An Open Letter to Apple Computers

Dear Apple,

I’m starting to feel a bit let down. I spent a lot of money on this Mac Pro, and spent even more getting the upgraded graphics card. Turns out that was a big mistake. Sure it gave me faster video usage in the first 6 months of owning it, but after that… well, let’s just say things started to drop off. Pixel corruptions and random and instantaneous restarts because of the video card overheating. And what recourse do I have? I could buy a new video card. But then I’ll just get the same one I have now. The one that stopped working long before it should have. The one known to have this problem. The video card that would cost me 1/3 as much if I bought it for Windows. The video card that was one year out of date when I first got it. So why are you marking up the cost of this card so much, and refusing to let me buy a video card from another source? For that matter, why does my Cinema display with the exact same panel as two of my Dell displays cost twice as much? Sure, it’s prettier (barely), but my Dell displays can turn sideways in their stands. My Cinema display can’t do that. You keep talking about how form is function, but being pretty at the expense of functionality doesn’t sound a lot like function to me. It sounds more like you’re kind of being complacent and using the lack of competition in the software realm as a reason to not push yourselves in the hardware realm.

My dear friend Apple, I am not a recent Mac convert who isn’t accustomed to the way you operate yet, nor am I the long-time customer who used the original macintosh and have decided to be grumpy by nostalgia. I own 3 macs (4, if you count my work computer), and have been for 4 or 5 years. My first mac was an iBook that I purchased refurbished, and was at the bottom of the line even then. I used it daily for 4 years. I then gave it to my friend, who has been using it daily since then. It had an apparent robustness that I’m not seeing in this professional workstation that I spent nearly $4,000 on.

Oh, that reminds me. You’re lucky I can get fairly priced RAM from third parties. Otherwise I’m not altogether sure I wouldn’t have hacked Leopard onto a PC box by now.

Instead I have a video card that you refuse to acknowledge a problem with. Sure, it’s out of warranty, so you’re not obligated to replace it. But you could at least admit that it’s a problem, and offer an alternative. And no, Apple, a $1,500 professional CAD video card isn’t an acceptable alternative.

In short, Apple, your software department is better than ever. Leopard, Final Cut Studio, Aperture (although this could use 2.0 revision), your iLife suite: they’re all excellent tools, but you’re starting to leave us hanging on the hardware end. Step it up, or I’m teaching myself Linux.

Your friend, and source of income,
Peter Boysen

Update:

Within half an hour of writing that post, my computer became unable to maintain functionality even while idling because of the video card overheating. I have thus reverted back to using the entry level video card, which while not as fast, seems to somehow actually work far better than the one that cost 4 times as much as it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.