The times when “it just works” described the Apple experience are obviously long gone. Maybe it was transition to Intel processors that started it or maybe it was just that Apple had to start to care about security as their platform got more popular and decided to fuck up along the way.

I don’t know. But they sure decided to fuck up well this time. After applying an Airport patch that was delivered to me through Software Update, OS X’s built in software update system, my MacBook Pro refuses to connect properly to my wireless network on startup. Well, it connects to the network itself - or at least that’s what the wireless AP logs tell me - but it’s not very interested in asking the DHCP server for an IP address. I have to manually tell it to do so by adding the wireless network again and entering the 128 byte WPA key.

St0pid!

Judging by the noise in the Apple support forum, pretty much every OS X user on the globe has this problem, and that does not of course cover the users who were not able to figure out how to get online again after updating and are now proud owners of $2,499+ paper weights.

The download to manually update has been pulled from Apple’s site, but they are still pumping it out via Software Update. This creates an embarrassing chicken and egg headache for Apple when they eventually release a fixed update (or a “patched patch”, a well-known Microsoft piece of software): You have to get online to download and install the update, but you can’t get online before you download and install the update.

Marvelous. People are probably lining up outside the Apple Stores as I write this.

To summarize: My experience with OS X is that it’s just as much hassle as Windows XP, if not more. On XP I could’ve removed the patch and rolled back to the previous version. On OS X I have to download a third party application to remove it or dig up file by file. I’m not going to do that, instead I’ll curse Apple every time I turn on my MacBook Pro.