consolejockey

In the 90’s I was a serious Apple fanatic. I grew using an Apple IIc, which lasted me from middle school all the way through high school. In college I got one of the first PPC Macs, a Powermac 6160. From then on out I was a total MacHead. One of my earlier jobs was working for Power Computing, probably the most successful of the short lived Mac clone manufacturers. When Apple pulled the rug out from underneath the clone industry, and thus got me laid off for the first time, I became pretty disillusioned with Apple.

I bought myself a Dell PC and used Windows NT, then 2000 and now XP (sometimes even Vista.) I was a PC guy from then on, and over the years as I went from NT to 2000 to XP and Vista I’ve become pretty disillusioned with the PC platform and Microsoft. I tried various distributions of Linux which my experience I can only sum up with the phrase, Linux is pretty cool… considering it’s free. I still have hopes that Linux will someday be every bit as good as the Mac OS or Windows, but it’s just not there yet. And Abobe really needs to support Linux before I can use it as my main platform. I’m hooked on Photoshop, Fireworks and even Dreamweaver. Today I use a Mac at work and Windows at home. Occasionally I’ll check out the latest release of Ubuntu. I’ve become pretty comfortable in any OS, I’m not loyal to any particular brand.

I did break down and buy an iPhone though. My old smart phone was slowly dying and the price on the iPhone dropped so I jumped on the bandwagon. And pretty much immediately was reminded why despite all the hype, despite all the fanatics calling it the “Jesus Phone,” Apple is still just another electronics company. The iPhone lacked many of the features my three year old Windows Mobile smart phone had. The iPhone also had restrictions on it’s use that to me were unreasonable (you can only sync with one machine, you can’t use it as a drive, no MMS, no shooting video, up until yesterday no third part apps, etc.) and it cost more than my previous phone. Not that it didn’t do some things well, like web browsing and playing music and videos, but nothing that would make me consider it to be the best smart phone ever, or even a great smart phone.

And today, when I went to update my iPhone to the latest firmware, the long awaited and widely talked about version 2.0, and my phone was essentially bricked. In order to upgrade to the latest firmware, an iPhone owner has to reactivate their phone online. Apple apparently didn’t anticipate the load on their servers that millions of iPhone owners across the world would cause by trying to activate their phone all on the same day. Apple, a company that manufactures servers, apparently didn’t have enough servers. I’ve heard that those buying the new 3G iPhones are having to spend hours waiting in line, then hours waiting in store to actually purchase a working and activated phone.

Complain about Microsoft all you want, complain about Dell, HP or Sony, but you’re going to have to make a pretty lengthy and strong argument about why I should think that Apple is really any better, and in some cases not actually worse.

BTW, after about three hours my iPhone is working again, but I still can’t sync it to my computer.