[telemachos]

It's an obnoxious image, and the author is right that Apple (and everyone else) should use either 10.5 or Leopard more consistently.

That said, I simply cannot remember the last time an Apple computer hard froze on me - not an application, the entire OS. It simply doesn't seem to happen. (Also his link to a picture of a crashed Apple (presumably?) seems broken.)

That said, I also run Debian, and complete system lock-ups never happen there either.

[ugh]

Windows doesn’t crash anymore. No more than OS X anyway. I do think, however, that the use of this icon is ok. It’s a cheap potshot at Windows but it’s only visible if you use Quicklook or Coverflow, no big deal. And, contrary to the author, I don’t believe that you should only mock if you are flawless.

(This is [2007], by the way. The BSOD icon is still there, though. It wasn’t removed with 10.6 update.)

[nkassis]

Actually, it can be seen in smaller version on the side of Finder under shared. I find it funny that i have two computer connected, one using NFS which shows up a cool LCD and another one using SMB showing up with the BSOD icon and both running Linux ;p

[ugh]

You see a monitor with something blue on it, it’s not identifiable as a BSOD (if you don’t know). That was my point.

[rsl7]

I think is a reflection of how switchers feel about Windows systems when they have to connect to those shared drives. Makes them feel good about their switch. And of course reinforces Mac users' bias against Windows. It's an emotional connection, better at least than an abstract disk image or a Microsoft logo.

It is no more smug than the envelope/stamp imagery used for email - it's not as if we email users look down upon those poor deluded souls who still cling to their snail mail. (do we?)

[strebler]

Ooh, that's not true, I've crashed OSX a fair number of times. Why, just 2 days ago the keyboard on my MB randomly stopped working. I couldn't type a thing (until rebooting). Both my MB and MBP will occasionally have the mouse not show up when waking the machine up (have to reboot), and sometimes freeze when I zoom out to all windows. On my mac pro desktop, I've had the disk utility freeze the entire OS just by running it (without even doing anything), happened at least 3 or 4 times last week.

Oh and my (older) MBP freezes 25% of the time just by plugging something into the dvi port. It's nice when you're just starting a presentation and have to say: "sorry everyone, just let me reboot". That MBP also has issues "waking up", it likes to stay asleep (lazy).

And let's not even get into the shitty batteries and how the MBP will randomly blank out (turn off) with like 20-30% battery life left. No warning, nothing, just powers off.

[wtallis]

It sounds like you've got a lot more problems with your macs than most. I'd like to know what kind of third-party software you've got running.

On my macs, Flash will regularly eat my cursor, and jitouch and my Wacom drivers can occasionally interfere with my keyboard or cause recent versions of iTunes to crash, but none of these require a reboot, and usually don't even require me to log out to recover.

Your MBP clearly needs a new battery if your machine dies when it's still at 20-30%. I bet if you went to the power section of System Profiler, you'd see see the full charge capacity of your battery is less than one fourth of its rated capacity. I once abused a battery so badly that its full charge capacity was less than one tenth of its rated capacity. (Oddly enough, this was partly due to Windows, but that's a story for another day.)

[DannoHung]

Oh, I can, but it was a RAM issue. The fated gray screen of death.

Now, my Windows computer that I built a few months ago for playing games... that'll lock up if, get this, you don't use it for a while. BSOD's when nothing happens. Play a game? You're fine. Leave it sitting for 5 minutes? Drops dead.

[harshpotatoes]

Some hardware might be failing. Have you taken the time to look into the error codes it gives you?

I would also guess that it is trying to use a power saving feature which may not be supported by your computer, as another commenter pointed out.

[DannoHung]

I disabled all the power saving features, at least, all the ones that I could find (don't really care about power saving since I only have it on when I'm either downloading something game related or playing a game).

I did do a search for the error codes and it was just a bunch of people saying, "Hi, I'm getting this error code, help."

It's comforting to know that, no matter what happens, Windows will always suck.

[eru]

Probably something kicks in when it's idle. (Or it's a green powersaving feature.)

[mnemonicsloth]

I simply cannot remember the last time an Apple computer hard froze on me

Whenever I have more than 100 browser tabs open, I get crashes at a rate of about one a week. Somehow, YouTube is always the straw that breaks the camel's back.

I love it. Keeps my desktop clean :-)

[nkassis]

Yeah flash usually is the culprit for me too. It leaks ram

[duncanj]

My iMac routinely locks up when it gets overly confused while playing a DVD. This is probably the only major annoyance the computer gives me, but it is annoying. Perhaps if I used VLC I'd have better luck, but DVD Player and Front Row both cause problems.

[protomyth]

That might be a hardware issue, we had a machine doing that and had to get it fixed (not sure what was wrong - applecare with someone else taking it in).

[Tichy]

I've had it happen, and I also lost data on my MacBook. Apparently a disk was faulty. They say that can happen to anyone, but it never happened to me with non-Apple hardware.

[ericd]

It's just the luck of the draw. I've had multiple HDD failures in the past 10 years on non-apple hardware, owning roughly 5-10 HDDs at any given time.

[AngryParsley]

Apple uses the same drives as other manufacturers, so yes it can happen to anyone.

I cannot stress this enough: Backup your data. Even if you have RAID, you can still accidentally delete data. Considering how simple it is to use Time Machine, there's no excuse for not having backups.

[robin_reala]

I have hard lockups on OSX occasionally (1-2 a year) and it’s always down to badly written device drivers. Guess the same is true on Windows as well?

[invisible]

That's not always true - sometimes the kernel craps out if an application dies while trying to do something with the kernel (services especially). It doesn't make it Microsoft's "fault," it just means they should know that dumb situations like that are bound to happen.