No Easter Bunny

Short memory
Must have a short memory
 - P Garrett, J Moginie, R Hirst

Get It Try It

The Easter Bunny's late this year. Some expected him already at Halloween 2007. But no. Again at Xmas he was rumoured to be riding shotgun with Kris Kringle. Nope. And then Easter itself came and went - but no bunny.

The faithful Kool-Aid™ drinkers have had it rough. Thermal grease. Bridget Riley lines. Mooing. Exploding batteries. MBPs running at 200°. iBook G4s declared defective by Denmark whilst the Company refuse to recognise flaws in all other countries not spending the same amount on research to expose and prove their lies.

Goldilocks begs people to report their bugs as this places them under an NDA and then nobody can know what the real story is and anyway the Company never fix the bugs anyway. And they have way too many bugs - about 1,000,000 reports per year.

And when you report a bug? Here's what happens. If you're not immediately told 'blah blah blah works as designed Macs are cool' you're most likely told the bug's already been reported. Something like ten years ago. So your ticket is destroyed and your report is 'merged' with the older one (along with the other nine thousand people who've reported the same thing) and now if you want to find out what the F they're doing to fix this bug you're SOL because they only respond to you if it's YOUR bug. But it's not your bug anymore - get it? And you can write to them and cite the new ticket number and ask for an update. Go ahead, sucker.

AppleDefects suffer death threats for pointing out where the flaws are and since 12 July 2007 have not posted a single new report. Bought off. Or silenced through threats. From the Company or from the orcs. Who knows. One of them.

Harry McCracken quits because he refused to drink the Kool-Aid™. Apple Defects write:

Here we have a company with only four hardware platforms to support and they still can't get it right. Talk about amateurs. Open source? A bluff. Cross platform? Another bluff. NeXTSTEP only to the degree it enhances and preserves the Beige Box™. Some Brave New World all right.

The Easter Bunny is still not coming.

Random shutdowns. Ticking/clicking fans. Cracking loudspeakers. Palmrest discolouration. Blocked vents. Coloured screen lines on boot. CDs/DVDs destroyed by flawed Combodrives and Superdrives. Foxxconn Quality™.

Unreliable AirPort reception. Burning chemicals. Oozing chemicals. Cracking cases. Screen flicker. Misaligned casing. New nickname: The Oven. Hard drive failures. Extreme heat. Blown speakers. Kernel panics. Flawed trackpads. Headphones causing kernel panics. Anaemic LCDs. Substandard LEDs. iSight fucking the mic. Buzzing screens.

Swollen batteries. High pitched squeals. Delete key clicking. Electric shocks. Humming fans. MagSafe adapters melting. Hissing LCDs. Big white dots on screens. Blown speakers. Underclocked ATI. Warped casing. Loose lid hinges. Scratched casings. Topcase corrosion. Dropped WiFi signals. Vertical blue display lines.

Apple Store staff threaten customers with bodily harm. Works as designed. Within spec. Consumer grade quality. Shut the fuck up. Delete the forum thread. We will not authorise any more work on this computer. The repair falls within our specs. The specs are confidential and you may not see them. Lower memory slot failures. Raster shifts. Peeling chipping paint. Hinges that break off and destroy the screens. Denting cases. Excessive heat. Overheated Combodrives.

Scratches. Cracked screens. Logic board failures. Flawed power supplies.

Four units. Only four. And this is as good as they can do. Three out of four Apple hardware units will fail to some extent in their lifetime. Suck it up.

PowerPC is best. Tell all your friends. Intel is teh suck. Tell them that too. Now what did you learn? What is the best? PowerPC. Right. And what is teh suck? Intel. Right. Now guess what? And don't break stride, OK?

Safari build 48 hoses user accounts. FileVault hoses user accounts. iTunes update hoses entire systems.

Finder for Jaguar. Finder for Panther. Finder for Tiger. Finder for Leopard. Cover Flow but you can't set the X bit anywhere anymore. And clicking in the wrong part of a file list will crash the program.

Number one Internet program crashes reliably on single mouse click on startup. Number two Internet program can't find its Drafts folder, doesn't remember to store all addresses when saving messages, can't decide if it's using plain or rich text, gets its indent colours all screwed up, brings messages back as rich text when they're saved as plain text, completely loses messages and never sends them either, can't reliably save its settings. Number one Internet program still has cosmetic bugs dating back to build 48. Head programmer still has not admitted the first flaw or apologised because the official policy is to ignore and hope people forget.

All Internet programs provided by the Company found susceptible to attack because their Finder based interface is totally flawed as always so what do the Company do as they're damn well not going to fix a Finder or system flaw so they apply really stupid band-aid code to their own programs and leave everyone else's programs insecure. And the media go bonkers but the Company again practice 'ignore and wait and give away free Kool-Aid™'.

Bay Area network admin grows tired of being told StartupItems works as designed and begins developing Opener. Several years later when Panther is ready to go out the door the mainstream media get hold of it. October 2003. Company finally plugs the hole - the crater - in April 2005. Eighteen months later. Biggest security hole in the history of personal computers and it takes the Company several years to get around to fixing it. Thank goodness only 0.0000001% of the market use the platform.

Oompa Loompa hits. People - especially at MacForums - are screaming. Swedish rm my Mac contest provokes freakazoid botox shill from Wisconsin to try to nullify portent of it just as he'd done with Oompa Loompa, repeatedly offering abortive really stupid solutions and in the end almost getting sacked for jeopardising university equipment.

Rob Braun posts he's had it with the duplicity of the Company. Open source? Open source his butt. It was all a PR stunt. Scott Anguish's long forgotten narrative of the 'bait and switch' pulled on the NeXTSTEP programmers Anguish wanted to represent gets dug up and causes an uproar and Anguish quickly hides the articles so he doesn't get in trouble with his new Man.

David Maynor finds a walloping driver bug in Apple boxes and shows Brian Krebs who close to dirties his Calvin Klein underwear and the beige shirts go attacking Brian, harassing the WaPo, vandalising his blog and Wiki entry, and just generally behaving as they always do. The most demented of them all starts to weave conspiracy theories as he's been kicked out of Digg and needs the ad impressions desperately.

Molester Casanata runs scam after scam where preteen Kool-Aid™ drinkers get one-off software titles they can't update and the developers don't get shit. The iPhone comes out and everything's running as root and Charlie Miller cracks it in a matter of hours. But he's just arrogant for doing that. When he was told by his boss to try he should have refused out of good conscience or something.

Then when he a year later cracks another computer from the Company the Vampire uncovers a Microsoft conspiracy to make the Company look bad. Yeah right. The company with a 95% market share is scared shitless of the lilliputian Company where the boss doesn't want to expand because he can only digest Whole Bananas™. As long as they're washed down with Kool-Aid™ of course.

Nancy and Fred have to quit because their boss gets greedy and he of course just abandons them, in Nancy's case after twenty years of unswerving fealty.

Chief of hardware and chief of software up and quit demonstrably on the same day to SEND A MESSAGE exactly one day before the thirty year anniversary of the company. The Kool-Aid™ Gazette™ dutifully reports nothing but the Kool-Aid™ ads get bigger and more frequent.

Welcome to 64-bit country. Except things don't exactly work right yet. So sorry. But make yourselves at home. You can't reconnect to all your old computers yet we sort of only had enough time to fuck it up and not to fix it. We've been really busy with our iPhone so we don't have time to fix bugs on the old system anymore. In fact why don't you just fuck it and buy the new system and tell your clients to do the same and you know if you find the same bugs in the new system why then drop us a line and tell us, OK?

And OK some of you will lose bonuses from work because our stuff is total crap so far but please don't get riled up about it, OK? Can you count from zero to nine? As in 'ten five zero' to 'ten five nine'? So can you do it twice?

A project builder that crashes because it can't move the contents of an empty directory into an area it has no business going into. A critical text control that somehow gets rewritten for no good reason and is today performing substandard compared to days of old. A mnemonic system Microsoft's had for over ten years perhaps fifteen except Microsoft's works. Listing controls that used to work OK but today are totally fucked like no Company could ever do.

Better? Improved? Where? What does it matter if the basics everyone's relied on for seven years suddenly refuse to work anymore and the 'brain trust' assigned the task of fixing things don't have a clue what the F they're doing?

Five million, six million, seven million bug reports. A few things get fixed but more things get broken. This isn't a professional Company, is it? One release, two releases, three releases. Things still broken all over the place. Why even mention them? Nobody's going to fix them.

Now 10.5.3's approaching. The Easter Bunny's bringing it. But it seems he's been delayed.

Commas as colons. Colons as commas. Secret directories. Files banished forever, never to return. Dashes instead of both commas and colons. It never ends. We still have some eggs we can paint while we're waiting.

Happy Hanukkah.