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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.

If you read the likes of Gizmodo, EnGadget, MacRumors, etc., the new Microsoft commercial is leaving a serious wake. People on both sides are in a tizzy and it’s pretty entertaining.

Laptop Hunters #1 – Lauren

I thought I would put out the flames for a minute and look at this in a very pragmatic way. I am in an interesting place because I actually think for the most part, Apple laptops are a pretty fair price for what you get. The problem comes in when you evaluate what you get against what you need. If we were to build a scenario for this particular young woman, her usage needs might look something like this:

• Use Microsoft Office for Word, Excel and Outlook.
• Browse the Web
• Use an IM Client
• iTunes/Zune to manage a MP3 player
• Manage some photos

Wow, when you take out gaming, editing video and high end graphics work, the needs of your average computer user look pretty pathetic. So based on this particular user, let’s do a reasonable comparison of the PC that Lauren chose against the standard $999 Macbook.

*90% of users do not have gigabit Ethernet or N capable wireless networks.
**The display is really scenario dependant, I called the 17” a win because the user was wanting that, but I wouldn’t consider the 13” a disadvantage to most users.

Now for a second, let’s compare the MacOS/Vista debate. The fact is that more than 90% of the world runs Windows. It’s pretty hard to make a reasonable no fan boy argument that it doesn’t work or isn’t usable. The world runs on Windows, it’s just a reality. Vista SP1 is perfectly stable and reliable, I run it on several machines every day (along with 3 Macs so don’t go there.) So taking that at face value, in this case you are paying $300 more for a machine that is likely slower giving the anemic RAM and can hold half as much data.

For our core user, it breaks down like this:

• She can use Office on both although the Windows version is much more feature rich. To be fair Office is more expensive than iWork, but you get much more and it’s an industry standard. Big win for PC here.
• On either platform she has the option of Safari or Firefox, but IE is Windows only. Odds are she isn’t using anything that requires IE. Wash in most cases.
• IM client wise it’s a wash, with the exception if iChat, all the clients are cross platform. Keep in mind that it’s an 90% Windows world so most of your friends aren’t using iChat anyway. Wash in most cases.
• If you are using an iPod (which you probably are but should really check out the Zune, I just traded my 160GB iPod Classic for my second Zune!) then it really doesn’t matter. If you want subscription based music you better go PC. Wash in most cases.
• Managing photos has lots of options, lots of people will use Photoshop elements, Google Picasa, etc. Windows Live Gallery is a fantastic product and iPhoto is amazing. I would give the technical win in this category to Mac because iPhoto is so good, but in reality the scenario is just as valid on Windows Live Gallery. Wash in most cases.

So what does this all mean? It sounds like it all hinges on how important her Office needs are. If she is your average user making some simple spreadsheets and Word documents, then you can’t go wrong either way. If you need advanced Office work you might want to go PC. I am betting for Lauren it’s a Wash there too. Given that, we still have $300 bucks sitting out there.

Now I will recap a conversation I had with my dad this week. He is considering getting a laptop to replace his aging PC. Want to know what his budget is? He wants to spend around $500. That’s where things get more complicated. $1,000 is NOT the average personal computer budget anymore. Wal Mart sells perfectly “capable” laptops for $389. You can get net books for a few hundred dollars. I hate to bring up the word recession, but if there was a time where price mattered it’s now. It’s time the Apple Fan boys quit saying “but it has an aluminum case!” because nobody really cares.

UPDATE: My dad did buy a new PC, he decided to go with a desktop. He got an LX series Gateway desktop, 2.66Ghz Quad Core Intel, 8GB Ram, 640GB HD, Vista Premium 64, 1GB GT120 nVidia video, TV Tuner, 15-n-1 card reader, Remote..$779. That’s $179 more than the cheapest Mac you can buy.

The whole argument is silly. We bloggers, blog commenters, and flamers are all pretty tech savvy users. Of course we are going to want more from our computer than a $500 machine offers. We all pitched in to get my mother a $500 Dell for Christmas a couple years ago. She still loves it, uses it every day and it works just fine. Interesting…

(FYI, I wrote this on a PC sitting right beside an equally powerful iMac that I use most of the time. Why? Because I would die without Windows Live Writer. I would consider that proof that it’s the scenario that matters, not the machine.)

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.

A few of my Mac centric friends saw my blog post on Windows 7 and said that Aero Peek ripped off Apple’s Expose. Let’s make this clear, I have 3 Macs running OS X Leopard, I use them all of them time, and I think that makes me pretty credible to judge Mac OS X features. I have also been playing with Windows 7 for several days and have it installed on two computers that I use every day. I have some screenshots to display how Aero Peek and Expose’ look, and I’ll narrate how they work in case you aren’t using them.

Apple OS X Expose’

When you are using your Mac and have a bunch of applications open, a keyboard shortcut or hot corner will tile them out on your desktop like this

Ironically I don’t really use this feature much. I prefer to use Spaces to thumbnail all four of my virtual desktops and then select the desktop I want to use, organizing applications by sets instead of selecting from all available windows like this. Expose is also somewhat of an island in the sense that if you don’t choose to create a hot corner for it or remember the shortcut, you might not ever even notice it is there and use it. In my experience many users do not actually take the time to learn shortcuts so not having this hot corner enabled by default limits its exposure.

So what is Expose’ really? I would say that it is a beefy alt-tab for PC or cmd-tab for Mac. Ironically cmd-tab was not available on OS 9 and many claim that Apple stole it from Microsoft Windows, but that’s a debate for another day

Microsoft Aero Peek

Windows 7 brings us Aero Peek. Aero peek is integrated into the taskbar and adds several features to the mix. First and foremost when you hover over a running application’s icon in the taskbar, Aero Peek turns all other open windows transparent to draw focus to what you are highlighting like this

What’s powerful about this is that there are no shortcuts or hot-corners to assign, every application supports it and it’s default functionality. When you hover over any icon in the taskbar a thumbnail of that application is shown, no need to hit a hot key and see what it looks like, if you hover the thumbnail, all other windows fade to clear and that window retains clear focus at it’s actual size and placement.

That doesn’t sound or look like a copy to me. It’s a variation on ways to find open windows for sure, but these are concepts here, I think you have to go much further up the implementation stack before you call it copying.

Is it a copy?

In my opinion it’s not only not a copy, it doesn’t even serve the same fundamental purpose. Apple Expose’ is designed to show you all open windows and let you choose the one that you want to have focus. Aero Peek is meant to show you which window would have focus if you click it. Since you have already highlighted the window that is being shown, and the taskbar thumbnails are telling you textually which application or document it refers to, you aren’t using Aero Peek to select, you are using the taskbar thumbnails to select and then Aero Peek is showing you what the current selection is.

Sometimes OS X will show you a thumbnail in the dock, sometimes not. Windows 7’s task bar always shows thumbnails when you hover. So the Windows 7 taskbar is the tool you are using to select your application window.

For the record, Vista’s task bar had application thumbnails also. The thumbnails were not capable of showing a set of documents and windows related to that application however. If you compare the thumbnail view on the Windows 7 taskbar it’s actually quite superior for a few reasons:

• Windows 7’s taskbar displays all windows related to the icon you are hovering over grouped together. Expose’ has no concept of relation when you have several windows open so you see every window for every application in a big pile.
• Hovering over different application gives you a full size preview of the window you are hovering over no matter how many windows you currently have open. Expose’ thumbnails become less and less useful the more you have open because they get smaller and smaller.
• Right-clicking pinned applications give jump lists that allow you to launch the application in specific states or with specific documents already loaded. (Recent Items for example)

I think it’s interesting that Microsoft Windows had the taskbar long before OS X had the dock. When OS X released the dock, it was seen as being revolutionary, nothing else like it in the business. Microsoft comes along years later and makes some tweaks and refinements to it’s taskbar which basically boil down to taking the names off of the taskbar buttons and integrating the quick launch menu with running applications, and now people are blaming Microsoft for stealing the dock. I can’t figure it out to be honest, is the taskbar in Windows 7 so drastically different than the taskbar in Windows Vista that it’s turned to stealing from Apple?

Hopefully after looking at these you can see that the functionality is useful, well implemented and unique. The who copied who rhetoric is tired and old, if you want to get nasty about it, look at all the things one could make an argument that Apple stole from Microsoft.

• Is iWork a copy of Office?
• iTunes is a media player, did it rip of Windows Media Player?
• Is Front Row a poor copy of Windows Media Center?
• Cmd-Tab is the same as Alt-Tab in functionality and implementation.

I think that these things are the result of evolution of personal computing, not a board room full of developers saying “ooh, that’s awesome, we need to steal that.”

The best quote I have ever read was on a forum once, it said:

The only thing Microsoft ever stole from Apple was the personal computer market…

Ouch.

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”

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