Slashdot Mirror
"Maybe It's a Piece of Dust" (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: I was in the Grand Central Station Apple Store for a third time in a year, watching a progress bar slowly creep across my computer's black screen as my Genius multi-tasked helping another customer with her iPad. My computer was getting its third diagnostic test in 45 minutes. The problem was not that its logic board was failing, that its battery was dying, or that its camera didn't respond. There were no mysteriously faulty innerworkings. It was the spacebar. It was broken. And not even physically broken -- it still moved and acted normally. But every time I pressed it once, it spaced twice. "Maybe it's a piece of dust," the Genius had offered. The previous times I'd been to the Apple Store for the same computer with the same problem -- a misbehaving keyboard -- Geniuses had said to me these exact same nonchalant words, and I had been stunned into silence, the first time because it seemed so improbable to blame such a core problem on such a small thing, and the second time because I couldn't believe the first time I was hearing this line that it was not a fluke. But this time, the third time, I was ready. "Hold on," I said. "If a single piece of dust lays the whole computer out, don't you think that's kind of a problem?"
But holy crap, the touch-bar is a bad bit of UI design. I'm constantly accidentally triggering it. When I'm typing it offers spelling tweaks, so if my finger grazes the touchbar I wind up changing the word I typed unintentionally. I hit the escape (or cancel) button frequently. It's a nightmare. I was curious to try it, but now I wish there was some way I could switch back.
I purchased the second Macintosh model (Fat Mac) in college and had Macs up until about 10 years ago.
So it is with some sadness that I say Apple is no longer special. Whatever Karma Jobs left behind has worn off and now Apple is merely another Tech Company.
Their idea Vault is empty, their commitment to be "insanely great" has waned, and investors are on the verge of turning management into just another, "beat the quarterly earnings forecast" collection of MBAs and bean counters.
I feel privileged to have lived in the time of it's creation, ascension, and total domination. I fear that I will also live to see its demise in the manner of so many alternative computer companies before it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Did they find the fault, or have you made three visits and each time been left with a faulty computer? Were you abandoned with a still broken computer? The summary seems incomplete.
Is this a warning that we need lemon laws for computers as well as cars? At what point does Apple recognize that a repeatable and verifiable problem, even if intermittent, requires a product replacement?
The audacity of Apple giving some minimum-wage tech schlub the title of "Genius" says *everything* about Apple, its branding, and the customers it serves.
-Styopa
Slashdot is a tabloid.
Perhaps so, but most "single" things aren't so common as dust. You can be careful with a glass of water, but it's damn near impossible to maintain a dust-free environment.
Debris in a keyboard is a pretty common issue. Especially for laptops. Dust, hairs, crumbs. It's gross in there.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
One of the things I've learned working in retail; it's better to bullshit than admit ignorance. One gets into a whole realm of magic words and phrases to keep peevish customers from going into asshole mode, and plausible excuses are an important tool. Even if an employee develops a thick skin, the store's customer satisfaction surveys will not.
Think about how many religious people believe "We don't know what happened before the big bang." is a weakness in the theory, or indeed a weakness lurking behind all cosmological science.
In any case, the article says the apple employees were almost certainly correct, so I dunno what you're referring to.
Mac laptops are designed for a very specific operating environment -- sitting in a coffee shop and "working on your screenplay" while desperately hoping the cute hipster girl at the next table over asks you what you're working on, so you can casually mention your screenplay. You probably weren't doing that, thus it's your fault.
20+ years PC users have had a gripe with Apple products. It's time to let it go.
If you don't like Apple products don't buy them and don't comment on articles related to them. It simply makes you like like a twit.
Science says "there was a point in time when nothing existed, and then everything existed."
No scientist in their right mind would say that, since by the standard model, time itself was created with the big bang, so there was never "a point in time" at which nothing existed. It doesn't make sense to ask for the "before". So please check your statements, especially when you're trying to speak for science.
Now, the main difference in this matter between science and religion appears to be that religion actually sees it the way you described, i.e. "at some point nothing (except time itself) existed, then some intelligence appeared and created everything else", while science goes the "we don't know, we can't fundamentally find out, therefore speculating in this direction means leaving the bounds of science". There's a slim hope that once we have the right model, going back to t=0 and looking at what's going on COULD provide us with some understanding about how the big bang came to be in ways that we can't anticipate yet.
Either way, pretty big difference, if you ask me.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
> The thing is? The "Genius" used the wrong terminology, in my opinion, which made things sound
> worse than they really are. A speck of dust is most assuredly NOT enough to jam up one of the
> new Apple keyboards. CRUMBS, however, from people eating by the machine? Absolutely possible.
Dust, crumbs, pollen, dandruff, boogers... whatever. I've been using computers in the same environments for 20+ years and laptops for 15+. If Apple's newly-designed keyboard cannot deal with the same things that EVERY SINGLE OTHER KEYBOARD has successfully handled in that time, APPLE FUCKED UP. Period, full stop, <local terminology of your choice>.
I've been using Macs for 20+ years. I'm using one right now. This is what my ~ten- or fifteen-year-old keyboard looks right now. (Apple fans will know that they shipped these clear & graphite ones with early G4s. Later G4s came with white-and-clear keyboards, or maybe that started with G5s or white iMacs. Whatever. It's still pretty damn old. PowerMac G4s were discontinued in 2004.) You can see all the crumbs and stuff that have worked their way all the way underneath it. You can only imagine what's actually among all the keys right now.
That picture is from today. You can see this post in the background. And I shot that pic with my iPhone. I like Apple stuff just fine. Like I said, I'm using a Mac right now, and I've used this keyboard since it was new. I've never had this or any other keyboard fail for such a trivial reason as DUST. Or even (God forbid) CRUMBS. Jony Ive needs to step out of his glorious white room and spend some time in the real world.
Who knows, maybe he'll have a epiphany and make phones 2mm thicker and fill that space with battery. Hey, a boy can dream...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It kind of sounds more like a mechanical problem with the butterfly switch than an electrical problem. At least the fix is the same in either case though. Just $700 or so for a new top case, and the metal shaving or piece of dust or whatever is no longer a problem. Until you get the same problem again, but rest easy, it's just $700 to replace half the case.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Looking to religion for scientific statements is as silly as looking to science for a moral code, and certainly isn't the reason religions persisted for millennia.
Yes, this.
Or, as I like to put it... science is trying to answer the questions of "what" and "how", religion is trying to answer the question of "why".