Usually I don’t write that much about technology here, that’s more of my husband’s area. But I just have to warn everyone against doing the Lion update to your OS. My husband did it when it was released, because he likes to be on the edge of new stuff. And it destroyed his machine, not once, not twice, but three times. This is someone who is a professional technology consultant, and his entire office, and the only solution they could come up with was totally reformatting and reinstalling everything.

So I waited a month, figuring that Apple would get their shit together, before doing the update on my brand-new-in-September MacBook Pro. Which I love. I did the update last weekend and have so far spent six hours on the phone with Apple tech support trying to resolve the half-dozen issues the update created on my computer.

First it broke my bluetooth, a huge problem for me because I rely on a smartmouse and mac bluetooth keyboard to not have excruciating back pain while I work. It took all of Sunday, the day I did the update, to fix.

In the meantime, while my husband was pulling out all the stops to fix it, it broke my Time Machine back-up. I tried to revert to the previous OS using my time machine backup to see if that would fix the bluetooth problem, and instead it stopped the restore half-way through, effectively losing me half my files. So Monday morning I tried to restore again, only to have it fail half-way through again, because two PDF read-mes that had come with a font I bought six years ago had been automatically locked. By Lion. And I couldn’t unlock them.

Another two hours on tech support (and an incredibly rude person who told me it was an Adobe problem and I should call them, then hung up on me) and I finally got that fixed. But then, the next time I tried to back up using Time Machine, it deleted my entire history of back-ups on the Time Machine drive, and then failed to back up. So yeah, that makes me feel great. I tried using another hard drive for the Time Machine, one twice as big, formatted so it’s totally clean to start. Still, back ups are failing. I’ve managed one successful back up since last Sunday.

In the meantime, my spotlight has been broken, re-indexing every few days and taking hours to do it, not finding files I can literally see on my desktop. And every time I go in to repair permissions in Disk Utility it finds dozens of system core permissions that need to be repaired, the same handful, and repairs them. Even if I do it twice in a row, without doing anything else on the machine in between.

This, of course, means that everything is running unbearably slow. Oh, and my wifi is cycling on and off, connecting sometimes, booting me, and then not detecting my home network. And I can no longer connect remotely to my other computer. And it is randomly ejecting my external hard drives. And automatically shutting down SugarSync, one of the programs I rely on to do work across computers.

So I’m reverting. Luckily my old computer, the one this MacBook Pro was bought to replace, is still running 10.6 and I’m going to use its time machine to restore this computer to how it was in September, when I got it. I just hope I don’t lose all my files in the process. And sadly, we don’t live within 4 hours of an Apple store, so we’re on our own, with the dodgy phone tech support.

What happened, Apple, Steve Jobs died and quality control went to hell?

I recently talked to my mother about replacing her old Toshiba laptop with a MacBook Air. I’m a big fan of Apple in general, and think they make better systems than anyone else. But she could never in a million years handle all this. So if this is the future of Apple…it’s looking pretty bleak.