Tag Archives: apple

Apples current arrogance and self love and ignorance toward upgradeability, recyclabilty and repair

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I have been using Apple Computers since the Apple II europlus, and do apple tech support for a living, I was evangelist for a long time and helped recruit many johnny come latelys to the party. But to be honest Apple are pretty evil as concerns this stuff nowadays, their marketing is extreme and over the top, and their supposedly unparrallel’d design cant be that great if the design doesn’t include the ability to repair, upgrade or easily recycle the components, like most design today its form second and functional customer orientated design third, and primarily supreme profit margins first, the volume in which their selling and premium for which they charge, they need to listen more to their customers, I certainly no longer wholeheartedly recommend apple to people on limited budgets who want upgradeability , Their sony like walled garden money making cash till mentality is also wearing. The computing arena is supposed to enable people and develop their understanding and save them time, the postpc era is generally becoming a new form of media based entertainment distraction device anyway.

Apple linein and stupidity with audio inputs

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Another reason apple are totally crap in twenty years they have failed to put a mic input on theri fucking computers !!!!

Linein only and no mic input

this has been the case since the plaintalk mic fucking days, can they get over theyre own fucking gigantic fucking super design egos and include a standard fucking mic input someday on their fucking machines ? no I fucking doubt it ! fucking assholes !

example as to why thunderbolt needs to get with the pricing scenario, real soon >

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on The apple store Lacie and apple seem to be living in LA LA land. no doubt making it copper rather than optical cheapened the standard but not enough for example ?

Oh such good value ! this is really going to take off (tongue in cheek) compared to the following offerings ?

£44.00 for 1TB usb ext drive … or ok lets max the 7200rpm drives throughput and use usb 3 ?

or just £65.00 for usb3 which will maximise the drives potential ?

This is simple mathematics, people dont want to pay an extra £235.00 to have negligible extra perfomance compared to a usb3 HD ? apple will no doubt put USB3 on macs real soon, after they’ve sold a load of people into the overpriced culder-sac of this thunderbolt technology and dont reimburse them (myself included), as soon as they realise they cant make thunderbolt cheap enough to make it a standard that gets adopted, thunderbolt either needs subsidising or its not going to take off as a technology !

Or maybe they’ll maintain it as a standard so expensive noone can afford it, that way not having to admit they sold us into a culdersac ?

Oh look just one thunderbolt cable is practically the same price as a 1tb usb2 drive !

really apple and intel need to get a grip you have to subsidise this pricing model fast ! or its dead in the water, except in HD video editing houses, and if its just for them then what are you doing for the consumers need for high speed external storage ?

apple unibody macbook pros not very green and heres why ?

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Apples unibody macboom pros may sing their own environmental praises from the point of view of materials used, but its actually their design that makes them less environmentally friendly than older laptop as their lifespan will be less because of the following design flaws, and that has to be a good measure of a laptops environmental menace.

PROBLEM A : UNITARY PART DESIGN: The totally unitary design apple has created means the unibodys consist mainly of three replaceable parts when it comes to repair, nearly all of which are three quarters the price of the laptop itself when it comes to replacing them and keeping the laptop running :
part 1:
logic board has its expensive processor and graphics and every other port controller surface mounted on mainly in BGA packages, meaning everything thats expensive about the guts of the computer must be replaced as well when the logic board fails in one hit, 2 years from purchase the cost of this component alone will outweigh having it repaired versus buying a new computer, this shortens its lifespan.
part 2:
the screen casing and lcd are glued together, to such an extent that taking the screen apart is actually quite difficult these units will tend to be replaced as one unit in allot of situations, this part is a little bit less expensive than the logic board, again 2 years down the line most will probably consider buying a new laptop before paying for this parts replacement.
Part 3:
Upper case because it is a unibody and milled from a single peice of aluminium is very expensive, but what makes it more expensive is that the keyboard and other parts are glued and screwed into it, making it cost even more $279.00 from what i could see.

PROBLEM B : THE SEALED IN BATTERY : Battery screwed into place not considered a user replaceable part ? even more un-environmentally friendly, apple have placed the battery behind a 10 screw backplate and then secured in place with 2 tri-wing security screws which are about as non standard as you can get, so if you ever … like one of my clients … spill some liquid onto your laptop, then the combination of sealed in battery and liquid will make sure your laptop is utterly fried and becomes uselless, unless Part 1 above is replaced which will cost 3/4 the price of a new laptop ? In the old days a drink spilt on a laptop keyboard could be remedied with fast action by doing these moves as fast as possible :
Remove Power cable
Remove battery
invert laptop

then mopup all visible liquid, place in a towel in a dry cupboard using gravity to draw any liquid that ingressed out, then you would carefully open the laptop clean out any signs of water ingress, if sticky residue is there (coffee) then remove with 90% alchohol or distilled water, then again wait for 24/48 hours for laptop to be thoroughly dry resting in a dry cupboard, re-assemble and turn on, 80% of the time most laptops could be rescued by this method.

Apples unibody laptop seems to be designed to guarantee that liquid ingress will kill your laptop every time, as getting the source of power out of the equation ie the internal sealed in battery, seems impossible in any timescale that is usefull, therefore these unibody macbook pros are designed to die with the slightest of water ingress.

Its the combination of water and electricity in this situation that kills the logic board, not one or the other, and apples design has guaranteed the presence of electricity at all times.

and then when its taken to those “Genius’s” in the apple store, whats the first button these buggers will press after its brought in ? the power button, oh it doesnt seem to be working sir ? really … well now you given another huge jolt from the battery, by turning it on again with remnant water in it youve certainly guaranteed to have killed it cheers “Apple Genius !”.

etc etc you get the idea .

Apple announcement : the truth about quality and cultist behaviour iphone 4g aerial

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We all know the iphone 4 aerial issue is a real design flaw, something that would normally warrant a recall ?

whats the minimum Apple should do ?

Offer all of the 1.7 million iphone 4 users a free bumper or case delivered free of charge, or $20.00 towards a case of their choice on the apple store, that is the absolute minimum, at the moment they charge theyre customers for their bumpers to fix this ? apples users might as well pay to be ravaged, their evangilism for apple appears absurd, to any mature human organism.

$20 x 1.7 million = 34 millions dollars maximum to solve the issue, for apple thats a drop in the ocean, they have a cash war chest to cover rubbish like this in the 20 billion region. And its only steves arrogance that has prevented him from seeing this as the real issue it is, you cannot sensibly ask your customers to hold your phone a certain way for it to work !

Steve man up and do the right thing, youve already caused allot of damage to your market perception with delay and denial. Not that I dont know the dark secrets of many other previous design flaws youve got away with because people are to slow and thick to assert their rights.

like :
• Some models of Intel core2 duo macbook pro cooling systems, sometimes incapable of preventing damage caused by overheating of graphics chips through extended use.
• Some macbooks and macbook pros came with faulty nvidia chips (nvidia/apples fault)
• Lombard laptops with motorola G3 CPU’s unable to run macos x
• Lombard laptops modem sound issue, patched away.
• No cable strain relief on the transparent wired Apple pro mouse, very high failure rate.
• solder issues on power chips on white G3 ibook motherboards
• failure rate of G3/G4 ibooks in general abnormally high, to the extent of some users having them replaced once a year over a three year warranty period.
• Graphics chip failures on some ibook G4’s due to overheating and bad nvidia chips used (industry wide but heck).
• the nipple scrollwheel dying very quickly on the mighty mouse. solution was a wierd cleaning regime.
• 27 inch imac initial release high failure rate and big issues with screens
• Sudden power supply fan noise and death on some mirror door mac towers, and G5 mac pros.
• G5 imac capacitors failing causing fuzzy screen syndrome within a short lifetime.
• G4/G5 mac desktop machines unable to sleep with third party usb cards in.
• some G4 ibook 12″ machines theyre airport slots became faulty, and prevented the machines from booting until the airport card was removed.
• Ethernet port failure on apples generally a bit too high, or not syncing at the right speed (which i see allot of)
• firewire chipset variation from the Texas instruments variety to cheaper 3rd party chipsets causing huge incompatiblity issues between chained firewire devices and general instability of firewire, when it used to be a more rock solid interface then USB. Hence motu 828’s often being bundled with firewire cards that were known to work properly.
• the fact that SCSI and firewire were supposed to be hot swap but very often did not work out that way.
• How older keyboards can sometimes power some USB devices and others/newer ones not ? and the randomness of this as a trend
• Some USB ports providing enough power for devices and others not especially on laptop systems big variation in design here.
• the fact that they glued too many devices together, and went for a policy of making their batteries and components innacessible rather than accessible in newer designs.
• artifically hampered hardware, flashing dvr drives to have lower read and write speed maximums than they are capable of, for quiter use but still thats the users choice ?
• artifically low ram expansion options, compared the chipsets possible spec
• promoting some ports and ignoring others, most noteably esata ? limiting external drive performance in terms of copying with the newer drives.
• inacessibility of hard drives on allot of older laptop models.
• the overuse of BGA chip packages when the industry has proven a high failure rate with chips soldered this way which consume power or get hot (graphics glitching, RROD, YLOD etc)
• Solder reformulation from leaded to lead free solder, leading to a whole series of machines released whose lifespans were artifically low, until this formula was resolved (of course the military had a special dispensation to use leaded solder, they didnt want to lead the field on that one ?)
• USB ports to close together to connect two devices side by side on the new unibody macbooks
• slippy shouldered Apple designed USB connectors on their cables that have no grip for removing them from USB connectors.
• the nightmare of connecting ipods/iphones/ipads generally to several macs due to ruddy DRM rubbish
• the ipod dock connector being a terrible design generally

to be honest i could go on for hours about the faults with apple design, they do an amazing job generally but they suffer from too much pride to ever openly admit their mistakes.

Well I can barely remember them all theyre have been so many things Apple has got away with not recalling, by not anouncing the issues and dealing with those who complain quietly on an individual basis or not making much fanfare or apology, until the disquiet has faded with time enduced apathy, and people gullibly by another machine.

Apple isn’t better quality for its higher price than any other manufacturer, go view a genius bar anywhere in the country for an hour, to see the quantity of returns, and you will realise they are just as badly built design wise and flawed quality wise, its apple gloss and software wizziness the machines are sold on, and lets not even get started on software issues, except perhaps to mention the find function, hasnt worked properly since 10.1.