Missing in (dissatisf)action

I’ve managed to make a bit of progress on my “make the wiki portion of this site stop sucking” endeavor — you can see the shiny new consistency in articles such as this. And this! And this! Look at those charmingly consistent headers, the mercifully cleaner formatting… even a helpful breadcrumb. Aw. So nice. Too bad my computer died shortly into the process.

So hey, I need you guys to do me a favor. If I ever express a desire to purchase a piece of first-generation Apple hardware, please come to my office and kick me really hard in the shins while screaming “Are you utterly incapable of learning, you complete moron?” Apple is pretty much indistinct from Microsoft these days, and when I realize how similar they are at times (not to mention the fact that I use my Xbox 360 a lot more than any other console at the moment) I feel the chilly hand of Death upon my soul. The most important similarity is that you should never, ever buy a first-generation product from either company, because you are being used as a paying beta tester, which is not really a good idea when you’re dealing with machines that cost thousands of dollars and upon which your livelihood depends.

Also, both companies want to consume your soul, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s have a look at my history of terrible Apple early adopter decisions:

  • 1996: Bought a PowerBook 5300c, the first portable computer to feature a PowerPC chip. (It also featured a new style of lithium ion battery which became famous for bursting into flames at inopportune times.) It was a terrible, terrible system that ran Apple’s terrible System 7.5 terribly.
  • 1997: Bought a QuickTake camera. Digital photography was a great idea, but paying $600 (in strong ’90s American dollars, which is, what? $1200 of America’s currently flabby dollars?) for 640×480 max resolution was a sure indication I had gotten a little too far ahead of the curve.
  • 2000: Bought a G4 Cube, which…. no, wait. Actually, I loved this system. Best desktop computer ever.
  • 2006: Bought a MacBook Pro the second they became available, well aware of the fact that the first Mac to make the change over to Intel processors was destined to be riddled with problems. I was correct.
  • 2007: Didn’t buy an iPhone, thanks to my loyal crewmen who tied me to the mast so I could hear its song but not plunge headlong to my death.

So there’s hope. I just might be learning. I only wish the lessons didn’t knock me out of action for two days at a time whenever my laptop feels compelled to jeer, “That’s what you get for ignoring your common sense, genius.”

15 thoughts on “Missing in (dissatisf)action”

  1. Woo-hoo for my gen 2 MacBook. Man, it must suck having a 32-bit processor. Mine has, like, two times the bits, dude. I think I’ll go use more than 4 gigs of RAM in one application just to celebrate.

  3. the high school i went to had a huge technology grant about a year after I graduated that made them able to purchase MacBooks for every student. You had to pay an $80 fee, and it was initially stated that if you broke it, then you’d have to pay some deductible for the repair.

    this plan is fine, until you find out that the failure rate (of one thing or another) in a

  4. I fell for the iPhone. I thought about it, and there aren’t really any big hardware features that I think are bad. EDGE is kinda sucky but I don’t mind as my prior mobile internet didn’t even exist. The rest is all software, which can and will be updated. Any bugs in software will be patched. I’m a little worried still though… we’ll see.

  6. I got an iPhone, and I’m loving it. Like mighty Odysseus, you should have broken free of your bindings and gotten one. Also, my internet is down, leaving the iPhone as my only source.

  10. So Nintendo wants to be Apple, Apple wants to be Microsoft, and Microsoft wants to be Sony. But who or what does Sony want to be??

  11. “So Nintendo wants to be Apple, Apple wants to be Microsoft, and Microsoft wants to be Sony. But who or what does Sony want to be??”

    Nintendo a decade ago?

  14. True dat, yo. True dat.

    I occasionally revisit their pathetic 2006 E3 show on YouTube. I get the giggles occasionally.

  15. We have a 1st gen MacBook (not Pro) and we’ve had all sorts of power source problems. I think the display and the hard drive are about the only components that haven’t been replaced. We didn’t buy the three-year warranty though, so hopefully nothing else drops out. The cost of the last repairs was more than the cost of the computer, I think. (Good thing it was covered.)

    I’m convinced that companies have now adopted the “Beta-as-release” philosophy. Gmail, iPods, Windows, take your pick, everything gets released now as more of a mostly-working prototype to snag the early-adopters and fund the revisions for the “actual” v2.0, which everyone buys, including the saps who got suckered into buying v1.0. Unfortunately, it seems to be a pretty solid business model.

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