Another Apple Laptop
[Back-dated from 10/8/03 to 8/17]
Coming down the home stretch with the office cleaning. It now looks great.

Maria and Crystal looked at modular homes.

Maria bought a used Apple iBook at a 'potentially good price'. Picked it up from Nathan R, one of Nate's friends. This one is smaller than her PowerBook, somewhat faster, several years newer, and has a much larger hard drive. Nathan was glad he had the extended warranty, as the iBook has gone back to Apple several times for repair. He decided to finally switch to a PC laptop. We'll see how many more times it needs to be repaired by Apple.

We bought extended warranties with every Apple computer we've purchased in the last 7 or 8 years. Good thing, as we've needed them every time. Don't know why Maria likes Apple products so much. Their quality control is a joke. Prior to the iBook, we've owned two other recent Apple laptops and an iMac. Every one had multiple hardware failures under the extended warranty. Computers for the rest of us? Total bullshit. Our experience with three different recent generations of their hardware? A greater than 100% failure rate.

Apple brags about their ease of use. They don't mention their hardware reliability, because there isn't any. With the price premium Apple charges for their stuff, you'd think it wouldn't suck. You'd be thinking incorrectly. Apple's old 'think different' slogan? Maybe think about how different things would be if their hardware had less than a 100% failure rate. Be very thankful that they don't build cars, airplanes, or space shuttles.

Maria and I had dinner with Tom and Nanette. Sue and George's wife were also there, along with Bryan. 

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[back-dated from 10/5/03]
Apple OS X - solid as a rock. Just checked the uptime on my Powerbook (which runs Apple's OS X operating system).  It's been 9 days and 19 hours since my last reboot.  Actually, the only times I have rebooted were because I installed some software that wanted a reboot to take place. 

So, here are the stats for the month that I've owed the Powerbook:

• System crashes     - 0
• System hangs        - 1
• Application hangs   - 2
• Pop Ads                  - 0

I leave the laptop running most of the time so it has had plenty of chances to crash or encounter incompatibilities.  Right now I have 9 applications running (most of them are not full bore applications, so let's say that I only have about 4 running most of the time).

When I am not using the laptop I simply close the lid, which puts it to sleep and uses virtually no battery power.  When I open the lid it wakes up within 3 - 5 seconds and is immediately ready to surf the Internet or do whatever work I need to do.

My desktop XP machine has hung or crashed a couple of times in the past week.  And my wife's XP latptop doesn't hang or crash much, except if she tries to use it after putting it to sleep.  Then it's about a 50-50 proposition.  So, naturally, she doesn't rely on it to go to sleep and just shuts it down when she isn't going to use it for a couple of hours.

[Ernie the Attorney] 

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