If like the other posters have stated JD Power and
PC Magazine say Apple support is great. They have
said the same thing about IBM, HP, Dell, MS. Most
have outsourced their support to India, Apple being
one of them. How can you get good support from
someone who does not speak english and reads from a
script.
I know plenty of people who work in call centers here in the US who are far less fluent in competent customer service than many in locations further afield. Language barriers are certainly an issue (just as they are within the US itself), but it's the policy of providing scripts rather than good training to these people that causes the problem. Even then, and wherever Apple's customer service calls are routed, they still outscore their rivals (except in the one study which has consistently shown Sony to be a little ahead - and their call centers are certainly in an Asian sub-continental region). Like it or not, your complaint is far, far from typical.
That does not, of course, make it irrelevant, though the language used in your opening post and the rather silly supposition of a giant conspiracy foisted on the general public might hint a little at why your experience of customer service may have been lacking.
I went to the MAC because everyone told me I did not
have to go through the hoops in keeping my system
running well like someone would with Windows. Guess
an OS is an OS, you have to be able to manage it. So
I would say if you know how to manage a Windows
system, stay with it. Same for Linux.
I would say the best advice is to use whatever operating system you need to use in order to get done the tasks you need to get done. There are inherent differences between all these OSes, and strengths and weaknesses of them all. The people who tell you that with Macs you don't have to jump through hoops to keep the system running well are perfectly right - myself, I never run any maintenance of any of my Macs, including the one I'm using right now which has been in almost constant 24/7 use since late 1999. It's undergone one faulty hard drive, the migration from MacOS 9 to 10.2, then upgrades and updates from there right through to 10.4.8. It's had almost every imaginable piece of software installed and used on it, now contains multiple drives, outputs to 2 displays and a TV, and has had a CPU upgrade - and it performs flawlessly. Similar flawless performance from the rest of the flock of Macs I own and have responsibility for - none of them 'maintained'.
In comparison to most (not all) Windows systems which need some regular attention, and Linux installs which tend to need somewhat more expertise to use, MacOS is simple, easy, efficient and robust. But not perfect and not suited to every task. The user should always make sure a prospective purchase does what they want it to do and meets their specific needs. It's no-one's fault but their own if they do not and end up with the wrong thing.
Learning how to configure, install, update, clean up
the MAC is not as easy as stated. Maybe being
installed over Linux is the problem with the new
system. Not sure.
Funny that. It's amazing how many people go to the store, buy a Mac, take it home, plug it in and use it without giving the thing a moment's thought. Indeed, it has consistently been one of the Mac's greatest assets that it requires very little technical skills of any kind to set one up and use it.
No matter. Apple is just not keeping up with Bill.
As Bill told Steve along time ago, you just don't get
it.
That's a great joke and I appreciate the injection of humor! Coming from a guy who was responsible for the worst operating system design error in history, (now corrected with Vista to follow the OS X model by the way) I'm sure Steve looks back on Bill's kindly advice with a great deal of warmth and satisfaction. And that's aside from the fact that on the MacOS side we've enjoyed OS features for some years that on the Windows side users are only just going to get the beginnings of in Vista. For someone who lags MS, Apple are doing pretty well it seems to me.
After all that - if you want my advice, what you should do with your mini is simple. Get the original install disk and boot to it. From Disk Utilities, do an 'erase and install' to return your mini to out-of-the-box condition, and then, without the risk of having done anything to the system to destabilize it, play with OS X for a while until you get used to it. If your system exhibits signs of failure in that time, then you know that whatever was wrong before wasn't something you had done by installing Linux (or anything else). If it behaves, then update everything, and it should be perfectly OK. If not, then post a new thread here describing the failure(s) and symptoms, and I have no doubt that we'll be happy to try and assist.
