[Biallystock]

Decondo,

Apple tarnished its own reputation. It was the Apple models that were crap and way over priced. The clones constantly trumped it with multi-processor support, faster processors and an on-line shop that was so good that Apple took it over and used it itself.

Apple did not support the clones, they did that themselves until Apple bought out Power Computing which it then had to support as the new proprietor.

Be Inc. developed absolutely brilliant software. We still have some of it now ported to OSX. I remember demonstrations of spinning cubes with movies rendered on the faces, leaving both Windows and the Mac OS absolutely in the dust. Unfortunately creating an entirely new OS on a shoestring proved to great a task for even Jean Luc Gassee.

OS 7.5 was a disaster and was symptomatic of just how bad Apple had become. OS8.6 was golden, very consistent and rarely bombed. I had it on an older iMac up until recently and was astonished how fast PhotoShop ran on it and pleasant it was. OS9 was to make the raw unfinished OSX look good, something it didn't quite succeed at.

OSX only really got there with Tiger. Leopard has been a few steps forward and several back. Simple apps like Preview constantly bomb when converting postscript files and I managed to get a kernel panic when doing something as simple as sending it to sleep. It also screwed the FireWire on my iMac G5. I am still waiting for a stack of fixes as are a long list of users on these forums www.macworld.com/article/133956/2008/06/hate_leopard.html.

The suggestion that you make your own Hackintosh at your own risk is a little fatuous as is the advice to lobby Apple.

There is a strong accusation of sacrilege here if Apple is criticised for even obvious short comings. I thought we had outgrown that now that Apple's future is secure.

Again I encourage Mac users to consider their own interests before Apple's, Apple does! You are nothing but customers to Apple, and not even that if you are not currently queuing up right now with cash in hand.

Apple will be richer for having a less submissive user base.

[IVIIVIi4ck3y27]

Biallystock said:

Well you've got your choice, it would be too much to expect we should get ours. Apple has shown how that is impossible having produced how many iMac models with matte screens and for some odd unfathomable reason all their Pro Displays are matte. I guess they just haven't a clue!

Firstly, did I say you shouldn't get a choice? No?!? Then hrm... why crucify me because they built a machine that fits my preferences and elected not to build one to suit yours? Honestly, I'd hope they'd build one to suit the matte screen whiners just so they can all personally shut the heck up and we can all get over and past it. Then again, they'll probably all find something else to bitch about. It's a never ending rant and rave for those that aren't realists. These types make Fanboys look respectable. At least a Fanboy loves what they're given (if not maybe a bit too much), whereas the whiner types wouldn't be happy if they were given a Mac for free. If ya'll are that tripped up by it, why not go find something else? Y'know... something superior that suits your needs? Apple isn't the only computer company in the world, there's PLENTY of others...

Oh wait, but none of them are Macs... ::gasping::

It's this same mentality that you wish to heap on fanboys (your next thread) yet you jump to conclusions yourself. I'm one that can and will criticize Apple when and where it's warranted, yet even when I criticize I do respect the majority of Apple's decisions because they typically make some semblance of sense once you can get your biased eyes past the blinders and take in the bigger picture. Yet, I'm also one that realizes that people are human and humans are prone to make errors in decision-making and not want to nail everyone to the cross, sooner or later things will get fixed suitably.

My Leopard experience is far superior to Tiger, Tiger had many more beachballs for me, the Finder wasn't as responsive, QuickLook is a huge improvement, I much prefer Leopard's version of Mail, and to me the SINGLE largest upgrade is that my system is snappy and usable ALL of the time. I also have no problems using my wireless network on my iMac, I have no problems AT ALL with Preview opening postscript files, and everything works exactly as it should. I had more problems with Tiger in fact, and I thought it was a pretty solid build. I would hope that they could improve your experience but some things may be outside of their control... i.e. where you place your computer vs. the router. Apple can't design to suit your home, at least not without being inside it to see what other hardware and obstructions lie between a clear signal. I've got a giant I-Beam that runs through the ceiling of my lower floor (so no pillars, it's quite nice but there are some tradeoffs) but that beam raises havoc on my FM radio signals... but you don't see me getting on Kenwood's site and bitching about my FM reception on my tuner. LoL

In as far as the clones being superior (in your other thread)... are you serious? When I was at Ohio State and they had numerous Power Computing clones shipped in... over half of one whole shipment was DOA, which amounted to some 12-13 machines that would not even power on. At Columbia College Chicago, where I attended afterwards... half of their machines we had in one lab required CD-ROM Toolkit to having working CD drives (which if you'll recall, had certain issues with booting an Apple OS CD-ROM at times; this was required because Power Computing opted for a different brand of CD-ROM drive than the one's Apple used), and a good majority of them were far more fickle than ANY of the Apple Macs we had in the labs. Tons of system bombs, error 11's, etc. I purposely went out of my way to avoid them with a passion after awhile because I'd learned how junky the dang things were. I personally would've rather ran a PC than them hunks of garbage. UMAX's weren't as bad, although they were a bit quirky (some machines had issues accepting some PCI cards... cases weren't designed large enough) but they were about as stable as an Apple Mac, then again considering UMAX was built from the ashes of the former Radius PowerMac group... it stands to reason, as much of the original Radius machines stuck closely to the Apple system spec, even sharing Apple motherboards for quite awhile. We won't even get into the StarMax's as the only machine that seemed halfway decent never got released (their CHRP machine) and that was because Apple put MacOS for PPCP in park and killed off the clones.

In as far as BeOS... it was FINE when it had a small amount of hardware to sell to (i.e. first the BeBoxen which didn't sell... and later Macs which it was forced from). Yet therein, when Apple blocked cloning for PPC and basically pushed Be to Intel/AMD, Be attempted to do exactly what our dear friend Decondo thinks Apple should do... i.e. help Psystar out, let 'em exist, support their (and everyone building Hackintosh's out of spare parts) needs. Funny, if it wasn't for those producing the "hacks" to make Hackintosh's work... Psystar wouldn't exist at all. How can they support hardware when they rely on some enterprising hackers to make their whole system/business plan possible? How can they support their sales when they don't even have a license? This is the equivalent of a mom and pop shop with off the shelf parts slapping PC's together in their basement. Yeah... worked for Michael Dell when he started up Dell, but in the end... he had a legitimate PC license from Microsoft and did things by the book, he followed the EULA's, he built a legitimate company. Psystar has NOTHING and all they're doing is the same thing any Tom, Dick, or Harry could do if they really wanted to and were shady and ignorant enough.

Did you notice how long Be lived on Intel/AMD? They couldn't support the drivers for all of the commodity hardware out there on PC which crippled their usability (the same thing Apple would have to support in order to make widescale Hackintosh-style clones a reality, it's worse than the old Apple clones for that reason alone), they were too small and not built to develop drivers for all of the hardware types that existed. Toss in the chasing to improve the OS, it proved too much, and they were on the verge of disappearing. They were on a tight budget with a tiny development team and little resources, Apple's bigger... but still far too small so if they went that route, it'd be the clone wars all over and Apple would lose (surely) simply because it's not their forte, not within their size/scope and reach. Heck, even look at how far Haiku (open-source BeOS) has come since it came to fruition and you're still seeing an OS that is not only not up to par with the old BeOS 5, but one that's behind various Linux distros. Yeah... not every open source platform jumpstarts to the top of the charts and goes bananas... Haiku is so unknown as an OS project that it just kinda' plods along in slow motion, and you have almost as much chance of seeing an Amiga revival as you do seeing Haiku mainstream.

You see, that's why I will occasionally give Microsoft props... because for all of the hardware a Vista or XP has to run on, Microsoft has gotten quite savvy at making their OS work with more and more hardware. Long ago their drivers tended to be crappy, certain hardware wouldn't work at all without the companies stepping up, but as time has gone on... even that has proven less of an issue. They often, at times, write better drivers and software than the hardware manufacturers do anymore. When I installed the Belkin wireless card in my cousin's HP laptop, Windows detected it and enabled the network. The default Belkin software locks up and causes a 2 minute stall on load that was defeated simply by using Microsoft's own software.

Even Apple COULD NOT pull this off, their dev team is nowhere near the size of Microsoft. While MS'es team is a huge colossus that makes a ton of mistakes, doesn't leverage more mature open-source technologies as they should, and tends to stick to "eating their own dog food" in computer tech parlance... in the end, their driver support eclipses almost every OS platform out there. The only one bringing the battle to their doorstep nearly as well is Linux, and that's not so much that it supports the parts from the driver database it has installed or that it works with vendors to get the drivers to market before the hardware ships (ala Microsoft)... that's more a case of Linux adapting to their surroundings quickly and getting drivers out there with support (of some scale) quickly. Even there, not all features are supported as soon as the hardware is available, many pieces of hardware can be picky with the particular methods Linux developers get hardware active quickly (i.e. HP uses some odd mish-mashes of technology that makes driver writing to the standard Linux systems a bit hairy at times) and unlike a PC product where the support is there on a CD-ROM with the hardware the day you get it... many pieces of hardware take days or even weeks before you have a fully operational driver. When Canon or HP releases a new All in One, you're better off to wait a month before buying one (and to look online for someone getting a piece to work) than to jump on it if you're a Linux fan... because point blank, you're generally going to have to wait to use it. Considering Apple has leveraged CUPS (from Linux) to support more drivers than it could on it's own, and the fact many pieces of hardware are still not compatible out of the box... you can see one of the major tasks Apple would face if they just allowed Psystar to push stuff out. Right now it's been in Psystar's hands to find hardware that they can make work, but... given an allowance, there'd definitely be more of a demand for Apple to make more widescale hardware work. Plus... if Apple granted Psystar, you'd see 20 more companies spawn Mac clones over night... straight on up to Dell (even Michael Dell has said at one point he'd welcome a Dell Macintosh).

Want a perfect example? Apple released Leopard with printer drivers for my parent's PSC 1210 in box. The drivers work superb, better than any prior version of HP's drivers for the printer. What problem did I run into though? The Leopard update truncated support for some deprecated API's and the ancient installation software that HP used for the scanner driver installer WILL NOT install the driver. Irony is, if you install the software in Tiger, then upgrade to Leopard... the scanner will work. HP WILL NOT take the time to repackage the old scanner driver and software as a separate download, the open-source drivers for SANE don't work with it, and eventually I had to go out and buy a copy of VueScan to get it back working. It was either that or format/reinstall Tiger and then upgrade to Leopard. If HP had just gone through and created a new installer with the software using OS X's installer vs. the old school Carbon-based installer, I'd not have any problems at all. Is that Apple's fault? No... deprecated API's and cruft need to go, much for the same reason that Microsoft is still saddled with WIN32 calls that leverage WIN16-based API's in some applications out there. An old saying goes... "If you don't finally kick some people out, they won't ever leave." Nowhere is this truer than in the programming realm. Unfortunately, HP doesn't see fit to update the installer for their drivers (doesn't even need a driver update, just an installer update) so I've saw fit to jump ship to Canon, Brother, and Okidata more and more from hereon out.

Apple's might not have been the fastest of the bunch, the first to embrace PPCP of the bunch, but they were the most solid of the bunch day in and day out and reliability is worth more to me than a scant 5 seconds of operation before the things locked up. I still have a beige 9600 lying around that's still in working order. I've had humerous 7x00 and 8x00 machines over the years. It was never the hardware that was the problem IMHO, and while Apple might not have gotten the latest parts out there ahead of the clones... they also didn't shove near as much absolute garbage out the door either. My experiences with regards to clones are far less rosy than you paint. Then again, I've actually had real dealings with them in large #'s and have always felt that if cloning was the future... I was more than likely going to have to move to Windows, 'cause comparing a Power Computing to a Dell was like comparing a rusted Yugo with a burned cylinder to a Ferrari by comparison. Yeah, truly that sad...

In as far as the Apple store... ummm... the store is built with WebObjects which is a NeXT technology. I don't buy that Apple bought Power Computing's store... they bought Power Computing as one of the last options to rid themselves of the clones as it was cheaper to go that route than to go through some form of heated lawsuit (Power Computing's heads were rather pissed) considering that by Apple parking the clones, they completely prevented Power Computing a reason for existence. They weren't the only ones pissed either, my ex-gf's mom worked at Motorola and after the Starmax project was put in park... Motorola, at their Schaumburg offices, even went as far as to get rid of EVERY Mac they had, giving half of the stuff away and replacing them all with PC's. Yeah, it was that much of an emotional knee-jerk they were that irate over Apple's decision. So in the end, Apple's store technology is no different than what Dell, at one point, was using for theirs... leveraging WebObjects. If Power Computing used WebObjects... so what, so did numerous other companies for quite awhile. Did you not think that if Apple put up a web store that they weren't going to use WebObjects? What did you think they were going to use... something driven by ASP on a Windows box? C'mon...

Biallystock said:

Again it is hard to argue against people who just see shiny and go "Ooooo, shiny!".

Much as it is to try to reason with people who immediately want to hold it against Apple that they should do everything to help make inferior hardware run as good as what it is that they're trying to put out, do all of the R&D and driver support, and give it away to cloners for a song? At least in the old days a clone had to have this thing called "A LICENSE" which is something that Psystar NEVER obtained. So I assume that you're going to now say that Psystar is using superior components to Apple's when even MacWorld's labs of both the Frankenmac as well as their personal test of the Psystar, despite performance numbers, show that it's a much inferior machine to Apple's? Yeah... MacWorld's wrong and you're right, I forgot about that part...

Even there, it was widely acknowledged that for what each of the clone companies paid Apple, the amount of $ Apple was spending in making a default "box stock" OS disc work in their machines, while their machines continued to eat into Apple's own marketshare rather than open up new markets... was larger than the $ they got in return from Power Computing, Motorola, Daystar, Mactell, Umax, et al. combined. In other words... Apple did ALL of the software writing for ALL of the clones to make them ALL compatible and took a loss for every machine sold that wasn't theirs, on top of the fact that many clone buyers were not new people to the Mac from different folds but were people that Apple normally had sold machines to.

Biallystock said:

I have an Airport Extreme which worked flawlessly with the 3 white iMacs. The alum iMac 2.8Ghz has always only got part of the signal or dropped it completely, I suspect the aluminium may be partly shielding the antennae. Curiously I have no trouble picking up my neighbors' wireless networks, but then I am not trying to log on or stay logged on to those.

Funny, I've got the same exact enclosure as yours... and can connect to numerous networks with no problem. Granted, I don't own my own Airport Extreme, but I bought a Linksys WRT310N and have had no problems with it. I can't speak for what your particular problem is, but my Linksys has no more external antennas than your Apple Airport and it works fine. I purposely went against getting the Airport and opted for the Linksys simply because after numerous reviews I'd read of the various wireless routers, the Linksys was rated higher because it had better range (significantly so over a particular Netgear model). The Airport was said to be a very solid router, but that it didn't have the range of some of the other options. Maybe you should consider where the machine and router is placed, what types of other devices you have in your house that could be impacting your network, whether or not your machines can run on the 5.4 Ghz. spectrum, etc. or even consider buying an external antenna (see Hawking Technologies) for your Airport and see if it makes a difference. Not every network card or tech is going to work in the same way with every component... and while your white machines might've worked well with it, times change, hardware changes, and even simple stuff like where a unit is placed can make a huge difference.

Oh and in as far as OS 7.5... I never had a huge problem with it considering what it really was (a transitional version of Classic Mac OS that sat between 7 and a fully native PowerPC release). Considering that it even worked at all was one of the greater miracles in modern OS tech and a huge triumph considering the whole transition from 68k to PowerPC and how quickly it transpired (and how much in shambles Apple had become under Sculley and Spindler) The best 2 OS'es for me were 7.6 (not 7.6.1 which some preferred) and OS 8.6.1. I will give you that 8.6 was a pretty solid OS... but I am not foolish to believe that 9/9.1 were designed to make OS X 10.0 look good. Despite 10.0's speed being pretty darn slow and there not being a ton of apps. written specifically for it out of the gate, it was still an improvement over even 8.6 at that time. Maybe not in speed, but I still had lockups running 8.6 and any crash took down the Finder with it, just as any version of Classic Mac OS did. All of that finagling with shared memory allocations... I don't miss it, not in the least. Leopard makes OS 8.6 look like an absolute relic in EVERY way, and is far more stable for me than ANY Classic Mac OS was. Then again, I've not had a kernal panic in all of the years I've owned new age Mac with OS X. I've seen more Error Bombs and Sad Macs in my time, running Classic Mac OS, than I even care to relive/admit.

To each their own though...

[bigpics]

bynkii said:

> Apple is a hardware company that produces software to support its hardware. If it does not protect its software then it will not sell the hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a software company and is quite happy for Apple's machine to run a copy of its Windows OS, Windows Office, and whatever else they make. Dell, however, is probably less happy about Apple's growth.I doubt Dell really cares. Dell's problems are of its own design, and foot-shooting. Apple doing well is FAR less of a concern to them than HP doing well.

I would disagree. Apple's new #3 standing in US computer sales may only be a quarter of Dell's, and not likely to surpass it (or HP) anytime soon, but that's not the whole story by a long shot.

The sales rankings are based on units shipped.

Of much more significance to Dell and HP is Apple's share of computers priced over $1000 -- which has zoomed to around 60% -- as these are the machines with healthy profit margins. The Wintel makers are caught in a savage, protracted price war at the low end of the market and Apple makes more on one $1600 notebook than they make on 3 or 4 $500 notebooks, for example, and have to include post-sale support on each of these low-margin, poorly made econoboxes (with all the problems of Windows), further chipping away at profits -- while Apple's eating their lunch on the machines that would actually make them fat and happy.

Make no mistake. Apple has lots of companies looking over their shoulders right now: MS, falling further and further behind in OS functionality and the need for Office fading (and who may counter with what, a zPhone? Yeah that'll work). The Wintel makers. RIM (crackberries). Nokia. Music publishers. Blockbuster/Netflix and other media sellers. Even Google, with the AppStore and MobileMe dealing a blow to Android before the first call is dialed. Adobe (with SproutCore vs. Flash, and competing in parts of the imaging and video markets). And coming up on the horizon maybe (I would say likely) becoming a mobile gaming power (a Wii in your pocket), and some actual inroads into the business market.

Integration, functionality, ease of use, world class design, more free media than anybody, focus, and SJ's amazing marketing touch are a potent brew.

[jroller]

Can't believe this didn't happen right after they emerged. Apple must have been researching its case before going forward to protect itself from losing and opening up a bevy of clone makers.

[Biallystock]

Too long to rebut everything. Not that I disagree with everything you said.

I've moved my aluminium iMac to within spitting distance of the Airport Extreme and into exactly the same positions as the white iMacs. After 3 days of support from AppleCare it won't connect at all and I am facing an entire wipe and reinstall. It also seemed to interfere with the connections of the other Macs.

The issue with Preview in Leopard is reproducable on several of my Macs running Leopard. The crashes are somewhat random, seem to happen on or after saving but sometimes on opening.

Your best chance of reproducing it is to open a stack of .eps/ps files and close all (cmd opt W) then start saving them. For a start it doesn't remember the save position and always reverts to the Documents folder, a new bug in Leopard, and after a few saves you will probably get your bomb.

Apple has been flooded with my bug reports.

btw Thanks for your support on the glossy screen thing. That's what we've been counting on.

Hey let's move onto those Losers with money in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac! Are they idiots or what!

[Grapho]

Biallystock said:

Too long to rebut everything. Not that I disagree with everything you said.

I've moved my aluminium iMac to within spitting distance of the Airport Extreme and into exactly the same positions as the white iMacs. After 3 days of support from AppleCare it won't connect at all and I am facing an entire wipe and reinstall. It also seemed to interfere with the connections of the other Macs.

Why not run an ethernet cable then. If it is that close, then you don't need WiFi, you need a patch cable. Have you fiddled with the channels on your Airport. Do you have a wireless phone near by, baby monitor anything that could be messing up your signal?

My experience has been a complete contrast to yours. I have an old Airport Extreme base station that is serving all my G equipment (Wii, iPhone, MacBook), and a Time Capsule serving my N equipment (MacPro, Apple TV), and they work flawlessly.

From my limited knowledge of wireless spectrums, the G spectrum is a very crowed one while the N spectrum is a lot cleaner, I am assuming that your iMac supports the N specification, so another solution would be to get an N router if the patch cable is out of the question.

Quote

The issue with Preview in Leopard is reproducable on several of my Macs running Leopard. The crashes are somewhat random, seem to happen on or after saving but sometimes on opening.

Your best chance of reproducing it is to open a stack of .eps/ps files and close all (cmd opt W) then start saving them. For a start it doesn't remember the save position and always reverts to the Documents folder, a new bug in Leopard, and after a few saves you will probably get your bomb.

Apple has been flooded with my bug reports.

I bet.

[Biallystock]

Grapho I know you suffer from dyslexia so may not follow everything that's posted

"Why not run an ethernet cable then. If it is that close, then you don't need WiFi, you need a patch cable."

I don't want it that close, I only moved it there to establish the problem.

"Have you fiddled with the channels on your Airport."

Yes

"Do you have a wireless phone near by, baby monitor anything that could be messing up your signal?"

No

"My experience has been a complete contrast to yours. I have an old Airport Extreme base station that is serving all my G equipment (Wii, iPhone, MacBook), and a Time Capsule serving my N equipment (MacPro, Apple TV), and they work flawlessly."

But no alum iMac? I don't have a problem with the lack of gun control. I don't live in the States.

"From my limited knowledge of wireless spectrums, the G spectrum is a very crowed one while the N spectrum is a lot cleaner, I am assuming that your iMac supports the N specification, so another solution would be to get an N router if the patch cable is out of the question."

The Airport Express is an N router

" I bet."

Yeah, all you have to do is click and send when it constantly pops up. One of the great features of OSX.

[vulpine]

Biallystock said:

>

Quote

I've moved my aluminium iMac to within spitting distance of the Airport Extreme and into exactly the same positions as the white iMacs. After 3 days of support from AppleCare it won't connect at all and I am facing an entire wipe and reinstall. It also seemed to interfere with the connections of the other Macs.

Hmmmm.. Something I discovered for myself is that it is possible to have your iMac too close to the router. Try moving either the computer or router farther away. You might also want to see if there is an update for your router itself.
Only a suggestion

Quote

The issue with Preview in Leopard is reproducable on several of my Macs running Leopard. The crashes are somewhat random, seem to happen on or after saving but sometimes on opening.

I have to admit I haven't run into this issue directly, but I do have an occasional issue where my machine totally freezes with video-intensive applications. I will assume that it's just the application, but because I can't get OUT of the app, the whole machine is effectively frozen. However, I just raised my machine from 2GB Ram to 4Gb, and that issue has dropped significantly. Maybe a memory leak in that particular app?
A suggestion here: Rather than a wipe-and-reinstall, try finding the comprehensive updates for your level of OS X. Try re-updating as a package rather than incremental. It might make a difference.

Quote

Your best chance of reproducing it is to open a stack of .eps/ps files and close all (cmd opt W) then start saving them. For a start it doesn't remember the save position and always reverts to the Documents folder, a new bug in Leopard, and after a few saves you will probably get your bomb.

This does seem to reinforce my suggestion of a video issue.

Quote

Apple has been flooded with my bug reports.

Have you actually tried for phone/Genius Bar support? They may be able to discover the cause of your issue if they actually get their hands on it.
btw Thanks for your support on the glossy screen thing. That's what we've been counting on.

You know my opinion here. No need for me to repeat.
Hey let's move onto those Losers with money in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac! Are they idiots or what!

Now this just flat doesn't belong.

[vulpine]

Biallystock said:

Psystar's business model may be to push Apple to eventually buying them out and shutting them down.

This would be the worst thing Apple could do. By buying them out and shutting them down, they only invite others to copycat the business plan and get rich off of Apple's money. The only way to prevent that is to make a lesson out of the first offender.

[Grapho]

[quote name='Biallystock']
Grapho I know you suffer from dyslexia so may not follow everything that's posted

"Why not run an ethernet cable then. If it is that close, then you don't need WiFi, you need a patch cable."

I don't want it that close, I only moved it there to establish the problem.

"Have you fiddled with the channels on your Airport."

Yes

"Do you have a wireless phone near by, baby monitor anything that could be messing up your signal?"

No

"My experience has been a complete contrast to yours. I have an old Airport Extreme base station that is serving all my G equipment (Wii, iPhone, MacBook), and a Time Capsule serving my N equipment (MacPro, Apple TV), and they work flawlessly."

But no alum iMac? I don't have a problem with the lack of gun control. I don't live in the States.

"From my limited knowledge of wireless spectrums, the G spectrum is a very crowed one while the N spectrum is a lot cleaner, I am assuming that your iMac supports the N specification, so another solution would be to get an N router if the patch cable is out of the question."

The Airport Express is an N router

" I bet."

Yeah, all you have to do is click and send when it constantly pops up. One of the great features of OSX.

Biallystock said:

Grapho I know you suffer from dyslexia so may not follow everything that's posted

"Why not run an ethernet cable then. If it is that close, then you don't need WiFi, you need a patch cable."

I don't want it that close, I only moved it there to establish the problem.

"Have you fiddled with the channels on your Airport."

Yes

"Do you have a wireless phone near by, baby monitor anything that could be messing up your signal?"

No

"My experience has been a complete contrast to yours. I have an old Airport Extreme base station that is serving all my G equipment (Wii, iPhone, MacBook), and a Time Capsule serving my N equipment (MacPro, Apple TV), and they work flawlessly."

But no alum iMac? I don't have a problem with the lack of gun control. I don't live in the States.

"From my limited knowledge of wireless spectrums, the G spectrum is a very crowed one while the N spectrum is a lot cleaner, I am assuming that your iMac supports the N specification, so another solution would be to get an N router if the patch cable is out of the question."

The Airport Express is an N router

Not quite true. The New Airport Express is an N router. Like I posted earlier, my Airport Express is only G (Older model). You mention that you have mixed G and N equipment since your other Macs are more then likely only G capable, so no, you are not on the N spectrum even thou your router supports it. You would have to get a G router to isolate your G equipment to the G spectrum and use your AEBS that is N exclusively for your N spectrum equipment. G and N don't mix, you end-up running everything in G if you mix them up. Unless you specifically set your AEBS to only broadcast in N, it will mix it up if G equipment is found.

You can setup the G router as a bridge instead of a router and still have everything networked together.
[quote]" I bet."

Yeah, all you have to do is click and send when it constantly pops up. One of the great features of OSX.

[Biallystock]

All my equipment except for the iMac G5, which is not running since Leopard screwed it, are N.

I've been promoted right up the ranks of the AppleCare support to the networking specialist who spent an entire afternoon on it with me.

I am stuck till I can fully backup and wipe my alum. iMac.

Not something I am looking forward to. My extensive experience in such matters is that you head deeper and deeper into the woods, meanwhile screwing up everything else. As I have jobs in progress on my iMac I am waiting till they are cleared to proceed with the reinstall.

This btw is an example of how Macs are NOT as flawless as everyone pretends. They bomb, they can have intractable hardware problems right out of the box, the OS can be a mess, they can have settings deeply buried and hard to find and reset, they can have apps one stubby short of a six pack, they are not capable of having their system rewound back to before a problem like Windows and they do have Apple offering generally good support but walking away and avoiding the issue if the problem persists.

For the simple minded this does not add up to "if you don't like it why don't you go back to where you came from". It is just the reality that Macs are not perfect but no-one wants to talk about that because it might bring the neighborhood values down.

[Wondercow]

You're implying that people think Macs never fail which is simply untrue. I don't think you could find one person here who would say that Macs are flawless, that is just your overly-dramatic rhetoric. However, the fact is that Apple's products are generally better than the competition in build quality, ease of use, and number of problems. Your one issue doesn't represent the entire market, however the innumerable studies, surveys, and tests are representative. And I'll point out that a lot of people--especially around here--talk about the imperfections of Macs, but they're still better than Windows PCs.

[Biallystock]

Wondercow said:

You're implying that people think Macs never fail which is simply untrue. I don't think you could find one person here who would say that Macs are flawless, that is just your overly-dramatic rhetoric. However, the fact is that Apple's products are generally better than the competition in build quality, ease of use, and number of problems. Your one issue doesn't represent the entire market, however the innumerable studies, surveys, and tests are representative. And I'll point out that a lot of people--especially around here--talk about the imperfections of Macs, but they're still better than Windows PCs.

No I am not implying that. Mac users do however buy into the rhetoric of "it never bombs" even though we know that to not be true.

Also they immediately do the "I don't have a problem" routine which implies the user who does, is either lying or somehow at fault.

My PC actually is more stable than any of my Macs. It is however appallingly vunerable to attacks from viruses etc and unpleasant to use. If it ever got into the serious trouble that some of my Macs have it can "rewind" its way out of trouble, something that puzzles my PC users that we can't do that.

The Mac and OSX can be a delight to use. Until you get into trouble.

In the last 2 months my iMac G5 lost the use of its FireWire ports and screwed up its networking after I carefully upgraded to Leopard. I was in one of those classic Macs gotchas. I had carbon copied my Tiger system and tested it onto an external FW drive which I could not now access, nor could I boot off any of my USB drives of which I have a number. I now have a valuable computer which is generally unusable and unsaleable.

The brand new iMac 24", I bought to replace it, has had problems within a month of purchase starting with unstable wireless connection and getting worse. I am sick of backing up my Macs and reinstalling to try and get them back to working order. It is difficult, tedious and leads to many problems in trying to reinstate them to where they were.

In the same time a friend of mine's MacBook lost his system and couldn't boot up after simply running a regular Safari update that failed. It took us 3 days of trial and error to get it back up.

Leopard has been problematic now for a year and I wish would get more attention from Apple. The many niggling problems are bad for productivity and have produced voluminous listings of faults needing fixing in these forums.

The problem of the glossy screens on iMacs, for example, is a fact and is not going to go away. Apple saw it as a problem that no-one complained about the matte iMacs, which they "solved".

It takes a lot to get Apple to ever concede errors, I am hoping this will be one of the few occasions where the users do get listened to.

If they were to be challenged by a possible competitor they may grow back the set of ears that every other retailer possesses.

[SpinThis!]

Biallystock said:

"I don't have a problem" routine which implies the user who does, is either lying or somehow at fault. ...
a friend of mine's MacBook lost his system and couldn't boot up after simply running a regular Safari update that failed.
It took us 3 days of trial and error to get it back up.
The brand new iMac 24" had problems within a month of purchase
My PC actually is more stable than any of my Macs.
In the last 2 months my iMac G5 lost the use of its FireWire ports.... I was in one of those classic Macs gotchas.

First, how is an isolated hardware problem a "classic Macs gotcha?" It's very unlikely a Mac OS version update would break the hardware beyond repair. OS updates tend to bring out pre-existing OS conditions and new versions generally bring out the worst in the hardware. It's likely your hardware would have failed eventually, regardless of the OS update.

The Safari thing sounds it may have been another isolated incident. (Old Hard drive corruption?) Especially in this case, what you're describing?and what Occam's razor would suggest?sounds like the rhetoric of a Windows user trying to get to grips with the Mac OS and blaming the OS?and not himself?for the lack of troubleshooting skills.

Quote

Leopard has been problematic now for a year and I wish would get more attention from Apple. The many niggling problems are bad for productivity and have produced voluminous listings of faults needing fixing in these forums.

Actually Leopard hasn't even been officially out for a year yet (October 26, 2007). One thing to keep in mind is forums don't measure every single user's experience. Most people don't hang out in a forum to shoot the breeze?they visit because they have problems. Leopard is also the single biggest OS release in the Mac's history. The Mac user base is probably the highest it's ever been so there's even more hardware/users to support and potentially more problems to unfold. (This is most likely a reason Apple may only be releasing Snow Leopard to Intel users.)

At least for me, as for the last few OS versions, Leopard hasn't been extremely better or worse in terms of stability or problems. And for those who are experiencing problems, at least Apple is releasing speedy updates. In the same timeframe, MS has released only 1 update for Vista. How can you claim Apple's not listening to their customers?