Apple, Stop the Crashes Out of The Box
I am writing this on my new 12 powerbook which I love! The industrial design is stunning both in terms of looks and usability. This is one of the best keyboards Ive ever used, powerbook or desktop. The legendary ease of use that a new Mac has is alive and keeping in Panther. Everything booted up flawlessly.
But alas, 20 years after the introduction of the Macintosh, all is not perfect. I decided to run iTunes for the first time and was greeted with a force quit. This makes absolutely no sense to me. This is a brand new machine from Apple with a newly installed OS. The hard drive hasnt spun enough to even have a smidgen of defragmentation. Preference files are virginalthey cannot be corrupt. And yet, my first experience in launching iTunes is a dialogue box to send Apple a message about why the application crashed!! Absurd.
Now I know better than anyone that asking for perfection when it comes to computers (or anything, for that matter) is close to impossible. But is asking for an application to open up out of the box too much to ask? The same thing happened when I went to install the developer tools. Im a savvy Mac user, so I knew that these two incidents of applications quitting wasnt the end of the world. And since I have been around since OS 6, I was also thankful that these applications didnt bring down the machine like in the buggy days of classic operating systems.
But imagine this happening to a switcher or to someone nervous using a computer? Apple needs to address the quality of its software out of the box.
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Your application crashed thats it. You didn’t get a system shipped with spyware and viruses already on it. You didn’t get a system that was already riddled with missplaced files all over the system.
It crashed. Thats it. iTunes has the same chance of crashing out of the box as it does 4 months from now. You really have no point.
If every mac, or even a high percentage, had this application quitting problem immediately out of the box, then the issue would be well known to people like me who fix macs for a living. If these quits are common and widespread on your system, it is likely that you have a hardware problem. Specifically, I have seen flaky RAM cause random unexpectedly quit errors.
Instead of spreading FUD, perhaps you should consider if your issue is unique. You have described a problem with a sample set of ONE, yet you seem to assume that this is suffered by every os x user. This is simply not the case. If I were you I would run the Apple Hardware Test Cd in looping-mode overnight. (Even if it passes, you may still have a problem). If you have added 3rd party memory, you should be very suspicious of it.
On my personal systems, I can’t remember the last time an App unexpectedly quit on me, but it hasn’t happened outside of Safari, ever. Blame Apple for YOUR problem maybe, but please don’t infer a systemic problem where none exists. Thank You.
I am writing to you on MY new 12” powerbook and I can assure you I have not experienced your iTunes related or any related Application crash when I first installed everything. I too have enjoyed some application crashes but they have been in Camino or Safari and once in the new iLife 04 version of iDVD after having the book for a while and installing a bit of everything on it. On the whole each of those incidents has allowed an extremely graceful recovery, never requiring anything more than a restart. I have to agree with the other posters that your incident though real is probly issolated to your experience and not widespread. At least from our sample of 2 12” Panther running Powerbooks it is at best half of them
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It very well could be hardware. I know of very few people who have that much trouble out of the box. Apple, as some of you may know, has been having trouble with its hardware. A friends iMac DV fried it’s logic board and my iBook is going to Apple to get it’s logic board fixed. I am not saying that you have a logic board issue, but the common problem is hardware.
If it is “right out of the box” the chances that it was a memory error is very very high.
I have had several experiences with subpar memory - random app crashes, even kernel panics and an unbootable mac.
There is a reason why there is dirt cheap memory and high-end memory - and that reason is stability.
in fact - you can look at your crash logs to see if it caught a memory error.
I feel I must weigh in here, I too had a lot of ‘out of the box’ crashes just after I had installed Panther. Safari, itunes, Photoshop CS, Suitcase and a few others just unexpectedly quited on first launch. And all installed after Panther. Though a bit annoyed I just waved these glitches off as incidents, like one off occurrence’s.
The really strange thing is that these crashes where exactly what they where, one offs. So is there something else going on? My mac (G4 350 apg) seems to be working fine now. In fact the old dog hasn’t worked this well since I got it!
I bought a brand new powerbook 15” with superdrive (and paid a pretty penny for it!). I have had about two crashes a day or more since I got it. Seems everything is crashing, so suspect the memory error mentioned above. iTunes, Safari, a complete freeze, even native apps like Disk Utility have crashed on me. Its a beautiful machine, but come on people totally unacceptable. There is no way I am paying that kind of money to swtich to something that quite simply does not work. Back it goes.