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September 06, 2008
You can be creative without a Mac?
British detective novelist - a great writer and a lovely man who does little stick figure drawings when he signs books (we know because we stood in line to get one at a Melbourne Writers' Festival a few years ago) - Ian Rankin rates the Mac as his worst investment ever. In an interview on a writer's finances in The Telegraph, the author of the Rebus series says:
Everyone used to tell me that as a writer I should have an Apple Mac because they are better than PCs, so a few years ago I went and bought the biggest Apple Mac system I could buy and a G4 laptop to go with it for around £3,000. I tried it and didn’t like it - I gave it a few weeks of struggling and then went back to my PC.He writes his novels on a Sony laptop. And he apparently trusts it a good deal more than he should. In another piece youngwriter [the Romanitas trilogy] Sophie McDougall an author's party, we learn that Rankin turned up with a laptop under his arm on which was the only copy of the novel he had just completed. And he was tipsy. We can't bear to think of the chances of the laptop being mislaid, dropped, immersed in liquid or who knows what? And given that he's been a victim of a burglary in which he lost his iPod, you'd think he'd know better. Isn't it interesting what you can find out about people?
One of our favourite columnists, the Financial Times Lucy Kellaway, has also had bad luck with iPods. She recently bemoaned the fact that Apple's quality control is less than brilliant.
In the 3½ years since I got my first sleek music machine, I have bought nine further iPods. Two for me and the rest for other members of the family. Of these, six are now kaput and one only works in one ear. Am I angry with Apple for selling me all this expensive crud that doesn’t work properly? Have I shouted at people on Apple help lines? On the contrary – I have taken it like a lamb.We've just had our fifth dead iPod in three years. But happily, the iPod Touch is still going strong.
In my experience, most iPods waited until around the 366th day, when the guarantee expires, to get sick. Then you take them to the gorgeous Regent Street Apple shop in London – a cathedral for the worship of sleek gadgets – and visit the Genius Bar. A handsome young nerd in a tight black T-shirt with the word Genius on his arm looks sadly at it and explains that it couldn’t be fixed, or could – but only at a high price.
If I were a genius myself, I would have worked out that it might be better to junk Apple and buy a cheaper MP3 player that works.
But I’m not. I’m a bundle of suggestible sentiment and emotion and each time I find that a newer, even sleeker one has arrived in the front of the shop just begging to be bought. What luck that the last one broke, I always think, as I happily part with another £160 for this sleek, high-tech tat.
Posted by cw at September 6, 2008 03:03 PM
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Comments
Notice the story about the inventor of the ipod in the Age's technology section. He let the patent lapse so he made no money from it and hasn't been able to bring himself to buy one. Apple gave him one "but it broke down after eight months". http://www.theage.com.au/news/articles/ipod-invented-by-furniture-salesman/2008/09/10/1220857618764.html
They really are a crock!
As for Macs - good for conservative Luddites who think style equals substance. They are sold, along with ipods, as if they were edgy and cool, yet they lack much in the way of functionality by comparison with their rivals and are immensely controlling over their users. And of course your ipod's target market is the least discriminating and most easily swayed, teenagers. Who, by and large, don't even have to pay for the rubbish they are consuming. Still in the computer world only about 15% of the population is so gullible.
My guess is that at some point soon the Chinese are going to really get their quality act together (just like Sth Korea did) and partner up with some savvy Europeans (Philips for example) and produce something that is functional, reliable, flexible and cool. And that should see off Mac and their cruddy interfaces.
Posted by: tflip at September 10, 2008 10:39 PM