They’re both stupid in the casual sense of being ‘wack’ or ‘retarded’ etc., and they’re stupid in that they are not smart.

Here’s the interface for telling iTunes which videos I want copied to my iPhone:

There are always 357 x 88 (or 31,416) pixels available for the list of movies, regardless of how big the screen is. There are well over a million pixels available there that iTunes will not use. If the current single-column list would just extend downward, I could see 40 titles at once in that space. As it is: I see four.

Jimmy Gutterman writes:

Radar’s Nat Torkington has a smart take on this. (He’s away on vacation, so I’ll quote him.) “Success breeds risk of failure,” he writes. “Some alpha geeks are turning away from Macs. Not all, but some. The reasons they cite are quite reasonable: It has surprisingly flaky hardware, many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now, and the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot.”

I’ve read a lot about how Apple hardware — particularly Apple hardware from early in the production run — is ‘flaky’ but to be honest I’ve never seen this myself. The semi-usable Apple hardware in my possession right now — that is, leaving out Newtons, anything with a 680×0 processor, etc., all works just fine, despite most of it having been bought on the first day it was available. The products and their problems, if any:

1. day-one 17-inch Powerbook G4. Original power brick frayed at connector but still working. Dented from being dropped by TSA. Otherwise: no problems.
2. day-one Mac Mini. No problems.
3. day-one 15-inch MacBook Pro #1. Original power brick frayed at connector but still working. Original battery replaced by Apple as part of recall. Otherwise: no problems.
4. day-one 15-inch MacBook Pro #2. Original power brick frayed at connector end, stopped working, replaced under warranty by Apple. Hard drive stopped working after computer was dropped onto marble floor. Keyboard stopped working after coffee was spilled into it. Disk & keyboard replaced by Tino. Corner dented from drop. Nicole is hard on computers. Otherwise: no problem.
5. MacBook Pro backup battery: stopped taking a charge at about 8 months of age. Replaced under warranty by Apple.
6. Mac Mini #2: no problems.
7. Mac Pro: no problems.
8. Apple 30″ display: no problems.
9. Apple iSight #1: no problems. Image quality kind of sucks, but that’s a design problem.
10. Apple iSight #2: ditto.
11. Apple TV: no problems.
12. 2nd-generation iPod: disk died. Bought new one. Intended to replace disk but never did.
13. 3rd-generation iPod: no problems.
14. iPod Video: no problems.
15. 1st-generation iPod Nano: died several times, replaced under warranty. I think the thing was getting wet. After long enough, it died while not under warranty. So: dead.
16. 2nd-generation iPod Nano: working fine.
17. day-one iPhone #1: no problems. Headphones suck. Fact that you can’t use regular headphones with it because of the stupid recessed jack sucks. iPod interface is too tree- rather than matrix-oriented, which sucks.
18. day-one iPhone #2: ditto, except the iPod interface thing doesn’t bother Nicole as much as it bothers me.
19. Airport Express: no problems.
20. Airport Extreme: works fine: in fact better than any other wireless access point I’ve ever used. It’s annoying that it needs to reboot to implement any change.
21. Apple wireless keyboard #1: full of hair and crumbs because of shortsighted design.
22. Apple wireless keyboard #2: ditto
23. Wireless mighty mouse #1: fine
24. Wireless mighty mouse #2: scroll ball action now too unpredictable to use without frustration, right-click function doesn’t work predictably.

From this, I can conclude that Apple needs to work on their laptop power connectors, and that the first-generation MagSafe connectors weren’t up to snuff. Also, the first-generation iPod Nano was prone to damage from getting wet; the Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball can’t be cleaned effectively; and the Mighty Mouse’s virtual second button is too clever by half. Also also: don’t drop thing containing hard drives. Also also also: the iPhone iPod app needs work which it probably won’t get.

Does this constitute ‘flaky hardware’? I don’t think so. It’s hard to compare this to the non-Apple computers I’ve had, because nearly all of those I built myself, and not always from the very best parts available.

Before we went in the Mac direction Nicole and I used Toshiba Porteges; these were pretty expensive, certainly on a par with what Apple charges for laptops. And they were in and out of the shop so often that we seriously considered dropping another $2000 on a spare just for when one of our primary laptops was being repaired. They were so bad that we wouldn’t have used them at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was an independent repair shop nearby that stocked parts for the things, and was inclined to conclude that nearly anything was covered by the extended warranty.

I never read anything about Porteges being flaky, though, and I think that this was because you can’t buy a Portege in a retail store. Or you couldn’t when we were using them, anyway. Toshiba sold them only through their ‘business’ channel, which effectively meant you had to mail-order them. Cheaper, beefier Toshiba computers were sold at CompUSA. Porteges were sold to the corporate market; the assumption was that an IT department would buy them by the crate and pass them out to employees.

Apple products, though, are overwhelmingly purchased and maintained individually by the people who use them. When a PC laptop goes bad, there’s probably about a 50% chance that the entire solution to this is going to be to call the corporate IT department, who will come swap the thing out for a new one. When an Apple laptop goes bad, there’s probably a better than 90% chance that the person sitting at the keyboard will be entirely in charge of solving the problem.

So I don’t think that there’s a ‘flaky hardware’ problem, though Apple may have a perception issue to manage.

What were the other complaints? “Many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now” and “the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot”.

The Genius Bars definitely seem to be too crowded, but you can make an appointment from home up to 24 hours in advance — so I’m not sure how this makes them ‘impossible to use’. You know whose Genius Bars are really impossible to use? Everyone else’s, because they don’t do this. Instead you spend hours on the phone to Bangalore, listening to someone read from a script. Apple FTW.

And ‘the base apps aren’t perfect’. I’m not sure what this means, but I suppose it must mean that iCal, Mail, Safari, and the Finder, at least, are imperfect. I’ll agree here: they’re definitely not perfect. What I don’t understand is how this is some kind of disadvantage — an impediment to Apple continuing to ‘get away with it’ where ‘it’ is presumably something along the lines of ‘pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes’. It might be a problem if there were some competition that did provide ‘perfect’ ‘base apps’. When the comparison is between Mail and Outlook Express, though (or even Mail and Thunderbird), Mail looks pretty good. There’s nothing really wrong with Outlook Express, but there’s even less wrong with Mail. Et cetera.

This has all been about the specific assertions, but remember that those were just offered as explanation for the main point: that ‘alpha geeks’ are ‘turning away from Macs’. Which is even sillier. And turning to what, pray tell? Linux? Windows? Presumably the ones who are upset with the inability to elbow their way in at the Genius Bar are turning to Linux because appointments at the Linux Store are so much easier to get. And the alpha geeks who are dissatisfied with Apple’s ‘base apps’ are moving to Windows — because on Windows, everything runs like a top.

WTF? I mean: WTF?! I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing, because it just doesn’t make sense.

An Alpha Geek might ‘move away from Macs’ because, as of today, there are only three Mac laptops available, and all of them are too big and heavy and lack serial ports. An Alpha Geek might decide that Apple’s proprietary systems bother him philosophically. An Alpha Geek might need drivers for some exotic piece of hardware, and it’s easier to switch to either Linux or Windows than to write his own for OS X. These are valid criticisms that can be made of Apple and Apple’s products. But saying that the problem is that the Genius Bar is too crowded, or that Address Book isn’t up to snuff, is ridiculous.