THE MAC ATTACK!

Mac's OS X Tiger fails to deliver Stability.

March 4th, 2006

I began using computers at an early age. My first system was a Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping 4K of ram. That's right 4K! Computers have come along way since then and have become massively more complex. Over the years I graduated to C-64, then An Amiga 500, on to an Amiga 3000 and finally broke into the PC world once MS Windows came along. One system I could never afford and had little interest in was Apple's MacIntosh. However, after years of struggling with file size limits when dealing with editing video, I finally gave in and bought a brand new Dual Processor G4 with Mac OS X v1.4. This new operating system was supposed to promise a solid and stabile operating platform. In fact Apple's early Ads bragged repeatedly that it would not crash. Well as you can imagine it did crash! It crashed daily which left me angry and frustrated. Finally, after repeated attempt to solve the issue, the tech people at Apple determined that I had a bad CPU. Finally, I had hope. You know get the CPU replace and everything would work just fine. Well as you can imagine it didn't. I still experience regular "Unexpected Quit" errors for my $1200 video editing software Final Cut Pro 3. I was then told that I would have to upgrade my OS to the new version 2.0+ to solve the problem, an OS that incidentally came out just 1 month after purchasing my machine. In my mind, Apple knew they had released a terribly flawed product in the first OS, had

OS X TIGER

been working on a new corrected version, but dishonestly sold me the earlier, bad version anyway. As you might be able to imagine I was furious and being the stubborn person I was I decided that I would not spend another dime on an Apple product. Well, that was then and this is now. I caved and am now the not so proud owner of OS X Tiger. The latest and greatest version of OS X and guess what… Crash… crash… crash… unexpected quit… crash, and now a new thing. My state of the art dual processor Mac is screaming at me. Every once in a while the machine, not the speakers, lets out a piercing alarm sound, kind of like a fire engine, everything on the screen freezes and I have to manually shut the system down. Understand that none of this happened until the new OS. Nothing has changed but the operating system. So now I need to call tech support again and try to resolve this before my 90 day free support runs out. If it does run out, Apple will charge me $249 to extend my support coverage. Wish me luck and take my advice. If you're looking to buy a new computer, stick to a Windows based machine. They may not be perfect but at this point almost anything beats a Mac, even my old Commodore VIC-20.

-Richard Okelberry, Managing Editor