And wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. Not the 30 minute operation you implied.
No, I said that it was 30 minutes of my time to start the process. I don't have to sit through the entire OS install or the backup; I'm not going to sit there and watch a few terabytes restore. I'll go out to a mall, a restaurant, for a ride on my motorcycle or bicycle, etc. while it restores.
Exactly, and I immediately noticed that sly bit of weasel-wording that glossed over the total restore time. If you ever tire of being an engineer, you'd do well in marketing.
Your "Yes, they could." assumes too much as well. The vast majority of Mac users don't own backup drives either, but they could buy them.
I don't know where you get that information about backup drive ownership, especially given the popularity of external USB hard drives at consumer stores like Best Buy, Radio Shack, and even Walmart. Is there some kind of survey that shows that?
Yes, and it's far more reliable than the source you used to make the claim in your statement that what you can do (with only a paltry 30 minutes of your time) can't happen with Windows PCs.
My Mac's hard drive can fail and I can be up and running, with all programs and settings restored to the new drive with a total investment in my time of maybe 30 minutes. That just doesn't happen on Windows PCs.
And if you don't care about going into marketing, perhaps a politician's press spokesman would be more to your liking. You'd be able to 'spin' with the best of them.
Every time that I've had to restore from backups on a Windows PC, whether it was Acronis (the best) or some other package, I would invariably find that things were broken; settings were lost, files deleted long ago reappeared (because incremental backups didn't track file deletions), and programs that had been registered no longer were.
My PC backups
do track file deletions. That yours didn't is your problem, not mine.
Plus the backups would invariably take longer as you would need to restore from a full backup and then from each incremental backup. Time Machine has a snapshot of the Mac file system at a given time. You restore from that and you get everything.
You mean that the
restores would invariably take longer. But that's irrelevant. I'm not disputing that Time Machine isn't an elegant solution for some or many users, but that your claim that
any Mac user would be able to do a full restore with only an expenditure of 30 minutes of their time. Since men, women and chimps have done it, they could also orbit the earth. Not very likely for most people though, even though they
could .
Even longer if the Mac is an iMac and needs to be sent back to Apple to get the internal drive replaced.
First off, you don't send anything back to Apple. You go to an Apple store and hand it to them for repair.
Even if you don't live remotely near any Apple store? It would take me much longer to get to Apple's NYC store than 30 minutes and I live in NYC. What's the turn around time? How many days is it? If you can get faster service by paying additional for it, how much would it cost?
Secondly, PC users don't replace their own hard drives either. That's why things like "The Geek Squad" can prey on ignorant consumers.
Now it's getting absurd. Best Buy and stores like it sell hundreds of thousands if not millions of bare hard drives. Who do you think buys them? You have a distressing tendency to imply that a tiny subset of users is equivalent to most users. Between very experienced, technically savvy users and Geek Squad prey lies the vast majority of computer users, and you don't need a survey to understand this.
Of course, if I did have an iMac, I'd still do the drive replacement myself. There are countless illustrated how-to guides for doing just that.
You could. I could. But most iMac owners wouldn't or couldn't. Apple doesn't target/market their iMacs for people that relish delving into their device's innards. You could also easily replace an iPod's non-replaceable battery, but most iPod owners would send their iPods back to Apple, as Steve Job's once said they should. This was after he said that when the battery dies, the iPod is dead and should be replaced with another new iPod. When it suits your arguments, you're remarkably naive about the relation between most Apple products and the majority of people that buy them.
Plus, having been sadly disappointed with a slow, buggy D-Link NAS, I opted for the eSATA RAID.