The infamous "Burn-In Period"
Getting a new machine is really fun sometimes, but it can also be a royal pain in the butt. I despise the "burn-in" period (as I call it). This is the period where you need to adjust and tweek and frob every knob and adjustable piece of the machine until you get it just right.
Ironically, however, I find that this burn-in time really only happens with PCs. Particularly desktop machines. Especially expensive PCs. It seems as though the more a machine costs me, the more I have to frob with it. :/ Why is this? :) There's got to be some law of nature which makes it this way. :) Whatever the cause, there's nothing like the day when you can finally declare yourself done with all of the frobbing.
This of course, all begs the question: Why didn't I need to frob with my Mac?
Ironically, however, I find that this burn-in time really only happens with PCs. Particularly desktop machines. Especially expensive PCs. It seems as though the more a machine costs me, the more I have to frob with it. :/ Why is this? :) There's got to be some law of nature which makes it this way. :) Whatever the cause, there's nothing like the day when you can finally declare yourself done with all of the frobbing.
This of course, all begs the question: Why didn't I need to frob with my Mac?
Comments
how long did it take me to get my SGI IRIS operative? Or even my SparcStation, provided I had to reinstall solaris since it was used? A matter of minutes.
I remember that when I bought my iBook I wanted to see "how mac the mac" still was. I paid for it in the morning, went to the library carrying with me a couple of essential cd's... and I was working seriously the same afternoon.
A friend of mine bought a laptop with windows XP and it crashed if he was browsing the internet and the screensaver came up. Problems witht he budnled windows version... and it was a pretty famous name.
And to stretch things further... I have a laptop from Dell and I want to have Gentoo linux and GNUstep on it. After a year I still struggle with many details... and the hardware is in itself pretty decent.
Thus peecee users can say what they want but there is still a line between them and our more elitarian computers.
They are not nearly as well integrated as some of the hardware you mention. GJC