Those bitches.
So I hacked my old laptop to run OSX. It was fun but it wasn’t completely stable. However, one of the thing that impressed me the most was the ease with which I could record content with my Sony HDR-UX1 HD Video Camera, put in the disk, and iMovie would very easily import it – without even finalizing the disk!
Being a guy that works too much, I decided to use my tax money ahead of time and just go ahead and buy a MacBook. I read and found that I wouldn’t be able to put the mini-DVDs into the slot load drive. OK, that really sucks pretty hardcore. Apple is supposed to be the technology leader in everything under the sun, but they cannot adopt the technology to allow mini-DVDs to be inserted into slot load players with Nintendo and Sony have already made use of this technology on both the Wii and PS3, respectively.
So I figure, you know what, no big deal. I have an external DVD burner that I don’t really use. I’ll hook it up out of the way on my desk for just this purpose. It’ll be inconvenient but I knew what I was getting into. I’m a little disappointed, but no big deal.
This weekend, I went to visit relatives where we threw a birthday for nearly everyone in our family (all of our birthdays are within a few months) and also saw my friend’s band play – filling two DVDs in the process. I was hoping to be able to come home, rip, edit and distribute quickly – again, one of the biggest reasons for buying the MacBook.
However, I hook up the external DVD drive and – nothing. I searched about it to no avail. I knew from previous experience that there was an application that would allow many unrecognized drives to work on OSX. I looked it up and found that there were versions for nearly every OSX release – until Leopard. The guy who wrote the program says that Apple has specifically done something or other to make it so that these drives will not work and he won’t likely have an app to fix it – how fucking lame apple. I already spent over a thousand on my laptop and my girlfriend’s was well over $1500. You have enough of our damn money. I’m not going to buy your overpriced external drive when you should have already addressed this problem in the first place.
So what can I do? Well, at this point, I’m forced to use my old laptop with hacked OSX86 to import the movies then waste a crapload of time moving them to the MacBook. My PC doesn’t properly recognize the disks, and I’m not about to spend the time troubleshooting it. The whole point of me spending the money on this is that I didn’t want to have to waste time dealing with random issues and very easily be able to work with my created media. That’s what they sold me on – and they’re not delivering.
I called the apple rep with my free first 90 days of support. He looked up the manual and found no mention of OSX. Therefore, he was no help at all. I told him my story. Maybe he’ll share it. I told him that I would have to use my illegal machine to do the work because their “superior” hardware couldn’t handle it.
Seriously, what the hell?
If anyone has a recommendation for an external that is super cheap and will work or another simple solution, please leave a comment. I heard that there might be some sort of an adapter to make these little disks fit into the drive as a larger DVD – is that possible, and is it safe?
So if you’re reading this, Apple – fix your shit. Then send it to me as a bribe so I can write about how you listen to your customers. Oh, and stop being assholes about the third party hardware. I spent $80 on 4GB of RAM that you would literally have charged me $500 for. I bet that pisses you off – but not as much as it pisses me off!
[Yes, this was enough for me to revive a blog that I hadn’t written to in ages – drop me a comment to show your support!]
Adventures with Artric 