I HATE APPLE

WHAT DID HE EVER DO TO YOU??????????

All too true.

Apple replaced my new iBook's motherboard while I was in Japan. That's hundreds of dollars worth, at no charge to me. Of course, it shouldn't have failed within six months in the first place...

That's why they charge you double upfront!

Because I don't believe in a company making you pay for a warantee that should be offered for free upfront. I was under the impression that a one-year warantee meant that if something goes wrong in the first year, they actually fix the thing, not put you on the phone with several douchebags who are trying to sell you additional warantees.

Shit, when the first warantee doesn't seem to work, why would I want to buy another one?

But it does sound like you have a problem with your serial number, Jay.

tho when i was waiting there, i did see todd oldham.

My tech experience with Apple has been sensational. A friend called me today to tell me that his mini iPod was replaced in less than five business days, and he also got the new generation mini in place of his old one that had died. No charge.

I've dealt with Dell and Gateway and their CSRs are no better than Apple's. HPs can blow me, they've sucked.

the desktop I have at work running XP has been up and alive for 2 years with barely any reboots. It does everything I want it to do, does it quickly, and I can navigate painlessly without ever touching the mouse if I feel like it.

I was raised on Apple and my first job was DTP on a Mac, followed by audio editing on a Mac, more DTP, and so on. OS 7+ had more than its share of problems and stupid quirks but the hardware was rock solid and at least its behavior was predictable.

Since getting my latest-edition powerbook I've put it through little more than I ever tried to do with my old OS

...OS

My old Quadra used to have a TV Tuner in it and be able to do image captures from live cable broadcasts, then I could import them into my cheap, incredibly easy to use paint program and do whatever with them. I believe it cost approximately half of what my laptop did! My laptop lets me chat and surf the internet. And rip CDs.

Well today it decided it wasn't going to wake up again, ever, as I'm being greeted with a totally white screen.

What's funny is that like doing searches on my own to try to figure out wtf this computer is doing right now (I mean not even the sad face x-eye Mac or the question mark Mac! NOTHING AT ALL! WHITE SCREEN! I know how to handle the other things!), everyone who is reporting similar issues to me is like bitching about how they have all this important blah blah blah they were doing with the Mac prior hand. Is it that no one who has this failure who is only using their Mac for chat, porn, and MP3s can be bothered to get in on the discussions, or is it because they don't die if that's all you use it for? Because yeah, it seems like my sleep problem increases tenfold whenever I've been using my iBook more for writing or photo work. If all I've done on the damn thing is use iChat for two weeks, no problems whatsoever with starting it up, back when it, uh, started up.

What does this imply??? Is there like some inherent instability in the majority of the "native" programs that come bundled with OSX or is this just really fucked up coincidence?

Also it seems that this particular issue with the iBook G3 was so bad they threw the whole "your warranty is expired, give us $500" shenanigans out the window, and searching on this same issue with "Powerbook" has not given me the same results--ARE IBOOKS PIECES OF SHIT? wtf?

*with the exception of my ancient PowerMac that I had when I was 14-15-16, which only died because my sister is a dick.

I am pretty close to deciding to become the female Punisher, except murdering computer firms, instead of bad guys.

And then kind of ran away????

That was pretty funny.

i don't really have a stance on this issue, but what are you guys pining for, the clackety-clack of PS/2-era keyboards?

I am pining for the X60-era thinkpad keyboard, that was a gem.

i guess i type hard because i have a recent gen macbook pro and my wife says it sounds like a telegraph office

aside from the whole "they don't work" thing, the usual complaint is that travel is so low/bounce so small that they are painful to use (and very loud!)

I'm pining for a keyboard where the f and j keys haven't broken off completely

Nhex - I think the issue is that a certain amount of travel or tactile feedback is necessary to both trigger the "I've pressed the key" muscle memory along with stopping the motion without it feeling like your fingers slamming into something

I'm a light touch on keyboards and actually have the opposite issue where I'll just barely tap

A couple of years ago I bought a Unicomp replica of the IBM Model M keyboard, which is easily heavy enough to serve as a murder weapon, and I love the huge noisy full-travel keys. It works beautifully with my new iMac.

I do get a cool nostalgia trip with a big old ibm keyboard or replica that reminds me of the green screened card catalog computers the library had when I was a kid

Because time machine is not an off-site backup. Don’t know how much I’d trust anybody who just says use Time Machine! I use Time Machine and backblaze and have lots of stuff in Dropbox and google docs. Used to also use super super to clone my system drive for an even easier way to back up and restore system drive without having to deal with time machine.

― dan selzer, Sunday, 2 February 2020 00:33 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

the thing is happening again which caused me to take the laptop to be looked at (i.e. to the guy who said "just use time machine") -- viz the laptop tending to hang and the spinny disc, bcz backblaze seems to use a lot of memory? is there something else i can be doing to sidestep this? it's not the worst thing in the world but it's mildly annoying when i have 12-odd GB available and still getting intermittent memory-pressure red in the activity monitor?

in the incremental os updates lately some beachball spinning began to occur where it formerly had not, may not be in your control

maybe -- it just really reminds me of how it was behaving two years ago and i wondered if there's a thing i can do

are you sure it's backblaze that's lagging? i can tell that safari in particular has gotten worse, whether it's because of its own code or an os subsystem it depends on, so that it's obviously a side effect of upgrades.

mark how big is your HD? 12GB isn’t much free space on a, say, 500GB drive. rule of thumb is 10% free at a minimum iirc

tracer it's 120GB

xp to j.
well i don't use safari so it's not safari -- what i generally use in a working day are:
chrome: could be chrome! massive memory suck i believe!
scrivener: unsure, it now has a fvckton of docs in it tho most of them aren't in daily use
mail: lol i have unfiled emails going back 12 yrs in my inbox alone

plus spotify for when the wifi signal to my headphones isn't buggy which is not never :(

i wasn't getting problems before i turned backblaze back on but this exactly coincided with upgrading to catalina 10.15.2 so

if you know how to use activity monitor then watching cpu percentages when there is an obvious lag is a good index to what the actual cause might be. sometimes it's a surprise, though what you're doing when the beachball appears is a pretty good bet.

i use scrivener, probably not with the nightmare kind of projects you probably have stuffed into yours, and i have found it to be extremely well-behaved.

I would free up like 10GB more HD space and restart.

^ mr tech support here

a fair bet for the cpu to jump into the yellow if not the red (and the lag to be in effect) is when backblaze is backing up! it doesn't register on the monitor tho

lol the guy that dan deplores is the guy tracer (ages ago) suggested i go to

What the guy on Hackney Road? No if so I agree, he’s a jackass

Backblaze may be needing some disk space to do its copying operations is my hunch mark. Try giving it more room to maneuver.

i need a new guy tracer (not for this problem)

maybe i shd delete some of my [checks notes] roughly two million old emails what do you think

some of them go back to 2002, it's a resource

i have some from doomie

That’s important historical material!

There are better ways, large files and caches lurking back there. CleanMyMac is great but expensive. You can try CCleaner for MacOS which has a free version. You can also try doing an advanced Spotlight search yourself and see what files you’ve got that are larger than, say, 200MB

when backblaze is backing up! it doesn't register on the monitor tho

mark s, I have the same laggy issues with my MBP and Backblaze. I've got a fairly new SSD with plenty of free disc space (around 500gb), so it's not that that's the issue. I think simply it's that BB is resource hungry when doing its thing comparing the back-up files to the latest version of files on the MBP, and that it maybe gets more so as the size of the back-up increases over time. I got so frustrated at the slowing down I just changed the backup schedule in preferences to 'only when i click <back up now>', and I'll turn it back on every week or so and leave it running overnight to do the back-up.

that's weird tho - I have an old (2011) Mac mini and have been using Backblaze for years - and literally never noticed when it's doing its thing

my backblaze is also backing up a large external drive at the same time, would that add to the burden? i googled around a bit re this issue when i first posted here abt it and vaguely remember reading some procedure i cd do to possibly restructure* the process of "comparing the back-up files to the latest version of files" to make it less time-consuming -- when i have a moment i'll go look again and post it here so ppl can see if it's a good idea or a bad one

*in my mind i processed this as "re-arrange the boxes as they sit in the warehouse" just so you know what the non-computer hardware is we're dealing with here :) aka defragging i guess, since that's how i processed defragging back when it was a thing you had to do now and then (shd i still be doing it now and then?)

I have a new Apple Music problem: I can log into it on my iMac and iPad, but no longer on my iPhone - where I get an error message telling me that my apple id email address is not valid.

I could spend further hours fiddling round to see if I can solve it, or maybe just wait till the next IOS update.

It's worth checking from time to time that Backblaze is functioning correctly in the background. Mine stopped backing up after the Catalina OS upgrade, but without any indication. To their credit BB did alert me, but some time had gone by which could have been critical.

bit the bullet and bought a CleanMyMac license (partly out of spite since the hackney road guy said it was a useless waste of space lol and removed the free version for me last time i was there): now i have 16.6GB available which is better not worse i guess (a more detailed deletion will be v time-consuming and painful as it will have to be small stuff mainly but this is a start)

tracer i need a new guy

https://i.imgur.com/BwXBhAm.png https://i.imgur.com/FKf2UBY.png

lol ok this is my life now

*quits activity monitor*

OmniDiskSweeper is a good free tool for identifying which folders and files are filling up your Mac.

i restated to bed in the previous deletion-sweep and when it started up it also decided unasked to take 45 mins reinstalling catalina from scratch so i'm now at 20.8GB available

hullo spinny disc i haven't met you for 45 mins wheres it at

Awesome

CleanMyMac is a v good product imo

Definitely sus that your System Preferences were represented by the Chrome icon!!

Malwarebytes is free and totally worth running as well just in case a network of bots has decided to commandeer your computer for its own dark ends

lol i get quite a lot of that kind of flirty icon cosplay, is it bad? my ilx bookmark used to read "murder" (currently it reads "second")

things do seem a bit calmer and less bloated since i just switched the backup schedule to once a day (=overnight)

I've always stayed away from CleanMyMac because of lots of talk about malware being included and it being nigh on impossible to ever uninstall again? Don't know if there's truth to that but it scared me off. Are those reports off?

I don't use a lot of apps on my mac, as it's old and slows things down. One I do use, and might be of use for you Mark, is Memory Cleaer. It's free and fast. I set it to clean my memory every hour, and I have def noticed it improved performance.

*Clearer, to be cleaer

ppl who have encouraged me to use: cleanmymac: j darni3lle, t hand
ppl who have discouraged me: the annoying hackney road guy* (who didn't mention malware) and rumours LBI has heard

*tracer i need a new guy

stick w the first ppl obv (but give memory cleaner a try!)

this first backblaze backup, the bulk of which is off a pretty old external 2TB disk, is taking a looooong time, several days now. only 13k files left but 544GB, maybe it prioritizes the smaller files? & this is over a wired super fast connection. but future backups will be much faster. & it's nice to not have to worry about old external drives dying anymore.

Enjoying the real keyboard talk---how are Magic Keyboards?

Identical to the MacBook keyboard before it all went wrong. Nicely engineered piece of gear.

I use one everyday and it makes up for my irritations with the MBP keyboard. I’ve no particular issue with the action but is is ridiculously easy to double strike a key on the internal keyboard. Never happens with he the magic keyboard.

MBP is still miles better than the worst keyboard of all time, the original surface type cover which has no space between the keys so it’s almost impossible to type without looking at it.