Mac: Fail.

I'm sorry about this post, but I just need to rant a little bit...

My MacBook Pro just experienced its second kernel panic, after its first less than a week ago. If you don't know what that is, it's when the screen goes dim and tells you you need to shut down your computer by holding down the power button because there has been a fatal error in the operating system that it can't recover from. Or that's my understanding of it--I'm actually not all that great in the realm of fixing computers. But neither time was I doing anything out of the ordinary. I had not recently installed any new software or hardware. I was not downloading anything. I wasn't running anything strenuous. This time, I had Firefox open to Gmail, my calendar open, and was typing into a Matlab m-file.

Since the first kernel panic, I have had a few other issues that in other contexts I would have deemed unrelated. First Firefox crashed and wouldn't reopen because it thought it was still open already. Then the X11 terminal wouldn't stay open--it would open, then close, then open, then close etc. on a period of around 10 seconds. Then my computer was very laggy, where I would get the color wheel when I started typing an address into my internet browser or writing on a desktop "sticky note". Then Matlab wouldn't let me save a file because it thought for some reason that my Documents folder was read only.

My beef is that Macs aren't supposed to do this. Their advertising campaign boasts that Macs, unlike PCs, are always reliable and don't crash randomly. This is the first Mac I've owned, and I was expecting it to be worry free after my PCs. At present, my 6-month-old MacBook Pro has had more unexpected crashes than my 2-year-old PC laptop. And I do much harsher things to my gaming PC than to my work Mac. Fail. Suck it, Macs.