Mac reliability, Apple satisfaction

[Jeff Wexler]

appeared in Macworld:

"Macworld's Reliability Survey

By Dan Miller (dmiller@macworld.com)

This week, Macworld.com featured the findings of a reliability survey we conducted for the June 2007 issue. We did the survey for a couple reasons. For one thing, Mac users have several alternatives when it comes to getting their Macs serviced: Apple stores, authorized service providers, the smart guy down the hall. It'd be good to know which one is best. For another, we see a lot of anecdotal reports about Mac problems--from yellowing wrist-rests to exploding batteries--and wanted to find out just how prevalent those problems really are.

Read our reliability-and-satisfaction survey

But, to be honest, I had another, private reason for wanting to do this story: To attack the stereotype of the "Mac fan." I hear that phrase a lot from my brethren on the Windows side of the world, and it grates on my nerves. To me, it implies mindless loyalty and irrational exuberance. No, I argue to anyone who dares use the phrase, Mac buyers aren't "fans." They're rational users who've made rational decisions about the kind of computer and operating system they want to use, and they've chosen the Mac. But to be honest, I didn't have any proof of that argument beyond the anecdotal. I wanted to see some numbers that'd support (or undercut) my argument.

When we first got the results of our service-and-reliability survey of Macworld readers, two numbers jumped out at me immediately -- and, frankly, made me a little nervous about my Mac-users-are-rational argument. First number: When we asked those readers to rate their satisfaction with their primary computers (mostly, but not all, Macs), 85 percent of Macs were rated a 9 or 10 out of 10. (By comparison, among those readers whose primary computer is a Windows PC (mostly used at work), only 15 percent of those PCs merited a 9 or 10.) Second number: About a quarter of the Macs in use by survey respondents had a problem at some point--not a passing glitch, but something serious enough to put those machines out of commission for at least a day.

So, roughly 25 percent of those machines had a problem, yet 85 percent of them rate a 9 or 10 for satisfaction. Does that make sense? After looking at the numbers more closely, I think it does. For one thing, many of the Macs that had problems were bought four, five, even six years ago. I don't think it's surprising that computer components that old occasionally go south.

More importantly, when those problems did arise, they were fixed quickly and well. Whether they took their ailing Macs to local Apple Stores or another local Apple service provider (or shipped them to Apple) for service, survey respondents whose Macs had problems said they were extremely satisfied with the promptness and thoroughness of the service they received.

Those numbers make sense to me. What about you?"

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

[RPSharman]

I still own both PCs and Macs.  The Mac I am using now is over 6 years old and has had NO upgrades of any kind, with the exception of a USB 2.0 PCI card.  It's a G4 800mHz with 512MB RAM.  While I do have a faster and newer iMac for use on set, this is the computer I use at home and it's only just starting to hang up a bit here and there.

My PC laptop sucks.  It was more expensive than the iMac and is only a few years old.  It has needed upgrades and complete re-installs several times.  A virus killed my hard drive recently, and I bought a new hard drive, but I couldn't reinstall Windows because it saw that it wasn't the original drive that came with my computer.  So I bought the Vista upgrade (since I owned XP already for that machine), but couldn't install it because although it was the complete program, the activation key was only valid if if I had a version of XP already installed.  But I couldn't install my XP because of the new hard drive.  Miscrosoft had no solution for this.

My PC desktop is a little newer than my Mac desktop, but has been plagued with problems for years.

While I am frustrated with the very occasional Mac freeze, it is only a fraction of the frustration of dealing with the PC and the associated Microsoft and Dell customer "service".

[engaudio]

Not jumping on any band wagon but I love my emac 1.4Ghz , G4 , 1gb ram.

I'm a computer novice and don't know much more then how to send emails and use it for my protools mbox.

I had very bad luck with my first pc and sent it back twice in the first month due to it having major issues with going past the start up screen... So cut a long story short ended up going mac due to such a bad experience with both the reseller and the pc itself. The platform wasn't an issue, the fact the pc wouldn't even let me start using it was. ( 2 different machines!!)

My macs locked up twice in 4 years.... not bad going considering my ex GF's pc crashed once a week not to mention the virus problems. So for me, 9.5/10 for mac!

Grant.

[Marc Wielage]

When I'm not working, I'm at my Mac at least 8 hours a day. I get crashes all the time (though fewer on the new Intel Xeon), because I run wacky software and push the machine too hard. Firewire is also flakey, particularly if you mount new drives or dismount old drives while other programs are running. (I would never do this when recording or under other "mission critical" situations.)

But USB2 is just as flakey under Windows. I've had more severe crashes under Windows XP than I have on the Mac, but to tell you the truth, they're both pretty reliable nowadays. I honestly think Macs and Windows machines now have more similarities than differences.

No question that the Mac experience is better overall, to me. But I concede that it's a personal experience, and I try not to rub my PC friends' noses into it. (It's tough at work, where 100% of the engineers are Windows/Unix people, and look on Macs as an annoyance.)

--Marc W.

[Ramsay]

I got my first Mac, a tangerine Imac in 1999. I only got it because my brother couldn't use it in his PC world. It is in my sons bedroom now with a 120 gig hardrive and a bunch of music. (no internet tho, surfing in our house is done on a new intel dual and I can keep an eye on sites visited). Except for an over used 10 gig hardrive in the original imac which eventually died (not without warning) I have never had a major failure. I have two laptops as well. Like any computer if you do dumb things or overtax its operating system it will stop working. If you had a stock 440 motor would you keep revving it to 8K and not expect consequences? The biggest advantage to the Mac OS is all of the useful home based programs it comes with (Imusic, Iphoto, Imovie...). Exept for the purchase of Microsoft office, you have everything any household could need and look mom, no viruses! As some of  you  are aware I use Boom Recorder as my main recorder and as long as I don't do something stupid like fooling around repatching firewire or USB devices without forethought, I have a never had an issue. I have never missed a take. I have been told to replace my hardrive every two years as a safety measure and I plan to do that. I look around our sets these days and it's odd to see someone with a PC.

[Philip Perkins]

For someone like me, with a foot in post and the other in production sound, with clients that are all over the map in terms of skill levels, knowledge, and platform loyalty and experience, what I think about the computers is not very relevant.  Some apps I use are PC only, and most  clients are Mac based.  It seems important to be able to "speak both languages" anymore, at least for me.  I guess I'll continue to have both until the differences are really erased.  In terms of my "satisfaction", I think I spend just as much time pissed off at my Macs as I do my PCs.

Philip Perkins

[dfisk]

I had a PowerMac G4 for a couple of years, and never had a problem. I sold it with my Pro Tools system, and picked up a MacBook about 2 months ago, and I love it. I'll never buy a PC unless I have to. Half of the conversations with my folks, and the inlaws are questions from them trying to figure out some weird PC issue they are having that I never have to deal with.

Also, I find it funny that most businesses these days that run on PC's require an IT department, whose sole purpose is to make sure that the PC's live. At work, I have a Mac for Pro Tools, and a PC for internet, e-mail, and all the general PC stuff. We don't have a staff of people for Mac problems, but we do for the PC.

-Dave

[engaudio]

Also, I find it funny that most businesses these days that run on PC's require an IT department, whose sole purpose is to make sure that the PC's live. At work, I have a Mac for Pro Tools, and a PC for internet, e-mail, and all the general PC stuff. We don't have a staff of people for Mac problems, but we do for the PC.

-Dave

I was just thinking about that Dave.... I know some guys in an advertising co that run macs with no problems what so ever , where as another (accounting) company the same size have a tech on staff to look after the pc's.

Grant.

[takev]

Hi,

Currently there is not much difference in quality between Macs and PCs I feel. But I do prefer Mac OS X for its more logical approach to programming and feel of the OS and its programs. I just wist that Apple could create documentation that was readable by someone like me, there is something to be said to let the programmer write the API documentation in stead of a "technical"-writer.

Both have problems with hardware, I work for a company where they use windows XP machines for the office, as an exception our department is also allowed to have Apple machines. I use both, 2 screen for my Apple which I use for my everyday tasks and 1 screen for my windows machine to read my email and create the odd word document. I share the keyboard and mouse using a program called synergy2, a very handy tool that makes it almost as if I only have a single machine, it is even possible to cut and past text between the two machines.

Anyway for the problems, as everyone knows PC hardware can be flakey so I don't have to go into that. But Apples can also die, for example we had a large batch of silver dual-G4s that have been really bad. In two years I have had 3 of these G4s die, the ide controller couldn't be found anymore and thus could not be boot. Also for some reason Safari crashed often on these G4s.

Now I finally have a quad-G5 at work, but these have also notoriously been failing after each power outage, seems that the PDUs do not handle power spikes that well (they probably die when the power is returned). But Safari works great :-)

As for OS stability, I am quite happy with this, but there is room for improvement. One of the first rules of an OS is; a programmer that runs as a non-root user should not be able to crash the OS. Still, I can pretty reliably crash Mac OS X, by just being stupid with OpenGL. There is something to be said for not doing checks with OpenGL, as it will slow down the drawing, but still.

I guess this was just some random thoughts.

Cheers,

    Take

[Philip Perkins]

One thing I'll say about Macs is that if they start out bad, balky etc they have usually stayed that way for me.  I've had a whole string of them since the original MacPlus, and some were fantastically reliable and others never seemed to work right at all, or had very disappointing performance.  Out of 9 Macs so far, 4 of them were great, 2 never worked right really at all and the rest were in the middle, and interventions by computer techs didn't seem to make any real difference.  Our PCs, (also 9 or so) on the other hand do/did benefit by techs working on them up until the point that they became uneconomical to fix.  Why this is may have something to do with Mac models being somewhat unique designs and PCs really being just the sum of their parts, I don't know.

Philip Perkins

[Marc Wielage]

My take on Macs vs. Windows machines is, I've had more catastrophic crashes with Windows than I ever had with the Mac. For years, Microsoft's standard advice for severe problems was, "well, start by re-installing Windows." I can remember one week with Windows95 where I re-installed it three or four times, after the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.

But XP has been far more reliable. On the other hand, there are still aspects of XP I don't like -- for example, Windows lets you run the same program five times if you double-click the original icon; Macs just switch you to the currently-running program. This flaw goes back ten years, and it still exists with Vista.

I think the Mac OS works closer to the way I think, but I concede it's a personal issue. And I've silenced a lot of pro-Windows friends of mine by telling 'em, "hey, I have Windows running in the background all the time on my Mac, on the rare occasions I need it." But I'm far more satisfied with Mac reliability than I am with PCs in general.

--Marc W.

[Andrew Bellware]

[snip]

there are still aspects of XP I don't like -- for example, Windows lets you run the same program five times if you double-click the original icon; Macs just switch you to the currently-running program. This flaw goes back ten years, and it still exists with Vista.

That's interesting, I've always thought that more of a feature than a flaw. There are times when I need identical versions of the same application running -- say one window with one set of preferences going while another with another set of preferences. Especially with applications which won't hold more than one project at a time like 3dsMax, or when I want to background render in one application while editing in another.

Other than that, I feel I'm pretty platform agnostic. I use XP, OSX, and Vista every day. (Mostly working in Samplitude on the PC, Final Cut Pro on the Mac.)

I do think, however, that Vista has no reason to exist. ;-)

[cmgoodin]

I agree with Andrew. The Windows ability to run multiple instances of a single application is a great feature and is completely controlled by the software author.  Some applications prevent you from running more than 1 copy at a time.  Some allow you. If the Apple OSX prevents this in all cases I think it would be a negative feature.  I run multiple copies of IE or BW-Pro or  other software. It is great with multiple screens since I can run 2 instances of a program on different screens and have different tools and layouts available on each instance.

Programs that use an MDI (multiple document interface) like Photoshop  and MS Word will just open another document in the one instance of the program running. Others that don't support MDI open a whole new instance of the program.

----Courtney

[Guest jimg]

My first Mac was a MacPlus

I pushed my Performa 630 until it died.

My 6500 worked well until it's power supply croaked. At that point, I got a new computer, although I never expected the 6500 run OS X for very long....

I have a G4 tower, a Powerbook G4 and an iMac G5 at the moment. Never had a system related faiure, t least so far.

Never had a PC, so I have no frame of reference. But all of my Macs managed to run for a long time upgraded above the Apple-supported OS and I'm happy about that. I'm looking forward to getting an Intel-based machine so I can compare the two OS's.

Best regards,

Jim

[dfisk]

Want to add.....

The one thing I HATE about Macs that Apple needs to rip off from Windows is the "add/remove software" feature. I hate the fact that I can't just un-install a program. The only problem (software issue) I've really had with my old G4 was when I upgraded to Quicktime 7, and was running Pro Tools 6. Well, QT 7 made it so pro tools 6 would not run. Apple's solution was to format my hard drive, and re-install the OS, or upgrade to OS 10.4, and upgrade Pro Tools. Digidesign's solution was to do the upgrade path as well. I didn't want to pay the money to upgrade. My system was working fine. I had no need to spend hundreds of dollars I didn't have to upgrade a system that was working perfectly. I ended up biting the bullet and payed $100 for OS 10.4, and "acquired" PT 7 LE.

[takev]

dfisk,

QuickTime 7 is not a program, it is much like a service pack it consists of many libraries to handle multi-media by many programs, including ProTools. Uninstalling would also have required a reinstall of the older version of QuickTime.

This is a little bit confusing as this "service pack" also included a new version of the QuickTime Player.

In windows it is indeed possible to uninstall a service pack, as during installation it makes a full backup of every file it replaces (during the installation of the service pack you can tell it to make this backup). I am not sure if you can uninstall a service pack from the add/remove software panel though, I think it requires a different program.

I think at some point Apple did publish how to return to a previous version of QuickTime, which I think was just by downloading and installing the old version on top of it.

As you know a new service pack for windows also creates a lot of incompatibilities with existing programs until these are patched. For both Apple and Microsoft these service packs shouldn't have broken anything. Most of the time the developers of the application had a bug in the application and got lucky with the previous version that undefined behavior wasn't catastrophic.

When you become a advanced developer member for Apple (same for Microsoft) you will receive these service packs well before the release date, such that you can test your software.

The upgrade path for the vendor to fix the bug in their application is a bit of an three edged sword; Apple made a change we are not responsible, we can not fix an old version of our application do an upgrade, an upgrade will cost you money.

Cheers,

    Take

[Jeff Wexler]

dfisk,

QuickTime 7 is not a program, it is much like a service pack it consists of many libraries to handle multi-media by many programs, including ProTools. Uninstalling would also have required a reinstall of the older version of QuickTime.

Take

I was going to post much the same info for dfisk so thanks, Take, for explaining these things. Quicktime is an active and integral system level "program" that hundreds of other programs (including the OS itself) rely on. There are applications, or programs, associated with Quicktime that are also part of the Quicktime package (like the Quicktime Player that launches anytime you need to "play" Quicktime media. I the Windows world I believe the equivalent are things like Active X and Windows Media stuff and these are certainly things that you should not ever "un-install" or try and remove.

It is true that when Apple (or Microsoft) updates key system level components, certain parts of installed applications may be broken. This is why major software companies (like Digidesign) usually recommend NOT upgrading to new versions of things (including the Operating System) until they have qualified their software. Apple does make it fairly easy, in most cases, to revert back to prior versions of, let's say Quicktime, so that your other software will run properly. This can cause other difficulties, of course, because often Apple will introduce a new version of Quicktime to allow other new software to work at all: for example, a new version of iTunes which will require the new version of Quicktime, or a new version of Final Cut Pro which will require possibly even an upgrade to the latest version of the OS.

As for uninstalling programs on the Mac, this couldn't be easier with OS X, particularly compared to the process in Windows. The installing of programs on the Mac, as you know, is also incredibly straightforward --- often it is just dragging the application to your drive and it's there. So, conversley, often the un-install is just as simple --- just drag the application to the trash. Windows installs, as far as I know, involve putting all sorts of files, DLL's and so forth, sometimes all over the place, and certainly just trashing the application will NOT remove everything --- that is why there are all these UN-INSTALL routines (and even 3rd party software) to accomplish this.

The applications for the Mac that let you know a RESTART will be required (and almost ALL of the installers will tell you that and may also tell you exactly what will be installed and where) I look into more carefully before installing. Any program that requires a restart indicates that it is going to be putting more files more places that I want to know about before installing. So that there is no mis-representation of what Mac installations involve, there are files that are put on your drive, often without telling you, but almost always these end up in your Library Folder > Application Support folder and are clearly marked.

Regards,  Jeff Wexler

[Guest jimg]

Echoing what Jeff has said, it's very simple to remove most applications in OS X. There are also preference files in addition to application support files but unless you are pressed for disc space or your computer seems to act flaky after removing an application, there is no real reason to search out and remove either of those sorts of files. Several complicated or large applications I have installed on my machines also install an uninstaller at the time of installation, e.g. Pro Tools.

I'm also betting that there are freeware, shareware or donationware applications out there that can remove any trace of an application if you want to go that route. Just be careful to check what they decide to throw away before you trash what they have picked out.

Best regards,

Jim

[curleysound]

Apple needs to rip off from Windows is the "add/remove software" feature.

Dave,

  I agree, but I was thinking a possible better movie would be something like the "Revert" function in Photoshop, where you  could go back to a previous version of something if it was messing up your system, and have the option to uninstall altogether. Of course, I suppose in the programming world, this is akin to the "Can we just move the mountain?" statement often paraphrased on set...