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My Apple purchase regrets

Paul Walker on December 16, 2021

I read an interesting article by Mark Ellis the other day which got me thinking about my biggest Apple purchasing regret. To be clear up-front, ...
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Ben Sinclair

I've bought three different versions of the ipod nano and two MacBooks over the years.

Two were good, one was dead on arrival, and when I got it replaced (next day), the replacement didn't enclude the engraved message I'd specifically had put on the original, and was clearly a used item put in a new box, no longer suitable for a gift.

One of the MacBooks was second-hand, and when I tried to upgrade its optical drive the machine bricked itself. I had been a laptop repair technicial for a few years at the point I tried.

The other MacBook was quite good, except that for the first month the WiFi didn't work for more than 60 seconds at a time, until Apple released a patch for it. I bought it for my partner, to replace the old one I'd broken. The experience pretty much put her off Macs entirely.

At one of my jobs, someone had their brand-new MacBook picked up, "repaired" and returned next day. They tweeted about it, saying how great Apple's service was. It was still broken, so they did it again. Another week, a third "repair". They continued to say how great Apple's service was, because what other manufacturer would be this responsive?

I said if it was any other manufacturer, I'd have had my money back by that point.

I don't hate all Apple products. Like I say, I liked the nano, and I appreciate a few things about the MacBook Pro I used for work. I just don't use the UI if at all possible; I SSH into it, use a real keyboard and mouse via barrier from my desktop PC, and pretty much use it as a docker server. It's decent at that, though docker is still an order of magnitude slower on a Mac than Linux if you're mounting large volumes from the filesystem.