Apple MacBook Pro firmware fritzes third-party HDDs Apple's firmware upgrade, whicsh restores the 3Gb/s Sata link speed to MacBook Pros, has also caused some 'unauthorised' hard drives to fail. An Apple Discussion board thread has 65 comments about the issue, which may occur when the Apple-shipped drive in the MacBook Pro is replaced with a third-party drive and the fast Sata …
But trying to catch-up with Microsoft in terms of errors and cock-ups probably isn't the best type of competition to be entering into (still got away to go before their level pegging methinks).
When Apple introduce the BSOD let's hope they choose a nice trendy colour or colours blended together.
The stability of Apple's machines is mainly due to the fact they have full control over the internal hardware and therefore can test everything against a very small range of hardware (peripherals excluded).
The moment "non-Apple approved hardware" is used, there's a risk of it not working - as we've found out.
Now, MS on the other hand have to support hundreds of motherboard combinations, with hundreds of different hard drives, with hundreds of memory suppliers/sizes/typres... which, in all honesty, they do pretty well.
If the firmware upgrade was to enable >1.5Gb/s, Apple don't actually fit any 3Gb/s drives and won't support any third party drives at all, then what the hell was the point in bothering with a firmware upgrade?
Oh, I get it...silly me. Apple will now come along and sell a 3Gb/s HDD upgrade, complete with Apples hardware tax.
.....who is of the opinion that yes, Apple can make computers that 'just work' out of the box when you have just a limited and tightly controlled range of hardware to support. Not that difficult.
Easy streets, yet I'm amazed at how often they seem to cock that up.
Whereas MS gets the flack for making software that has to work with billions of combinations of kit of all varying degrees of quality. Yet on the whole manages to get it to work pretty well.
Which is the greatest achievment/technical challenge?
It's no wonder Apple never lets OSX out into the wild open. It would die a death out there.
"Now, MS on the other hand have to support hundreds of motherboard combinations, with hundreds of different hard drives, with hundreds of memory suppliers/sizes/typres... which, in all honesty, they do pretty well."
Meh, it's not Microsoft entirely that supports these devices, a lot of support comes from hardware manufacturers. For instance, try installing XP on a motherboard with a newer SATA controller in AHCI mode and you'll find that you will probably need a driver disk.
Now if you were talking about Linux, well the Linux developers have to support more devices, motherboards and hardware types as the Linux kernel runs on just about anything from the latest x86-64 based PCs and Macs, and ARM/MIPS back down to the old Atari ST and Commodore Amiga computers. Try doing that one Microsoft.
In fact I'm sure I read that Debian is available for 12 or so different CPU architectures and that's before including revisions.
Rob
This post has been deleted by its author
What's amazing is the lack of logical thinking ability among the Mac bashers on this board.
Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and reliability of ANY computer vendor in virtually every survey ever done. There's another one in eWeek today - The number of 'very dissatisfied' customers from HP and Dell was 3-4 times the number for Apple.
There will be some failures. No one every said that Apple was perfect (except the strawman arguments presented by the Mac-bashers). First, why don't you show what percentage of systems had a problem. Then, figure out a way to show how many of them are drive problems that just came to light (take the drives out and put them in another system that hasn't been upgraded, for example).
It really amazes me the crowds of people who are always willing to immediately assume the worst and blame Apple for problems that may or may not be their fault.
Apple is a extremly bad company who's design for hardware is so poor that it as been sued for just about every single piece of hardware they made. Obviously those poorly design Apple laptop are really not SATA 2 the patch only give you the illusion of it. so when you try to use a quality HD (as oppose the low quality Apple one) the drive can't work.....
Solution: Buy a REAL Computer (A PC) and forget Apple and it's grossly over price junk
<quote>
Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and reliability of ANY computer vendor in virtually every survey ever done. There's another one in eWeek today - The number of 'very dissatisfied' customers from HP and Dell was 3-4 times the number for Apple.
</quote>
Like all such surveys, it says much more about the Apple's *users* than their hardware...
"Apple has the highest customer satisfaction and reliability of ANY computer vendor in virtually every survey ever done. There's another one in eWeek today - The number of 'very dissatisfied' customers from HP and Dell was 3-4 times the number for Apple."
Having to support HP, Dell and Apple at work I've found Apple to be the least reliable out of the bunch. We deployed around a dozen Unibody MacBook Pros only four months ago and two have had their powerpack fail for no apparent reason (not frayed or kinked) another one has had the trackpad button jam on. Also we've had a few batteries on the previous model MacBook Pro swell up, according to our Apple service agent these are quite common problems that he deals with regularly. We also have had to replace the optical drive on dozens of G4 iBooks due to a design flaw that prevents the disc from ejecting, fortunately most have been under warranty but there should have really been a product recall, or a warranty extension like Microsoft has done for the XBox 360.
I had to call Dell for the first time ever the other day for a warranty repair, I was on the phone for less than 10 minutes in total, and they sent a technician out the very next day to fix the problem on-site. My experience with HP is also similar.
As for the reason why Apple top these surveys I think it's very much a case of the Emperor's new clothes.
In related news, heroin users have the highest drug satisfaction and reliability of ANY drug users out there as well...
Not a swipe at Apple per se (though I have no love of the company and my mate's week old Macbook Pro is a lovely paperweight pending a visit to the genius bar), but rather the company I work for, who troop out this line all the time. All it shows is that you can create enough branding and cult status that you can delude your users into loving you!
It's amazing how ignorant people are about Apple. Of course Apple didn't intentionally cause this error... it just is a bug in conflicting HD firmwares. Less than .0001% of people will ever experience this when updating HDs in MacBook Pros so it's a non-event.
Apple stuff works extremely well, it's near perfection... but 20 people out of 370,000 is not something to get worked up about.
"Like all such surveys, it says much more about the Apple's *users* than their hardware.."
That's just plain absurd. Some of the surveys are things like "did your computer start up when you took it out of the box". If you were correct, either Mac users have some kind of telepathic power forcing broken computers to work or are incapable of telling whether a computer is turned on or not.
It is about 10 trillion times more likely that there is some truth to all the surveys and you are simply too narrow minded to believe reality.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
