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If you have seen Apple’s recent crop of ads to counter Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter Ads, you will find two themes: Apple Genius’ are amazing at technical support, and Windows computers just don’t operate without crashing and constantly catch viruses. Of course these are just marketing gimmicks, just like the Laptop Hunter ads were also, but I think it’s fair to take a few minutes to talk about something we often forget, reality.

Watered Down Geniuses

When you walk up to the Apple Genius Bar, the cool cats in the brightly colored shirts give off quite the air of style and chic, but does that translate to great technical support? Before I relay some of my own personal experiences, how about a reality check. On average, Apple Geniuses make about $25,000 a year, that translates to about $12 an hour. Now this is just mean, but if you stand behind a bar for 40 hours a week for $12 an hour, how smart are you really? The reality is that the average age that I see is around maybe 20?

A great place to start is reading “A day in the life of an Apple Genius” from Maclife. There are some great tid bits in this article like:

• Probably 70% of the stuff we see is physically damaged by the customer
• People should not use extensive mods to their OS, it always causes problems

The basic rundown is this. A Candidate gets screened by a round of troubleshooting questions. If he answers most of those correctly, he gets a two week training session in Cupertino that results in three certifications. The source for Maclife’s article admits the tests aren’t particularly hard. After testing, the candidate gets some real world retail training. That’s where they learn the ticketing system and such. In these two weeks they are well versed in AppleCare policies, entering information into the support database as well as general Apple policies. Finally the genius does a couple weeks training in a real store and bam, they stamp genius on his or her head and he may stand at the alter in an Apple Store. Excuse my cynicism here, but 6 weeks does not a genius make. Malcolm Gladwell posited in Outliers, that it took 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything. Apparently it only takes 240 hours to become an expert at all things Apple, and that’s assuming that they were absorbing for a solid 8 hours per day over these 6 weeks.

I want to be clear, I am not saying that you shouldn’t go to a Genius Bar to get your Mac Fixed, I just did. But I will say that had I not did 10 minutes of due diligence on Google before going in, my repair would have cost me $1,000 vs. free. The Genius was not aware that there was an issue with nVidia chips that was nearing class-action status and because of this Apple had extended the warranty on machines with the issue to two years. Seems like something you would hope they knew, right?

The time before I went to get an Airport Extreme card installed in my Mac Pro, only to have them accidentally disable Bluetooth in the process.

The point is, don’t expect them to be all knowing and never make mistakes, they are Apple’s Geek Squad, no different.

For a more amusing read, check out the MacLife article’s source’s blog, Ungenius.

Viruses Smiruses

I encourage you to first think back and tell me the last time you or someone you know got a virus on their PC. I know it does happen, but I also know it is much less common than the general perception is. I can’t remember catching one myself since “I love you” in 2000. It was a nasty bugger, but it was proliferated across the network because at the time people pretty much opened anything that came in an email attachment without ever looking at it. I like to think people are a bit smarter now.

Also software is better. Despite the hordes of Apple and Linux aficionados that will quote the countless thousands you will have to spend to hopefully be protected, I have been using AVG Free edition from Download.com for years. I would say that more often I hear of virus hoaxes than actual viruses.

Probably the only companies happier than Apple that Viruses DO exist, are anti-virus software makers themselves. It’s become a tremendously profitable industry spawning not only software sales but ridiculously expensive subscriptions. I personally have no problem installing Windows XP, Vista or 7 on a new machine and connecting it to the internet with no Virus protection software. 99% of not being affected by viruses is using your computer responsibly.

The point is that the Apple commercials are hyperbole, Viruses and OS Crashes are nowhere near as common as they would like you to think. As a parting note, Apple’s DO get viruses too. You can only expect them to rise with popularity. The most common, and true, argument is that Windows machines have more viruses because 90% of people use Windows computers, if you are trying to cause damage, you go after the larger target. OS X won’t find safety in it’s small numbers forever.

Now That’s Good TV

It is. The commercials are absolutely brilliant from a marketing perspective and have done wonders to create FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) about Windows Vista, PCs and pretty much anything that isn’t Mac. The laptop hunter commercials are great too, and now Apple is attaching those as well. Enjoy the commercials, but I sincerely hope that you don’t use them to make purchasing decisions.

World of Warcraft is a beast to install alone, patching it up to the latest version is another story. Many people, me included, will make a backup of the World of Warcraft folder to save time installing it on a new machine. This used to work just dandy, but now you might find yourself presented with an error message that says:

Well fear no more, the fix is easy and takes about two seconds. Go into your World of Warcraft folder and double-click repair.exe. When it opens, select reset only. Re-launch World of Warcraft and your patch should go off without a hitch.

I have been quite actively interjecting my own opinion in a thread on a website about Linux. I know, I know, don’t say anything if you can’t say something nice, but sometimes it’s just so much fun. There is actually quite a bit nice to say about Linux, I just happen to believe that it really belongs in the same place Unix does, on servers, maintained by really smart people who have good reason to use it. Ouch, maybe that’s a bit harsh, it is a cool desktop operating system… if you are pretty knowledgable to keep it running and do not mind the total lack of support from pretty much all major hardware and software vendors.

I wanted to repost a comment I made because I firmly believe it and think it brings to light a lot of the misconceptions of Linux. Kevin, a poster on this thread also believes, rightfully so of course, that his true reason for using Linux is the freedom, not the price or lack thereof. Kevin personally feels that he is shackled by proprietary tools. Now I am not sure if he would feel that he needed to be able to open up Photoshop, look under the hood and change and recompile it to fit his need (this seems pretty ridiculous to me) but he says:

You are all missing the point. What makes GNU/Linux great is that is is free software. Free as in freedom. What this means to the computer user is that you can make it do anything you want, without restriction. If you want to know how something works the documentation and the code is there for your perusal, unlike proprietary/closed os’s.

Whether Linux’s desktop market share grows or not is irrelevant. What matters is that it is free, and available to those of us that choose to free ourselves from the shackles of proprietary tools. And if you don’t think proprietary operating systems impose shackles on their users; next time a EULA pops up when you install something, actually take the time to read it. You’ll see just how restrictive most of them are.

How restrictive is Windows EULA (PDF Link) these days? It turns out the Windows Vista End User License Agreement is 14 pages. I will summarize these pages real quick so we can define these “shackles”

» Read the rest of this entry «

I don’t know about you, but I love me some Netflix. We shred through five or six movies and TV shows on DVD per week. Dawngrrl and I have been addicted to Showtime’s Dexter and when we ran out of episodes on the disc we had, we were in a panic to watch more. Lucky for us the first season of Dexter as available as “Watch Now” on Netflix. Problem with that was the only place to watch it was in my office as it’s Windows only and my laptop is a Mac.

In my office I have a plethora of computers. One of those machines is a 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate computer that has a TV Tuner and Media Center is configured and running. Along with that I have completely configured the Netflix Watch Now client and as long as I want to sit in the office and watch TV and movies, I am good to go.

But what about our bedroom? Being good little Microsoft geeks like we are, we have several Xbox 360s around the house. The bedroom 360 is set up as a Media Center Extender we already use it to watch shared media and listen to music.

Now that I have found my true love in vmcNetFlix, I can also watch movies and TV shows from Netflix instantly on the bedroom TV.

The UI is very nice, you can browse the entire library, manage your queue and of course watch video instantly from the Netflix Watch Now catalog.

As we speak I am in bed with Dawn, on my Mac, Remote Desktop connected to my 32-bit Windows Vista box writing this blog on Windows Live Writer. On the Xbox 360 is “Father Knows Best", the latest episode of Dexter we are currently watching.

If you have Vista Media Center (that’s where the vmc comes in) and a valid Netflix Account with Watch Now enabled, and a Windows Media Center Extender, you are golden to watch great quality video, realtime, away from the PC.

First let me say that I am a Microsoft employee and this post is pure opinion and not an official position of my employer. That being said, reading my morning dose of feeds I have already came across nearly a dozen articles whining that Windows 7 looks just like Windows Vista.

Not to go directly at our buddies down at 1 Infinite Loop, but hasn’t OS X looked the same for like, um 10 years or something? OS X was released in 1999 at version 10.0, and here we are at the edge of 2009 and they are still on 10?

In 1999, when OS X first hit the scene (as a server component first), we were on Windows 98 Second Edition. Microsoft was still on Version 4 of Windows which included Windows 95, NT 4, 98 and 98 SE. That’s four official OS releases off of the 4.0 framework. It had been a period of four years, one OS per year.

That’s a decent life span out of a code base and it was time to move on. In that same time period, Apple shipped OS X 10.0 Server. Now let me introduce a quote that I think might ring somewhat familiar if only you take out the words Mac OS X and insert Windows Vista in their place.

“The initial version was slow, not feature complete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. While many critics suggested that the operating system was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve. Simply releasing Mac OS X was received by the Macintosh community as a great accomplishment, for attempts to completely overhaul the Mac OS had been underway since 1996, and delayed by countless setbacks. Following some bug fixes, kernel panics became much less frequent.”

Wow doesn’t that sound familiar. Are you saying those boys have those kinds of problems too when they change the entire architecture of their OS?

To the right you see a screen shot of what OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) looked like the year it was introduced.

I’ll let you draw your own opinions while we follow this timeline forward and compare the look, the innovations and the general market sentiments of the two OSes as they have blazed their way through the last decade. It’s not pretty at times for both, but I think you will draw the same conclusion that I do. Microsoft Windows has changed a great deal more than OS X in the last 10 years. The changes from Windows Vista to Windows 7 are not cosmetic, the power is in the code. Moving to the Windows Server 2008 Codebase is a huge win that should not be ignored because the buttons aren’t shinier.

February 2000 – Microsoft Ships Windows 2000

If I had to take a pulse, I would bet that until XP really matured, Windows 2000 would be considered the most stable Windows OS ever. I remember standing in awe at not having to reboot to change an IP address.

Now if you were to compare Windows 2000 to Windows 98 SE at this point, you might be tempted to follow today’s current media whirlwind and say “But Windows 2000 doesn’t look very different from Windows 98 at all, hell, it kinda looks just like Windows 95!”

But I am sure history and experience would tell you quite a different story. Windows 2000 was the first time I felt Windows was truly stable. The first time that the OS at heart was rock solid and performed it’s duties without getting in the way.

Of course you will remember, or at least I do, in the beginning there were huge legions of missing drivers. It took hardware makers ages to catch up, but when they did, it was a force.

Now at this point Mac OS X Server would be out for nearly two years before OS X would ship as a desktop product and the space between the initial launch of OS X 10.0 Cheetah and OS X 10.1 Puma would be a gap of mere months (March to September).

They boosted performance a bit and added DVD playback. It was released as a free upgrade to 10.0 users. In January 2002, Apple announced that Mac OS X would be the default OS on Macs. That’s a timeframe of less than one year before they made OS 9 obsolete.

Microsoft would later be lambasted for announcing the demise of Windows XP 17 months after Windows Vista shipped.

October 2001 – Microsoft Ships Windows XP

With the amount of petitions and users clinging to it, one could make an argument that Windows XP is the most beloved Microsoft Windows version ever.

Windows XP provided Microsoft’s first significant UI update since Windows 95. It was also quite different under the hood making for a stable OS that is still being used and will continue to be for several years.

Windows XP was also Microsoft’s first real entry into 64-bit operating systems. While 64-bit Windows wouldn’t catch fire until the release of Vista, the milestone is no less significant.

Windows XP has had 3 service packs in it’s lifetime and depending on the installed service pack, is scheduled to be supported until 2014.

In August 2002, just over a year after 10.1, Apple shipped OS X 10.2 Jaguar. In a years time they had introduced over 150 enhancements according to Apple. These amounted to a more performant operating system that was more stable but looked fundamentally the same. Sound familiar?

This was also the time when Apple finally let go of the “Happy Mac” logo and went to the grey apple screen that is now so familiar. CHIME ON!

It’s interesting to note that we have fast forwarded several years and while Windows has seen 98, 2000 and XP, Apple is still rocking 10.1. Sure numbers are semantics, but it’s hard to call anything up to this point revolutionary.

January 2007 – Microsoft Ships Vista

Wow, that was a big gap, 6 years, and one Microsoft caught a lot of grief for. That’s a hell of a long time to go without a new operating system for anyone. Of course we did update with three service packs in that time frame. The OS has been kicking along quite well for all this time and so much so that now that Vista is out, everyone wants to know why they should change?

The laundry list of changes to the UI and underlying framework for security and interoperability is huge, but to most people, it just looks pretty. It’s glossy, it has a totally new UI.

The hardware requirement bar has been raised quite a bit but for some reason those same people that have been rocking XP for 6 years on likely the same hardware, can’t figure out why the new one doesn’t run so hot. I could make a fair guess but that’s not the point of this post now is it

In October 2007, Apple introduced OS X 10.5 Leopard. While Windows Vista was sleeping, we skipped right past OS X 10.3 Panther and OS X 10.4 Tiger. Apple added more performance gains in 10.3 and what they called an extensive update to the user interface. I’ll let you be the judge.

10.2 Jaguar	10.3 Panther	10.4 Tiger

I can’t say I am seeing drastic changes here, especially not “extensive.” As a fair comparative, here is a fast forward comparison of Windows and OS X for the last decade.

	2000	2007
Windows
OS X

So there you have it folks. OS changes are incremental, it is what it is. In 10 years we have come a long way in both camps. Sure the truth is version numbers and screen shots don’t amount to much in the real world, but as pure marketing fluff, it’s easy to look at things this way and see the point I am trying to make.

Don’t expect Windows 7 to look drastically different. The changes aren’t always so close to the surface. Keep tuned for more open and honest commentary on it as it’s made available to play with.