Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

September 20

Well the dammage reports for Apple are in for the iMac official, but nothing sez - screw the user - like a stinkburger going into the refurbished column. In this case, it's MacConnection's refurbished iMac's going for 1000 dollars from defunct units that arrived DOA into retailers or end-user hands. Now before you think this is mere - couldn't find a boot-sector or crooked power button one of those chew on this. These days refurbished for all practical purposes means DOA - later. I got screwed by an online auction a little while ago for about 20 bucks for a Sony DiscMan that was being resold. It arrived "refurbished". Well with a one board, one laser wonder - there's not a hell of a lot you can do to "refurbish" it. I suspect that the drive motor was barely functioning, and the user returned it - and I got stuck with a machine that posessed the most common and most annoying problems specific to the electronics industry. Intermitent failure. That means the user can be pissed and return it - and the next user gets the same old shit when the factory can't make heads or tails of it. During a party - me and the guests turned the damn thing into an art project - using the pieces gathered from the room after we bashed the bejeezus out of it with a Stanley hammer that came with a lifetime warrenty. Suffice it to say - the hammer won. Who knows, perhaps I'll get double my money back from the thing once the sculpture fabricated from the parts is complete. In any case, I have to wonder. If the iMacs are failing less than a month after their introduction - in such numbers that re-retailers shelves are full of them for aftermarket specials - then I wonder how many people will end up getting screwed twice, and how many iMacs will end up as a "work of art" rather than a "work of design".

September 21
Macintouch readers are falling all over themselves wondering out loud how the fuck Apple can get away spewing sperm up the ass with every retailer and consumer in town with their new - turn away - policy regarding the "perfect" iMac with failures showing up all over the radar in record numbers. Numbers at least 12 points higher than the average mean failure rate for the industry that makes "substandard" Wintels anyway. Well besides this being a total case of the usual suspects biting the hands that feed them one of those, it's also the easiest ground to land Apple into the courts once again. The last time a computer company fell short of the mark recently was Gateway. They paid a shitload of bucks when a cadre of users decided that they were full of shit for something as minor as the use of the word "warrenty". Lord knows, their computers weren't dying left and right - it was the fact that they thought GateWay promised people would come to their house to fix the units that didn't measure up. Now we have iMacs cacking left and right - total flatline mode. I have the sneaky feeling that Apple - with this minor "surge" in consumer sales - may have bought off more than they can chew. With people looking for easy money with lawyers - this is not a good thing. Particularly when state and federal laws protect consumers against DOA purchases under 30 year old consumer laws that Apple doesn't have the time to bother with these days.

September 22

One iMacintouch reader wonders out loud - with all the product failures and the abject stupidity going on at Apple tech support - how the fuck a first time buyer would feel - or worse - an (alleged) PC convert. Well whoop de shit. So do I! Imagine, if Apple really is selling to new users - rather than tennacious fans (otherwise known as freaks) - then there's going to be a ton of bad press if they keep finding their computers are going belly up. Recent press indicates falures approaching the 25% mark, with a base failure rate of 18% reported from the people making them. This is not a good figure, and Apple has NEVER had a good raport with quality. Because here's the deep dark dirty secret. Apple is good at product design - but their follow through has sucked since Woz stopped designing computers for Apple. The first Macs right up to the Mac Plus had been notorious for bad analog boards and failure of the flyback transformers. The followup Macs like the II series had lousy hard drives and cheap ADB ports that would blow and require board replacement. All Macs - except the iMac - have had wonderful horror stories on SCSI failure and lousy internal SCSI configs. Even my last Mac, a Quadra 800, was misconfigured from the factory and had published memos on rewiring the internal SCSI connectors to avoid perpetual crashes. The real mayhem began when the product line expanded at Apple to such a degree that single component falures blossomed to build failures from all the lines being re-oriented on a weekly basis. Hence, you had exploding monitors, flaming powerbooks, performas dying left and right. The difference is when Apple was at it's worst, it was still just a status-quo thing with the current user base that was accostomed to such things. Now, you can bash Microsoft all you want, but Dell, Gateway, and IBM have some of the lowest defect yields in the business. Suffice it to say - my ThinkPad is a tank and has outperformed every Mac I'd been forced to use over the last decade-plus. If "new users" are snapping up defective - or near defective - iMacs and are then finding themselves waiting for repair, while their neighbors who got a new low-end Compaq or IBM are humming along - people are going to be pissed. And they're not going to be pissed at IBM. Suffice it to say, word of mouth is still the most powerfull marketing tool out there - but it cuts both ways. You can spout numbers till you're blue in the balls, but if word gets out that users are getting burned, it's going to be the start of many flame jobs directed to Apple. Certianly the MacMarines are going to have their hands full "correcting" misinformation in the near future.

September 23

Speaking of MacMarines, retail and "real computers", I just have to stop a moment and soak in the warped wierdness as it happens. Bear with me, it'll only be a moment. In recent and redundant chatter the "Marines" have been taking note of store displays, CompUSA, sales people, and if they're computers were working in the first place (meaning had anyone recently gone over to un-crash the ever crash-prone Macintoshes on display). Pathetically, they still can't find their "perfect store". To date - the lousy displays are still out doing the good ones showcasing Apple computers about 6-1 storywise. Now who's fault is this anyway? Is it because Apple can't build a computer that doesn't crash every hour and needs constant attention to be at it's best? Or is it CompUSA for getting itself into this mess to begin with? Al Pachino - in one of his best recent movie scene's - declaired, "Free will - it is a bitch". This doesn't just extend to how stores conduct themselves presenting Apple computers - but for the customers as well. Now I don't advocate "crashing" Macs on display intentionally (lord knows, they can do that by themselves just dandy), but there have been people who have been "tinkering" with display computers on the Apple side to keep them trashed. Although one story from the MacMarines portends this actually is the case, the real truth of the matter is that computers on display usually degrade with kids running amock and hammering away on them. Hell I used to do it when there were Trash80's and C64 around. None of this is new. However the MacMarines are now putting their conspiracy theorys into overdrive and are acting as bad as the PRMC, in monitoring the activities of people who approach Apple displays and computers. I offer this warning to all users out there. There's a pack of fucking fruitbats stalking the CompUSA aisles, making sure nothing bad happens to their machines - or that they're corrupted by prospective customers. If you want to stay safe, I suggest you stick to the Wintel sections where the MacJihad only rarely venture. I'm almost certain that the next reports from the MacMarines will involve tailing people out to their cars and possibly to their homes to make sure the Mac was always "at it's best" and not manhandled by it's owner. Because once a precident for stalking has emerged - anything's possible.

September 24

During gushy praise for Apple computers from the Washington Post's Elizabeth Corcoran makes note of the fact that in spite of recent events at Apple - balanced reporting dictates mentioning that the software situation is still a dire one for Apple as well as the overall outlook for Apple. Now aside from muscling in on my turf - the real juicy soundbite of the day was "unless software publishers help with the current situation, this is a gonner platform". Ouch - that's gonna leave a mark in the morning for the MacJihad! Well of course the MacMarines went ballistic and within 48 hours was spamming the living beejezus out of one of Apple's most influential fans in the print media world. The rebuttle was even more harsh - and of course contained something that this site loves - and the MacMarines (and MacJihad in general) hate. Factual numbers. Well, here's the one's reported in a rebuttle via e-mail to the MacMarines digest. In a tome delivered under the heading "The iMac is attracting many new users, but so are sub-1000 dollar PC's", we find DataQuest numbers showing that 7.7 million Wintels were sold in the 2nd Quarter, and out of those 35% were sub-1000 dollar models. Within those that were sold, 3/4 of them were purchased by new users. That translates into 2.2 million new users of computers - now using Windows. Apple in it's best wet-dream hopes to sell 1 million iMacs by the end of the year (two quarters worth), and perhaps 15% at the most optomistic (and unrealistic) targets for new users. That puts Apple on track to counter a mere 2.2 million new Wintel users - with 150,000 new users parked behind an iMac. So I guess the responses that have been cascading around the Jihad these days about Apple pushing into new market territory are very well possible. And with numbers like these - I think Apple's just increased their death spiral faster than NeXT.

September 25

Eric J. Adams of eMedia Weekly (formerly the print edition of MacWeek), reports on some juicy bits about Quark's meager forays into the high-end publishing world. You remember the publishing world don't you? That was the market that was keeping Apple in business. It seems that while the New Yorker magazine has made the transition to full-workgroup publishing with QPS, they haven't found it all the solution that it was cracked up to be. According to eMedia, QPS has turned into a 80/20 solution. That is, it's only an 80% fit for the normal work-flow habits of the magazine. Now that doens't sound too bad for a software package that's mind-bogglingly expensive and is customized for each and every installation - but it means that at least 20% of the software is worthless and is not even used. But then this isn't news because Quark, for nearly a year now, hasn't had a printed publication concern from their own walls. First they had X-Ray magazine, which broke off and went to California and then sputtered out of existance. Then there was the newsletter XPressions, which was cast off during a publicized re-org in 1997. So suffice it to say, one might "wonder out loud", if the reason that QPS is falling short of the full 100% mark with publishers and workgroups, could be an open indictment at Quark's own lack of hands-on expereince in such matters. One thing is for certain. The publishing world works on many different models. Those models change, and are dictated on productivity and ability to meet publishing deadlines. If Quark continues to distance itself from providing solutions that are otherwise 100% spot-on with existing methods through sheer ignorance, there's going to be another casualty from the cornerstone member of the Apple publishing camp.

September 26

Charles Piller of the LA times, a former editor for MacWorld magazine, has gone down with the ship in his ability to inject Apple news and columns into one of the larger west coast media concerns. In his last column, he notes Apple's history of internal bullshit which has been echoed in several books and uses an example of a software house that produced a MacOS 040 emulator for the PPC, which would have provided much of the versitility of Copland, and eventually the 400 million dollar vaporware that came alon with the NeXT purchase. Of course this software publisher was squashed like a bug by Apple (and you thought only Microsoft had preditory software policies?). He wraps up the tirade and nostalga for the good old days by accusing Apple of "believing it's own bullshit". This is certainly obvious to me, but he takes it a step futher by mentioning that the whole Apple ball of wax is both "facinating and exasperating". Fucking bingo! Someone send Charles a cigar and my URL please. Because now you know why I'm here writing these words every couple of hours a weekend.