Apple Frustrations
I cannot express how frustrated I am with lousy quality Apple products.
Apple’s slogan used to be “It just works”. Well, Apple with the latest release reliability is worse than Windows.
My iMac running MacOS crashes ten times a day. I am having files get corrupted. I must forcibly power-cycle my computer every time. It’s ugly.
The problem is a bug in Apple’s PDF viewer. When viewing certain PDF files that are B&W the viewer will either lock up or (most of the time) lock up my entire computer. Just opening the PDF file is enough to crash the entire operating system.
Apple technical support is no help. I have sent the files to them and they have confirmed that their systems also crash when opening them. They have looked at the PDF files and they are just fine. The files open up just fine in Adobe and other 3rd party viewers. But when you open the file in Apple’s preview your computer will lock up.
Apple technical support has no sense of hustle. They will get back to me days later with almost stupid requests. (“Try opening the file in a different user account.”) It’s a stupid time wasting step because the same file crashes both my desktop and laptop computer and their computer. So, how is it possible that a different account on my system would matter. (It didn’t.) Really, I don’t get any sense of interest or urgency.
I’m not alone in the pain on this. Fujitsu issued a warning to their customers to not upgrade to Sierra (“users should not upgrade to macOS Sierra”. Fujitsu said that the issues, “are related to the PDF engine embedded in MacOS.” There’s no workaround yet”) This type of warning was unheard of in Apple products until recently.
This isn’t the only problem I am having with Sierra. But it is a big one.
I switched to Mac products when I was frustrated by Windows constantly crashing and needing attention. The past five years have been blissful. I never had a system lockup or crash. Mac stuff just worked. But now macOS is unreliable and crash-prone and doesn’t “Just work.”
I miss the days of Steve Jobs. He may have been a tyrant, but it was for the sake of all of us users. Time Cook is a nice man, and he doesn’t fluster over details like unreliable products.