Why the heck does Apple say Macs Don't Crash!! !

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gamefreak
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03 Aug 2008, 2:32 pm

Funny. Apple Claims that Microsoft is the face of all evil. Microsofts products are buggy and crash often. Apple also protrays M$ as a evil corporation. However i'm going to get to the truth and that is that Macintoshes and just as bad as Windows in most cases and in fact give more fatal errors. At least most M$ errors can be fixed easily.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqKNNLad ... re=related



alex
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03 Aug 2008, 3:19 pm

where does apple say that macs don't crash?


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JerryHatake
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03 Aug 2008, 3:31 pm

Pretty much anyone who believes their commercials which are not true at all because they can to get viruses as well. The computer experts know more about Macs and Windows than a consumer. If Apple says something that can't happened to a Mac then it will happen to a Mac because computers aren't invincible to anything at all.


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wolphin
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03 Aug 2008, 5:37 pm

Of course macs sometimes crash. I've gotten the grey screen a couple times.

But "just as bad as windows"? My mac crashes about once a year and that's it. I last rebooted about 30 days ago (to install updates) and haven't crashed/rebooted since. It's the most stable OS I've ever used (though linux is a close second)



Fogman
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03 Aug 2008, 9:56 pm

The MSDOS based versions of Windows would crash quite a bit. XP OTOH wasn't a bad OS at all as far as stability was concerned. My housemate had initial problems with Vista, though apparently that's been solved and he hasn't complained about it.

I would assume that because OSX is based on BSD Unix, it would be quite stable, though even sometimes *nix systems will crash, like any other OS. With Linux, I've never seen a kernel panic, though I've had apps lock up a desktop session to the point where you couldn't crtl-alt-backspace to a console and restart x. --I had to manually halt the system and reboot.

Sytem stability has come a long way in the past 10 years or so with major closed source vendors, however Apps can still destabilise a system no matter what OS your using.


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gamefreak
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03 Aug 2008, 10:00 pm

alex wrote:
where does apple say that macs don't crash?



In the Mac OS [Tiger and Leopard] when the computer has an icon to connect to server running off Windows it displays a beige model computer displaying the blue screen.Also Apple claims in its Ads Windows crashes more than OSX.



http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/



gamefreak
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03 Aug 2008, 10:05 pm

Fogman wrote:
The MSDOS based versions of Windows would crash quite a bit. XP OTOH wasn't a bad OS at all as far as stability was concerned. My housemate had initial problems with Vista, though apparently that's been solved and he hasn't complained about it.

I would assume that because OSX is based on BSD Unix, it would be quite stable, though even sometimes *nix systems will crash, like any other OS. With Linux, I've never seen a kernel panic, though I've had apps lock up a desktop session to the point where you couldn't crtl-alt-backspace to a console and restart x. --I had to manually halt the system and reboot.

Sytem stability has come a long way in the past 10 years or so with major closed source vendors, however Apps can still destabilise a system no matter what OS your using.



Most of the errors Macs get are kernel panics.[If you watched the video.]



Vexcalibur
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03 Aug 2008, 10:23 pm

If the ipod is a sample of apple's usual quality, I'd say Macs really crash, in the worst moment possible, really, that little gadget is so far the tiniest computer with the ability to crash I have actually seen so far...


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Orwell
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03 Aug 2008, 10:39 pm

Apple doesn't claim their computers never crash, just that they do so less frequently than computers running Windows. Which is true- I have never, in several years of use, seen OSX crash. Applications have crashed, but the system is resilient.

Apple FAQ wrote:
Is a Mac reliable?

When you buy a PC, you’re buying hardware from one company and an operating system and software from other companies. Not so with a Mac. Because Apple builds both the computer and the software that comes with it, they’re literally made for each other. This means that a Mac rarely freezes or crashes. Occasionally an application might quit, but it won’t affect the rest of your system. And Mac OS X resists most viruses, so you can do anything — without worrying about losing everything.

They said "rarely," not "never." But it's good enough that they can say "almost never." They took huge chunks of code from FreeBSD to make it, so it has a lot to offer in the way of stability. It even seems more stable than Ubuntu Linux, but that's probably just because I'm new to Linux and likely doing stuff wrong. :oops:

Oh, by the way: when an application crashes, you usually don't lose your work because it can still recover whatever you were doing. "Time Machine" does an automatic back-up at regular intervals to reduce the risk of losing something.


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Enigmatic_Oddity
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04 Aug 2008, 12:08 am

I don't know about Macs, but my iPod Touch crashes constantly, requiring a hard reset. Sometimes several times daily.



z0rp
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04 Aug 2008, 1:20 am

Apple never said their computers never crash, but they do substantially less than Windows PCs. And 99% of the crashes are little quits from Applications, and that's rare but it's nothing too serious. The worst thing that'll happen is a kernel panic which is caused by overheating, incompatible hardware or if the hardware is old.



RustyShackleford
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04 Aug 2008, 2:20 am

This particular mac has been on constantly (apart from one power outage which just caused it to reboot) for about the last three months and the worst that has happened for a long long time is having to force quit crappy freeware. I have only ever managed to crash OS X three times that I can remember in the 5 or so years I have been using it; I would call that a pretty good average.

In my experience the OS X version I use (10.4.11 cheetah or whatever stupid name they gave it) rarely panics and is wonderfully stable. I have not used any of the more recent versions.



z0rp
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04 Aug 2008, 4:32 am

RustyShackleford wrote:
This particular mac has been on constantly (apart from one power outage which just caused it to reboot) for about the last three months and the worst that has happened for a long long time is having to force quit crappy freeware. I have only ever managed to crash OS X three times that I can remember in the 5 or so years I have been using it; I would call that a pretty good average.

In my experience the OS X version I use (10.4.11 cheetah or whatever stupid name they gave it) rarely panics and is wonderfully stable. I have not used any of the more recent versions.

10.4.11 came out in November 2007, not that old.



RogueProcess
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04 Aug 2008, 6:23 am

I'm on a MacBook pro - no complaints here :)
One of the nicest things about OSX is the 'force quit' command (basically a Unix kill command), which means that even if a program that is irretrievably broken is causing your Mac to freeze-up, it can still be shut down, as force quit will just delete it straight from your RAM.
Also, on that video, a lot of the crashes (i.e. the girl who had broken iTunes and stripy monitor) seemed to be down to hardware manufacture problems which Apple had intermittently, especially just after the introduction of Intel hardware.



Cormac_doyle
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04 Aug 2008, 8:28 am

Computers are computers, and will crash occasionally.

When I supported 600 Windows machines, and 30 Mac's ... I would consistently spend more time (in TOTAL) babysitting the Macs than I had to spend on all of the Windows machines put together.

However, that experience is now nearly 10 years old, and I know that it is unlikely to be representative of current OS architecture.

When people have bad experiences, they tend to generalise (so the last time they used a Windows* box, it crashed ... ergo, all windows boxes are cruddy)

* = insert whichever OS you want here ...

Windows systems support a larger variety of hardware components that ANY other OS ... and the most common reason for a windows system to crash is due to hardware driver conflicts. The two issues are directly related. (Official Microsoft statistics show that more than 95% of crashes are caused by hardware drivers). Since Windows 2000, application crashes have been very unlikely to cause a system crash.

Apple state that app crashes do not cause a system crash ... but this is the same as Linux, Unix and Windows
Apple state that they only license/validate a small number of hardware combinations ... thus avoiding hardware driver conflicts ...
'nix systems tend to be slow to provide support for random hardware ...

So which is better - being able to add whatever hardware you want (but knowing that if you adopt the hardware too early, there may be a conflict), or waiting an unspecified/unknown length of time until your selected hardware supplier deigns to provide support for your desired hardware?

For the record ... I routinely use several different flavours of Unix/Linux/BSD and several versions of Windows (Server 2003, Server 2008, XP & Vista). I don't regularly use Apple, but equally, I have no problem doing so if necessary. I find "Fanboyism" regarding ANY operating system to be silly - use what works, and/or what is most appropriate for the task at hand.



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04 Aug 2008, 8:31 am

Quote:
Windows systems support a larger variety of hardware components that ANY other OS


More hardware brands support windows systems. Not the other way around.


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