Apple, are you kidding me?

Late last Wednesday afternoon I had what by now has become all too familiar: a Mac hard drive crash. Fortunately I learned my lesson after the first three times this happened to me, so this time I had a reasonably current backup. I lost just three or four days, almost all of it stuff I’d uploaded to the web already.

So the issue wasn’t data loss. The issue was the hard drive itself. The problem required a trip to the Apple Store (not exactly right next door), where the computer had to stay for three days. As down times go, that honestly wasn’t too bad. It was actually sort of nice to have an excuse to take a break from connectedness for a little while.

Plus the Apple “Geniuses” were nice to the verge of customer service overkill. One even told me that the company’s in-house code name for the computer I bought is the Ultimate. That made me wonder what their name is for the model with a few extras I didn’t get. Best not to know. I’d hate to think about people unwittingly using a computer known as the John Holmes.

My problem with all this (aside from this being the fourth hard drive crash in less than two years) was that in days gone past I could have tackled the repair at home. If the hardware was seriously torched (and in this case it may have been), then off to the store it would go. As I’d had it only a month or so, it was still under warranty. But at least I could have tried running some diagnostics and attempted to fix it myself before swapping in an expensive replacement part.

But in this brave new world that doesn’t happen. Because I needed to be able to boot from an external system disc so I could go to work on the internal hard drive. And do new Macs come with a CD system disc? They do not. Of course there’s a certain logic to that, as the new Macs don’t have disc drives. But I have an external drive that I use mostly to watch DVDs on the computer. So if I’d had a disc, I could at least have given it a try.

Another option would have been to use a Firewire connection to link the problem child up to an older, functioning computer that I happened to have downstairs. But Apple in its wisdom decided I didn’t need a Firewire port in my new machine.

Here then is the deal: in Apple’s imagineered vision, we’re all going to live in the cloud. We’ll store all our data in the cloud, connect to our peripherals via the cloud, watch movies from the cloud, do everything we do entirely from the fabulous world of the net-connected cloud. For the full effect, read that last sentence aloud while standing on your tiptoes, flapping your arms like a happy little bluebird and employing your most sarcastic tone.

In Apple’s defense, the cloud works great. Until it doesn’t. It provides us with all kinds of new possibilities. But if we rely exclusively on our net connections, we lose a measure of autonomy (not to mention opening our lives up to scrutiny by hackers at the government, corporate and freelance levels). At the very least, we appear to have surrendered the ability to opt in or out at our discretion.

So if Apple is going to watch over us like we’re a mass of ignorant children, then the corporation is going to have to make a bigger commitment to being a better parent. A few more geniuses in the design and assembly stages might save employing fewer at the customer service end. Just a thought.

Hi, I’m an a-hole. And I’m a PC.

A long time ago IBM tried selling PCs using one of the world’s most beloved symbols of innocent, non-corporate fun: Charlie Chaplin’s famous Little Tramp character. Following swift on the heels of the advent of this campaign came the inevitable parodies. The one I remember the best ran in a humor magazine (National Lampoon, if memory serves). On one side of the ad was the “public icon,” the Little Tramp extolling the virtues of purchasing a personal computer from IBM. On the other side was the “in-house corporate icon,” The Great Dictator outlining IBM’s labor practices and various other misdeeds.

Thanks to my DVR and the advent of baseball’s off-season, I’m not currently watching a lot of television advertising. But Mrs. Lens and I have gotten hooked on the Hi-I’m-a-Mac-And-I’m-a-PC ads. Some of them are clever. They’re cheap enough to produce that Apple doesn’t have to keep showing the same ones over and over again (an excellent advertising strategy that more companies should seriously consider adopting). But more than anything else, as Mac users we still seem to need occasional reassurance that we’re the cool kids and the majority of computer users are dorks.

But earlier this week I saw one of these things that actually ticked me off. In this go-around, PC hired a PR flak to answer questions about problems with the Windows Vista operating system. Whatever PC said about it would be re-interpreted by the flak. Most of this was innocuous enough. But when PC admitted that the first release of Vista had some serious bugs in it, the PR woman bent this around to “Some early adopters experienced a few difficulties” or words to that effect.

Who the hell does Apple think it is picking on anyone else for releasing insect-ridden products? The iPhone debacle that prompted the company to offer discount coupons to overcharged “early adopters” should by itself have made this a point of embarrassment to the company.

But of course those of us with longer, more extensive experience with Apple know that the iPhone thing was not a fluke. I would be humiliated to admit how many times I installed the new Mac operating system before letting at least two or three revisions drift by. And if you really want to know how willing Apple is to screw its own customers, dig back into computer history and see if you can find someone who bought the Lisa. Or instead, try finding someone who will admit to buying the Lisa.

This mistake is especially damaging to the Mac’s product position. The last thing anyone at the too-cool-for-school table in the lunchroom wants to hear is that we’re all secretly the thing we hate most: witless stooges eating a big plate of corporate propaganda. Even if that’s what we really are, it’s a mistake to call our attention to it.

So dump on the suckers all you want, Apple. Just don’t throw your own customers into the sucker basket.

PS - Don't forget Buy Nothing Day this Friday!