An Email to Tim Cook

I come out of my lecture and I walk to the library and pick the spot I most love to sit at, with the view of a woods in the distance. I open my most priced buy by far, my MacBookPro. A machine I have literally dreamt of owning for about 3.5 years now since I first started using one at work in 2009. I consider it by the far the best computer to have or work on. Something that gives you the best experience of using a machine. It’s like what I would’ve felt owning a Porche or a Mercedes S class if I had the money. Or for a person who loves speed to own a Lamborghini Gallardo.

A computer science student from India, at a University in the US, I came here with a laptop I owned with pretty good configuration for it’s age, and in a good condition again for it’s age of 4 years. All it probably needed was a formatting of the hard disk and clearn installation of a Windows or Ubuntu. I still chose to take this opportunity to buy a Mac and persuaded my parents to pay $1400 for a machine they don’t even know about, for a machine I just simply dreamt of owning one day.

Today I sit with it in my library and I open the lid to see The Beatles staring at me from the desktop and I open the browser and type in the most used URL www.facebook.com. And it throws a “Page not found” with reasons of the DNS server not responding and suggestions to change settings in the Preferences panel. I look at the wireless icon right away and it shows a slow search for networks. It finally settles and darkens all the lines in the signal icon. I press “Command+R” to refresh the page, the same error page is thrown back. I go to the left of my screen and pull up the Dock and click on System Preferences. The mac takes a grueling 30seconds to launch System Preferences. I then check the network preferences and see nothing new. The settings have not be played around with, why of course, since it was working at home half hour ago. I look around to see if the others sitting in the library, to assess if the library network has suffered a failure. I notice everyone is hooked to their macs or PCs and working, which means, the network is fine, which also means my Mac isn’t responding properly. Having faced this situation in the past a few times and without a solution, I decide to restart my machine. It reboots and still no improvement. I’m dejected. I shut the lid pack off to grab a coffee to drive away the disappointment, but it stays even after a few sips of a French Vanilla.

 

It has been a month since I bought this machine and a year since I last used a Macintosh OS. Yet I was most excited buying this machine and expected the most out of it, and out of the Mac OS X 10.8 Snow Lion. But disappointment struck when my friend who also owned a MacBookPro used my mac and termed it slow. I realized the same when I used her MacBookPro which has Mac OS X 10.7 on it.

I decided to call up Apple Support for assistance on getting this fixed. Issues like regular failure of wireless device to detect and connect to networks, recovery of the OS on opening the lid after it’s gone for a sleep, of slow response every time System Preferences is opened, of super-slow switching of applications when there’s no heavy applications active (like Eclipse, VMWareFusion, Virtual Box etc), Application launches taking gruelingly long times, Youtube running extremely slow, online movies streaming slower than a Windows PC, etc.

 

I was recently working on a project on an Ubuntu machine installed on a Virtual Box. It was around the time I had called Apple Support for assistance regarding the performance. I was advised to upgrade the OS X 10.8.0 to 10.8.2. I did so, it took about 20 min to execute the update, and on logging in, I found the VirtualBox application not launching, since it wasn’t allowed to launch an image. I was stumped! I had a submission the next day and here my Mac upgrade had just give up on me. I did a Google search only to find that it was a Mac-wide problem with 10.8.2 release. Another disappointment. Lucking VMWare had just come up with a new product Fusion, which worked okay with the new OS X release, and I could proceed, but I lost 1.5 hours in the re-setup of the whole environment.

These are a few of the multiple instances of disappointment I have faced with the OS X 10.8 release.

I then decided to downgrade my OS to 10.7. I read in a couple of tech blogs that apparently you are disallowed to do that !

What then am I supposed to do about this issue? I am at the verge of thinking of reselling my MacBook. It’s just been over a month since I bought this machine and I am thinking of formatting my PC and going back to Windows, since at least Windows XP is stable and doesn’t throw up surprises as much as every release of OSX seems to be doing.

I’m not the greatest fan of Apple, I don’t own any Apple devices except this MacBook, but I still am a fan, I did order Steve Jobs’ book pre-release so I could be one among the first few readers of the book on the life of this man who created this wonderful company and such wonderful products. But it’s sad to see that within a year of his demise, the company is already losing it’s charm. That his dream of building a self-sustaining company isn’t seeming to get closer to reality. Guess Windows is still faring better with the new Windows 8 looking to be really good, flashy and fast.

I am going to have to continue using this laptop (sorry I don’t like calling it a MacBook) since I spent a good amount of my dad’s money to buy one, and reselling it might not fetch me a great deal of money, I will not be as passionately endorsing this as I used to all these years. I’m sorry Mr.Tim Cook, but I guess there’s something missing here, you’re losing on your customer base, on the very basis of what the company was setup on, customer satisfaction and building the best ever products on earth.

-A dejected Macintosh Fan!