You're entitled to your opinion?but not your own facts.

by Alberto Enriquez - 6/19/09 4:22 PM

In Reply to: I kind of disagree by Dan Filice

The fact is that these iMacs shipped WITHOUT a word processor. Here I had all these Appleworks and ClarisWorks files from years of being a faithful customer?and 30 days to find an alternative or cough up another $70 to make a machine that already cost twice as much as the competition. That's a fact.

Later machines may have shipped with iWorks '06 included, but they've never shipped me a copy. To this day, if I click on an old .cwk file without dragging it to the Microsoft Office icon, I'll get a "friendly" reminder that my 30-day trial period for iWorks is through??and fork over the dough. This machine also shipped with an MS Works trial, but that was also 30-days expiration. Like I said, but for a generous boss who'd paid for MS-Office home licenses, I would have had to kowtow to Apple and hand over the money.

Appleworks was a great program?for the 1990s. I had the version that ran on the unstable 9.0 OS. The Unix platform is undoubtedly better, but pre OS X stuff is useless on this machine. So, with no backwards compatibility, and no permanent WP program, Apple KNEW every customer would be out an additional $70 from the start. It was dishonest. Like re-marking the price tags while ringing up the customer's sale and hoping he won't notice.

And yet.... I still wanted to go on believing Apple was the same old Apple. My experience hasn't born that out. Yours may differ.