computers

Mac annoyances

Submitted by yelvington on July 25, 2007 - 8:00am

Now that I've flushed out to Microsoft fanboys by complaining about Vista's interface and anti-open-source tricks, I'll irritate the Mac fanboys just to make things even.

I have a dual-core Intel MacBook Pro, a slick silver $2,000-plus laptop with 2 gigabytes of RAM. So, tell me:

Why am I seeing the beachball when trying to open mail, view a photo, whatever?

Why does it take so long to launch a program? Comparable applications launch in half the time on a three-year-old $600 desktop PC.

Why does it take Spotlight 15 or 20 seconds to search the directory I'm looking at? I can scroll and find filenames manually faster than that.

Why am I running out of memory/file handles/whatever? I have Linux systems that run for years without needing a reboot, but my Mac needs one daily.

The Mac is supposed to be the epitome of user interface engineering, yet I'm constantly tripping over little bits of UI ugliness. Dashboard is pathetic, and Apple should be embarrassed to include it. iTunes is a mess. When you try to save a file, some apps will pop up a minimalistic file selector with no clear way to change directories. If you mix in X11 applications the whole place turns into a zoo. (I suppose I'm supposed to lick Steve Jobs' shoes for his allowing me to run X11 at all.)

Mac zealots generally drool over iPhoto, but it's lame when compared with Picasa, which runs on Linux and Windows but not OS X. Apple Mail has a host of technical issues when used in an IMAP setting, and the system has no way of letting me replace Apple Mail. (I can run Thunderbird, but other apps that want mail services, such as iCalendar, insist on launching Apple Mail.)

And don't get me started on that 1985 "menu bar belongs to the screen, not the window" mistake. Or the poor support for multiple mouse buttons.

Have I offended the Mac crowd yet?

For the record, here's what I touch daily: MacBook Pro at work. HP desktop running XP at home. Sony Vaio dual-core laptop running XP at home. Ancient 300-megahertz Pentium running Ubuntu Linux, Gnome and KDE at home. (The family complains about the speed but loves the built-in games.) And a series of web servers running various Linux versions that never, never need rebooting.

I hate Windows Vista

Submitted by yelvington on July 22, 2007 - 5:36pm

I already hate Windows Vista, and I'm not even running it.

My mother, who lives in Missouri, has decided to finally plug into the Internet. She bought a laptop, which came with Microsoft's latest operating system, and ordered a DSL line from her local phone company. A relative managed to get the DSL modem and wireless hub configured yesterday after a bit of telephone consultation.

So today she's trying to browse the Internet, and she's having troubles.

Microsoft has made such a buggered-up mess of the IE7 user interface, which looks like something a teenager designed as a Winamp skin, that I can't even help her over the phone. And regardless of what Microsoft claims, Internet Explorer is a bugwad just asking to be infected by a virus.

Solution? Install Firefox.

She managed to find Google, run a search for Firefox, and click on all the right link to make the download happen. But Vista won't let her install it, popping up an alert that it's not digitally signed by Microsoft.

Signed by Microsoft?

As has been noted, that's not security. It's business terrorism -- frightening the user in order to protect Microsoft's business interests. This sort of nonsense doesn't happen on OSX and Linux, which simply require the user to confirm the installation with a password.

I swear, next time I get up there I'm going to wipe the hard drive and install Ubuntu Linux, Picasa, Abiword, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Update May 2008: I am closing comments on this thread because it's primarily attracting spammers. If anyone cares, I long ago migrated both my mother and my wife's mother (and my kids as well) to Ubuntu Linux, so I no longer have to worry about viruses and upgrades. It works, it's rock-solid stable, it's easy to use, it delivers much better performance than Vista, and they're all very happy with the universe of applications available to them.

Syndicate content