Apple OS X shortcomings got you down? Read some Windows 10 blog posts to cheer up

Often lately I think about how evil Apple is. Here’s a short list:

• Apple doesn’t pay their taxes. And Tim Cook is proud of it (secret, illegal tax deals hidden from the Irish taxpayer and the EU). 
• Apple puts fake humidity paper triggers in both iPhones and MacBook Pros to attempt to avoid responsibility for repairs. (Actually happened to us, I have photos of a MBP 13″ with no internal water damage but with the humidity papers changed colour on which Apple tried to get away without doing the repairs under the $300 Apple Care we purchased for the MBP.)
• Apple releases beta software which creates endless trouble for naive end users who update to the latest version of the OS without thinking. The Yosemite discoveryd networking replacement wasn’t pulled until 10.10.4 when good old mDNSresponder was reinstalled. Six months of hell for nothing.
• Apple prevents developers from creating backwards compatible versions of their programs (if you use any of the recent Xcode tools, you have to create completely different versions for older versions of OSX, maintaining a completely separate development environment). This basically harasses developers into doing the wrong thing.
• Apple prevents established long term app developers from releasing good products (their products require some tiny permission to function) while making it attractive for copycat Chinese developers to flood the app store with really second rate programs you wouldn’t want to see on Windows 2000 let alone Mac OS 10.11. This makes life hell for long term Macintosh developers and confusing for Mac users (the Mac App Store is a horrible place to search for software as there are so many crappy duplicate titles).
• Moving back to all proprietary ports. MagSafe 1 was brilliant. I guess Apple didn’t have enough patents on it so MagSafe 2 had to be released with more encumbrances on third parties. Or maybe Apple just thought it would be really fun to screw over its long time users and make them buy all new chargers (we have about seven chargers in this family: two at work and five around the house). Thunderbolt is pretty Apple specific and goes through iterations absurdly fast, outdating expensive hardware add-on.
• Removing all ports from the latest products, making people buy all new devices or travel with a ridiculous set of dongles. This is taking computing back to the era of the Apple PowerBook Duo (I had one of these, I know about this first hand).

Image © Stephen Hackett

• Refusing to make a modular anything. Every Apple computer you buy now is a complete throwaway if it breaks outside of Apple care. Just replacing the battery in that MBP 13″ meant replacing the entire top of the computer including battery, keyboard, trackpad, housing. The replacement trackpad still doesn’t work properly. This whole policy of throwaway computers is extremely green unfriendly from a company who is historically popular with the granola crowd (I’m in that crowd).
• No Mac Pro since 2012. The trash can/Darth Vader circular portable is not a pro desktop. You can’t change the video card or add any internal storage. When anything dies (and the video cards fail all the time as there is not adequate ventilation if you run both processors and video cards hard for an extended period of time, doing say video rendering), it’s Sayonara in most cases.
• Removing valuable pro features like software RAID.
• Preventing local sync of applications like Contacts. All your data has to go back to the mothership into iCloud if you want sync (Apple actively had to remove the local syncing options). iCloud is hosted in the United States where as a non-American citizen (and even as an American citizen if you’ve ever telephoned or emailed outside the United States) you have almost no privacy rights. Not only is this wrong, it’s basically illegal in Germany but Apple does it anyway.
• Phoning home without permission. If you install OS X from scratch, denying Apple any communication with Apple and add Little Snitch, you’ll see that all your user data is sent back to Apple right away after install. 
• Killing important pro apps like FCP Studio, Aperture, Shake on which creators and whole studios had built businesses.

I could go on but I promised a short list. In any case, just when you thought a computer OS company couldn’t get any worse, you might happen across some posts of a photography expert who uses Windows 10. What was Jim Kasson (it’s not his first rodeo) thinking when he installed Windows 10 on his new Lenovo portable? He agreed to Windows 10 updates, here’s what happened:

The machine reboooted several times and the whole operation took about 15 minutes. When I finally got the logon screen back, I couldn’t log onto the domain. I got this message:

“The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship.”

This is astonishing. Kasson was locked out of his own computer for doing an update!

I couldn’t log on to a local account, either. I got a message saying that the user name and password were wrong.

I did a little web research. Microsoft is admitting that this is sometimes a problem, and their recommended solution is to boot the computer with Win 10 installation media, and select repair.

This didn’t work either. Kasson had to do a full reinstall and if he didn’t follow the fine print he would have erased his whole disk.

When I finally got the computer booted off the Win 10 installation image, I didn’t see a menu. Instead, I get a window that said: “It looks like you started an upgrade and booted from the installation media. If you want to continue with the upgrade, remove the media from your PC, and click Yes. If you want to perform a clean installation instead, click No.”

Well, that was revolting. Two choices, and neither of them what I wanted. I tried saying Yes to see if there were any choices down the line, but there weren’t. I took the media out and clicked Yes, and the computer booted from the SSD into the same logon screen that led nowhere.

I went back to the screen with the two bad choices and told it to do a clean install, hoping there would be a chance to rescind that decision down the line. Turns out that there is. You get a screen with a big Install Now and a little tiny Repair label down in the lower left corner. Breathing a sigh of relief, I clicked on it.

On the next screen, I clicked on Troubleshoot. On the Next screen, I picked Command Prompt. That is supposed to activate the hidden admin account. I then booted Win 10 off the SSD and attempted to sign in as the Administrator. I got the message: Your account has been disabled, Please contact your system administrator.

Seven months later, the Windows updates were still broken. Months later Kasson discovered what the issue really is. Labelle who seems to work at or with Microsoft but is a kind soul left Kasson the required tips in a comment:

As explained in the first post, yes, just wipe your computer.
Put all your files in OneDrive if not already (this one is really a no brainer honestly).

Wipe it, log in with your credentials, install first applications of the Store for what you need. And only then, install what you cannot find in the Store so maybe special photo / video editing software and that’s it….

In less than 2 hours, you will have a working computer.

The price of a working computer on the “free” Windows 10? Two hours out of your life and storing all of your files on Microsoft’s servers (OneDrive).

I feel better about our five Macs at home and ten Macs at work now. Installing Mac OS X doesn’t yet require a license key or being online. You can move your whole startup drive between desktops and portables with no issues (lots of third party software like Adobe will go crazy of course and require re-authorisation).

AK00SK

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.