billpalmer.net

almost never do I reply to people who've gone off the deep end about Apple-related products these days, so it's as much of a surprise to me as anyone that I've ended up doing so twice in a span of five hours - not a trend, I promise...

Dear XXXX,

Sorry to hear about all the problems you're having with MacOS X Leopard. If it were me, I know I'd be angry and tempted to vent to anyone who will listen.

But has it occurred to you that you might have just been among the statistically unlucky few to have something go wrong with the install? With more than a million copies of Leopard already sold, even a one percent failure rate (defined as the install resulting in an unstable system) would mean ten thousand unhappy Leopard users, all looking to gripe, and all googling for "Leopard problems" and finding each other in the process. Nevermind that the other ninety-nine percent of Leopard users are smooth sailing, those one percent are going to seek each other out and convince themselves that they're the majority and that Leopard is a miserable failure of a product.

I have no idea how to respond to your comparison of Leopard to OS X beta. As a user of the beta myself, I can recall that it would mount a zip disk as a CD image, it lacked a lot of basic interface functionality and it didn't seem to know the difference between a gigabyte and a megabyte in certain Get Info panels, to name a few "alpha" issues. And those were issues that we all had to deal with, not a statistically unlucky handful.

I'm sure you're not one of those types who buys their first iPod, has it die on them, runs into one other person whose iPod died at some point, and then assumes that all iPods are defective and that a worldwide recall is in order, but that's the same logic you're using with your Leopard argument. There's no such thing as a high-tech product with a zero percent failure rate, and it's a given that those in the unlucky minority are going to seek each other out and make a disproportionately large amount of noise. I feel bad that you've been unlucky enough to be a part of that group. But your use of the word "plethora" doesn't add anything to your argument unless you can present us with hard numbers when it comes to users who've had problems, numbers that are anything more than a rounding error in the face of the million-plus Leopard installs.

Again, my condolences on the fact that you're having so much trouble with it.

Much thanks,
Bill Palmer
Publisher of iProng Magazine and iProng.com