Off topic: Apple, why hast thou forsaken me?

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Apple. I sit here in front of a MacBook Pro with a Mac mini to my left. An Airport Extreme beams the Internet into both my laptop and the iPhone I rely on like it’s a kidney. I have been Apple’s defender-in-chief. I have shouted Apple’s name from the mountaintops as solutions to various computer and non-computer-related problems. Not five minutes ago, I finished writing an email recommending an iPad for a 70-year-old woman who broke her foot and can’t walk to her computer.

Now, with all that said, Apple has been pissing me off in the last several days. My MacBook Pro, which is running the latest version of Mountain Lion, would drop its Internet connection. It would just randomly go away for a minute or two, then it would start working again like nothing ever happened. But something did happen. And it didn’t happen to my iPhone, the Mac mini, or anything else. Just the MBP.

So I did what anybody who knows computers would do. I fired up Google and looked for others with the same problem. And like with every problem, there were a thousand people like me and a thousand solutions. None of them worked (or if they did, they only worked for a short period of time until the next wifi dropout). So I did the nuclear option. I reformatted the hard drive with the intention of starting fresh with Mountain Lion. You see, I upgraded from Lion, and upgrading always causes little niggling issues. A file that was corrupt before stays corrupt after. Next thing you know, you have black screens and whatnot.

After six hours of reformatting and reinstalling Mountain Lion (which should’ve been 12 hours including redownloading Mountain Lion, but I made a copy of it on a flash drive as soon as it was released), I was back to normal. And yes, “normal” means suffering through the very problems that caused me to reinstall in the first place.

Worse, I had new problems. iTunes kept asking if it could connect to the Internet. Web pages didn’t render correctly in Safari.

During my troubles, iTunes 11 came out. I hoped it would solve my new problems. It should’ve come as no surprise to me that it broke more things than it fixed. I now see duplicate songs because iTunes is showing me that I can play them off my iCloud or my computer (a feature?). I don’t want that. Keyboard controls (spacebar, left, right, etc.) no longer work because the “cursor” defaults to either the search box or the genre box. My external keyboard’s play/pause/fastforward/etc. no longer work (possibly for the same reason). I kept wondering if perhaps Apple really is beta testing its software.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that my iPhone’s Maps app took me to the wrong place three times yesterday. “Costco” was an open field a mile north of where Costco actually is (I later discovered that it was the listing for the wrong Costco, one that’s 100 miles away. I feel really bad for the folks in Ringgold.). The “nearest WalMart” was a u-turn and a mile away (instead of an eighth of a mile in front of me where it actually was). Something’s rotten in the state of Cupertino. And it almost stinks bad enough to make me get a look at what Android and Windows 8 have to offer.