Have you noticed that Apple no longer features “real” people in its ads?
Might that be because PCs have (gasp) become easier to use than Macs?
Today, Comcast switched my cable modem to a combination telephone/high speed internet model. This will save me around $30/month compared to the same service with Verizon. Plus, it includes two premium channels, which I’ve not had in the five years I’ve been a Comcast customer.
I have a wireless network with an Airport router. Before he left, the tech confirmed that I had both phone and internet service, and he was correct.
He told me that I’d need to restart all my computers for the network to reset.
Well, it didn’t work.
I went through the Airport manual line by line – some of it is inaccurate, by the way. I tried every setting, password and configuration. The Airport still couldn’t connect to the internet, no matter what. Worse, I got no meaningful error messages to provide a clue as to what was up.
So, I tried a hard-wired connection with my iBook. That didn’t work either, in spite of plowing through yet more instructions that made no sense, like asking me to input a DHCP address.
On the other hand, when I connected both my ancient Precision desktop and my near-ancient Inspiron 5160 to the cable modem box, they made the connection instantly and flawlessly. I didn’t have to change a single setting.
I interviewed at Apple a long time ago, during the John Sculley era, and found them to be an arrogant and self-righteous bunch. I’ve tried to overcome that initial impression of their company through the years, particularly since my son is a Mac user and works for an Apple-centric company, and he’s introduced me to a number of very bright, pleasant colleagues of his along the way.
Still, I must admit that whenever I attempt something that would be simple to do in Windows, I end up making a munge of it with the Mac. I’ve managed to delete whole email directories, for example, something that would be hard to do in Windows unless you’re extremely unlucky, and darned near impossible to do from the normal user interface.
The UI on the Mac is _not_ user-friendly, and more than once, I’ve seen people who are power users give up on all those pretty screens and punt to a Unix window in order to get something done.
Personally, I’m surprised anyone can use a Mac for anything other than word processing and email.
My director at the office was right: good thing they gave me a PC, otherwise I’d probably be in an insane asylum by now.