Apple Apologist Deletes Discussion Post

Apple fans get a bit touchy when Windows users criticise their beloved Macs - I know, because I am one of them. But when, after two months of misery, I posted a response in the following thread, the post was deleted for containing 'Non-constructive rants or complaints':

Lion Flaky, Frequent Reboots

If there weren't thousands of posts on the discussions complaining of just what a pile of shite Lion is, it might not be so funny that officious fanboys feel that they have to resort to censorship.

My post:

Welcome to Club Disillusioned.

I have been using Macs for 27 years and I have never experienced such a frustrating couple of months. Every day, I am having to put up with problems which are being experienced by many others who have posted on here.

You will encounter a disperate band of Lion Problem Deniers who, lucky for them, don't have any issues - maybe they only use their Macs to watch YouTube videos and check their e-mail and don't have important work which is being jeopardised by an unco-operating system like Lion.

Installing it is the biggest regret in 27 years of Mac use. I hate it. I never had such a consistently slow, unstable, clunky, broken down computer in my life (including the pre-Mac years using a BBC Micro B and a Dragon 32). The SBBoD is a constant feature and every time I see it, I anticipate the relevant application or Finder to crash and I am sick to death of having to reboot just to get the WiFi working again. And Safari is just one massive bug with an icon and a .app suffix.

I have reinstalled Lion over a dozen times and look on here daily to seek out new, untried remedies - so, please don't suggest I zap the PRAM, repair disk permissions or any of the numerous other oft repeated tips!

If I hadn't had my escape back to Snow Leopard cut off by Time Machine being dysfunctional for a month and then destroying my Snow Leopard backups, I would not be lurking on here looking for answers!

The Experience Machine: The Above Average Driver Fallacy

In Radio 4's new series, The Philosopher's Arms, Dr David Geaney once more trotted out the truism about how ridiculous it is that the majority of drivers consider themselves to be better than average. If it hadn't been said in a forum for people to publicly flex their superior intellect, I would not be concerned but to hear the audience superciliously tittering was much too irritating for me to keep quiet.

This pompous myth can easily be exposed as a fallacy.

In its simplest form, if there were a total of ten drivers and nine were of, say, level 10 ability and one was level 0, the average would be 9, so nine out of the ten drivers would indeed be above average.

OK, so what if the levels were not so extreme? If nine were of level 6 ability and one was level 1, the average would be 5.5, so nine out of the ten drivers would still be above average.

But with tighter figures, it is also true, if there were four drivers with level 4 driving skills and six with level 6, the average would be 5.2, so still most drivers would be above average.

Unfortunately, the world seems to be run by people who falsely believe themselves to be of above average intellect. And this kind of sleight of hand has been frequently used expediently to massage statistics.

Covert Vaccination, Hobson's Choice and the Myth of Infinite Growth

Since the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination controversy, I have always wondered why it was necessary to have a triple vaccine in one injection, why those who objected to it could not opt for individual jabs. The issue seems to have been kicked into the long grass but it remains unknown whether Prime Minister of the day, Tony Blair, allowed his own children to have the MMR injection as he refused to answer any questions on the subject - though anybody with a modicum of analytical thought would deduce that had his children received MMR vaccinations, he would surely have said so in order to persuade other parents of its 'safety'.

MMR was an issue which, given that it was a dilemma faced by all parents of young children, was hugely controversial. But much less well known is another covert multiple vaccination programme which I only discovered literally by accident.

A couple of weeks ago I hacked into my hand with an axe whilst chopping wood. It was a bad cut which needed medical attention. I had the wound stitched up and was asked when I had last received an anti-tetanus injection. I could not remember but consultation of my medical records revealed that it was fifteen years ago and I was advised that given that the implement may not have been clean I should have the injection.

It was not until the needle was about to go in that I was told that the injection also contained diphtheria and polio vaccines. Under the circumstances, I don't think that I was in a good position to make a rational decision and was given the injection which I now know is referred to as Td/IPV. I had diphtheria and polio vaccines when I was a child but there is, apparently, no alternative. Had I been less anxious about the immediate situation, I would not have consented.

There is something deeply worrying that treatments are being bundled together in such a way. Not only does it seem unnecessary but it is a question of trust - not in the practitioners who are merely dispensing the only treatments they have at their disposal - but in a one size fits all pharmaculture, reminiscent, for me, of the sealed replaceable unit system of maintenance which was being introduced in the 1980s, that, for example, back then when a washer was worn out on my bike's gear changer rendering it unusable, I had to have the whole lever assemble replaced. But the gear assemble was integral with the brake assembly. Furthermore, they were only sold as a left and right pair. The company, Shimano, no longer supplied those gear/brake units (though the bike was only two years old), so, had it not been for a bike mechanic finding an old lever in a drawer, it could have meant buying a new bike. This adds a different perspective to the old adage, 'for the want of a nail, a war was lost'.

Is this a symptom of greed, laziness, arrogance, contempt or what? It fits very comfortably in my perceived scheme of mankind's oversized footprint trampling on everything in its path. It is, in itself, an illness but not one with a cure - for the concept of infinite growth of the economy is supremely sacred and the fabric of civilisation ostensibly depends on the its foolish belief in the myth.

OSX 10.7 Lion: A sign that Apple has overreached

On its website, Apple describes the latest operating system thus:

OS X Lion
The world's most advanced operating system advances even further.

At a rough guess, I'd say that about 20% of those who have installed Lion, if asked, would disagree with that statement. There are a few new user interface features which are a bit fun to use but with them came a torrent of problems and I'd bet that most of the 20% would gladly go back to Snow Leopard - if only it were possible. But I wonder how many are in the position that I am in, that my route back to Snow Leopard has been cut off by a Time Machine failure meaning that all my backups are now only Lion compatible and to return to Snow Leopard I would have to sacrifice my e-mail archive - which for reasons I won't go into, it wholly unacceptable.

I have a feeling that this could turn into a lengthy rant, so maybe I should make a preliminary bulleted statement to save any unnecessary bickering of the variety that has become a plague on Apple's Discussion pages:

• I am not an Apple newby, I have been using Macs since 1984. I have owned six and with them I have been through every Mac operating system.
• My current Mac is a MacBook Pro 17" Dual Core 2.66GHz 500GB (>250GB free) 8GB RAM so it is not underpowered to run on OS X 10.7 Lion.
• I have re-installed Lion at least a dozen times by various means.
• I have tried every procedure I know of and which has been suggested on Apple's discussions - numerous times with little or no noticeable results.

I have had many problems with OS X 10.7 Lion since I installed it.

I spent hours every day for weeks trying to find answers on the Apple Discussions pages and I have tried everything suggested. I haven't seen any posts where any of the issues I have been experiencing have been properly fixed.

I note that as of this moment there are over 20000 threads about Lion - just over two months since its release, compared with just under 85000 for Snow Leopard which has been out for over two years. Admittedly, many threads concern the novel ways which Lion is installed, but even so, I mean come on! Almost a quarter of the threads in a twelfth of the time? That's three time what might be expected.

There are many threads covering the same topics and I have tried everything in my armoury as well as every suggestion. I have given up asking for any more technical support from well meaning people who are simply repeating the same suggestions ad nauseam to a growing number of people who are getting increasingly fed up.

There are people who have had positive Lion experiences and people who have had bad Lion experiences. I only read the same repeated suggestions from people with good Lion experiences - I am yet to read of anybody who has had a bad Lion experience and has fixed it. And by bad, I don't mean that they can't get used to natural scroll direction and needed to be show how to change it in the System Preferences. I mean bad like startup still taking several minutes and applications being unresponsive for about ten minutes after first hitting the power button.

I just want to list the problems I have had and which I am still having nearly after over two weeks and having re-installed Lion several times by different means, App Store, Utilities Partition, burned DVD, re-download. Fixed permissions, ran disk utility, reset the PRAM, reset SMC, cleaned caches, booted in Safe Mode etc. etc. not just once or twice but many times each. I do not have restore windows selected and I always deselect 'Reopen windows when logging back in'. I have allowed Spotlight to fully complete its indexing on every installation - the last few installations I have completely left it alone for an hour or however long it took.

Reluctantly, I even removed my Windows partition - though I don't regret that now - but it was there for a reason. That was one of the main causes of installation problems that I had read about but it had not affected my installation. Anyway, I did two further Lion installations after that and it made zero difference.

My inventory:

• Slow startup, three minutes plus. The only way I have managed to reduce this my ten seconds was to turn off automatic login so that I didn't have to type my password.
• Can't use any applications for up to ten minutes after startup - constant spinning beach ball of death (SBBoD).
• Slow finder, frequent SBBoD when opening windows - windows are empty for up to thirty seconds.
• Slow scrolling. Just occasionally but extremely annoying. Sometimes it takes about thirty seconds to close a window.
• MacBook Pro gets very hot. I have had to buy a gizmo for it to sit on to allow more air to flow under it. It was never this hot under Snow Leopard.
• Save dialogue boxes also slow - also don't show folder content for up to thirty seconds.
• Frequent drops in WiFi - evident either as lost connection to server alerts or the new look Safari cannot connect page informing me that I am not connected to the internet.
• Video frequently freezing in QT and VLC. Strange garbled images when going to full screen - bits of desktop mangled up with bits of screensaver - incidentally, I selected Higher performance graphics in the Energy Saver preference pane but that didn't make a difference and seems to reset itself on every reboot.
• General video performance.
• My MacBook Pro does not go to sleep as per the settings in Energy Saver. It only sleeps when I shut the lid and never if I leave it open.
• Battery life is greatly reduced, probably due to the last point.
• Time Machine almost always active, mainly because it takes so long to start and cleanup but a 12MB backup can take 45 minutes. Then 15 minutes later it starts again.
• Many frequently visited web pages no longer look the same, particularly pages with embedded YouTube videos and images in frames, as much as half the video image is obscured. I have revisited with other browsers and they look fine. 
• Launchpad appearing empty with the words Looking for applications for ages after every reboot.
• Anything to do with Flash and Safari is messed up. YouTube controls don't work properly and they have the same odd behaviour in other things like Google NASDAQ graphs - the cursor is 'sticky'. This doesn't happen in Firefox.
• Pages randomly reloading - especially when using more than one tab. Very, very annoying when filling in forms etc. and you have to start again from scratch.
• Typing often freezes for several seconds, mainly in Safari but also in Text Edit.

Not to mention the Mail fiasco on my first installation. I lost everything and had to manually import everything from a backup.

Since reading about problems other people were experiencing several weeks ago, I have also noticed the following problems have started:

• Desktop icons arbitrarily shifting to the right of the desktop after restarting.
• Random full zooming of pages in Safari.
• Safari plug-in failure on pages with embedded YouTube videos.

And I am finding it more and more necessary to reboot because something isn't right, e.g:

• Applications not working correctly even after being relaunched.
• WiFi completely inoperative.
• Permanent SBBoD.

And I haven't the inclination to even start on the new 'features' which cannot be disabled.

So, are Apple going to fix it? There was a half hearted attempt with 10.7.1 released a couple of weeks ago which was supposed to address the WiFi issues but improvement was minimal. I had an e-mail from an Apple engineer (I assume he was an engineer) regarding the WiFi issue who asked me to run Apple's Capture Data application and send the results back, which I did. I received a further e-mail from somebody else requesting that I uninstall a number of applications which I do not have installed and carry out various actions which were irrelevant, e.g. related to network security - I live in the middle of nowhere and do not need any security on my network - everything is MAC controlled.

Eventually, I was invited to the Apple Software Customer Seeding Project which would allow me to try experimental software - as if Lion wasn't already an experiment which was out of control - with the caveat that, 'We do not recommend installing pre-release software on personal-critical and/or business-critical systems.'

There is no doubt that for many, probably mainly inexperienced, users who don't ask much from their Macs, Lion is a pretty funky enhancement to an expensive toy. There are evidently a lot of experienced users who are experiencing few if any issues - but of this group there are an irritating number who seem to act as volunteer freelance Apple groupies and troll the discussion pages telling Lion sufferers that they are in isolation and that the problem has nothing to do with Apple. I am pretty sick of these arrogant, smug, supercilious, haughty, overbearing, lordly, egotistical, supremos (or assholes for short) one of whom was nicely told, 'You're being an apologist with the attitude of a Fox TV reporter.'

This has been described as Apple's Windows Vista moment - though having never been so close to a Windows computer to have experienced what it was that provoked the comparison, I can only speculate that it is not a compliment. But for me, it signals a moment when, after years of being in the wilderness and maintaining the worthy status of the choice of creative professionals, the hubris of finding themselves at the top of the heap, with allegedly more money than the US Government, Apple thought it could deliver a half baked product and get away with it.