FAIL of the Week: Apple’s Invisible Transparency | Comments (2)
Posted in Apple on 19th September 2008, 4:04 pm by Stuart
The Macbook Pro I was issued at work has been plagued with a nasty graphics issue ever since the 10.5.2 update. Prior to that there were also some big graphics issues which caused freezes and crashes which were cleared by the 10.5.3 update but in fixing those issue this new problem appeared.
The Symptoms
The problems experienced showed up in many different ways. For me the worst was a text-tearing issue where the display of text would get scrambled. For example if I was using texmate, lines would overlap when scrolling and the only way to temporarily clear it was to use cmd+a (which presumably caused a re-draw). To stop it completely required a logout. There was also a relationship with sleep modes as it often appeared after waking the machine from sleep.
There were also occasions where the display was continually covered with white blocks that appeared as you scrolled. These appear in the terminal and places like embedded YouTube players in the browser making it difficult to get RickRolled.
The FAIL
Apple’s failing was to not publicly admit to there being a problem. This combined with the amount of time between the issue occuring and the fix being released made it incredibly frustrating. This main thread on discussions.apple.com was raised on a back in February and looking at the thread plenty of people had mainboards replaced and yet still the issue persisted like a bad smell emanating from a pair of birkenstocks worn all summer.
From the reports on the thread it also appears that only a very limited number of Apple’s technical staff had been advised of the issue. I pretty sure the frustration of many people waiting for a fix would have been significantly reduced if there had been a statement issued saying that work was being done to put it right.
The net result of not making a statement amounted to a lot of wasted time spent by MacBook Pro owners and Apple’s own uninformed staff trying to fix a problem with solutions that would never work.
I’m pleased it’s now fixed but seriously, a bit of transparency next time wouldn’t go amiss! It’s times like this when the openess and transparency of open source operating systems is much appreciated.
OSX has … faults? Apple is not … transparent? I’m shocked!
@Carl Camera: Yep you got it right who’d have thunk it!?
It’s easy to ignore a company’s failings — that is until you’re on the receiving end, at which point you become extremely tempted to go and buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it.