has made sure “just work”, like cameras and music players. On the flipside of that, there are many things that just will not work, no matter what you do to them – and if you finally manage to get it working somehow, Apple will release an update that breaks it and kindly tell you to bugger off.

Take VPNs for instance. Mac OSX used to work with a SonicWALL SSL-VPN NetExtender. Snow Leopard broke it. There’s a work-around that’ll work if you’re lucky, but it requires changing permissions on a core service through the command line – something your average sales lizard should never go anywhere near.

The biggest problem that I have with Apple products is that everything works exactly like Steve Jobs wants it to – and I don’t particularly care for having Steve tell me how to run my computer.

I first started out in computers to figure out how to make them do things the way I wanted them to. Sure I was just poking around in BASIC (yuk yuk) but I was programming.

Later, when I managed to get a PC running Windows 98, I couldn’t stand the look of the GUI – so I learned how to bash it into something I liked. Wallpaper. Startup screens. Shell replacement. Then I got into Linux and got really nuts.

All this time, however, Steve has been forcing his opinions of how computers should work down his client’s throats. Yes, they’re pretty. They have an excellent eye for design down in Cupertino. But the bloody thing has no way to centrally-manage security and it will barely talk to a Windows network at all, and it’s even worse trying to make a Windows machine integrate with a Mac server.

We had a client once that decided they wanted to be a Mac house. We advised them against it, but they went ahead anyway and brought in a Mac “expert” to make all their Macbooks and PowerMacs talk to their Windows domain. What was his solution? He uninstalled Active Directory from the server, which broke the security on all the file shares and suddenly the owner couldn’t use his accounting data.

The thing I really can’t get, however, is how Steve managed to convince all of you to pay twice what a machine is worth in order to have a shiny widget with crippled software and limited choices.

So yeah – Apple tablet. Woooo. A niche product for a niche that doesn’t exist.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.