Macintosh Pains

from: http://www.pseudohacker.org/~elmindreda/macpains.html

Macintosh Pains

Since I'm well known to be a Mac freak, I felt I couldn't write a positive account of the Mac experience. Instead, I've decided to nitpick, complaining about every single annoyance left on this most wonderful of platforms.

NOTE: In this document, Jaguar refers to Mac OS X 10.2 and Panther refers to Mac OS X 10.3.

The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

Mac OS X may be virtually crash-free, but that doesn't prevent the applications themselves from locking up. When the system is under heavy load, the dreaded Beach Ball of Death starts to appear over applications that cannot keep up. It signals that you had better not disturb it right now, or you might loose all that unsaved data...

Honestly though, Cocoa applications aren't the most stable you could imagine.

Dock Boxing

If you have ever had the dock set to hide automatically, you know what Dock Boxing is like. Vainly trying to access that tiny screen element close to the Dock's edge, you keep triggering the Dock, pulling back to make it go away, trying again, pulling back.

In the end, of course, the Dock wins and you have to move the cursor very slowly and deliberately, finally experiencing something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike satisfaction when you manage to click where you wanted to.

Trash Wrestling

Worse than the Dock Boxing phenomena is what happens if you should ever wish to drag something to the trash. In classic Mac OS, as well as every relevant version of Windows, the trash icon is located on the desktop. It also doesn't move around depending on how many programs you are running, or flee away from the mouse cursor when you try to drop things onto it.

None of these seemingly obvious things are true for the Mac OS X trash icon. Located as it is in the file area of the dynamically sized dock, it moves around constantly, constantly disappears if the dock is set to hide, and actually moves away from the mouse cursor when you try to move things to it, since the dock assumes you want to drop the files onto the dock beside the trash, not throw them away. The consequence is that no-one ever uses the trash, and everyone is forced to learn the Command+Delete shortcut, since it's the only functional way of deleting files.

DWIM - Do What I (Didn't) Mean

This is only partly a problem with the Mac itself but... well, just read on.

About 99.99999998 percent of the time, your Mac will just do the Right Thing, not even bothering to ask you about it. After a while, you get used to this and stop questioning your Mac's reasoning. Then one day it happens; it does something completely different than you expected, and it didn't even ask you before it did it! You feel disappointed, betrayed, you wonder how it could possibly have thought that that was what you wanted.

After you calm down, of course, you realise that it did just what it always does, but that this time you wanted it to do something else, and that you had become so accustomed to it reading your mind that you didn't even bother telling it!

This is actually quite a testament to the design of the Mac, but it's still just as annoying every time it happens. One problem with the Mac philosophy, however, is that when it does do the wrong thing, it can sometimes be quite difficult to convince it to change its ways. This is the downside of the "For the rest of us" philosophy.

Game Pricing

While Macs are a bit more expensive than PC:s, the extra expense is more than made up for by the quality of its hardware and software. Contrary to popular belief, Apple doesn't require you to be a millionaire to afford a Mac, always catering to students and educational markets and providing excellent financing.

Game companies, however, seem to believe that Mac users are all extremely well off, and gullible to boot. Why else would they charge double price for the same game that appeared on the PC six months earlier, and and that gets much less support than the PC version gets? If there was ever a market that deserved getting warez:ed to death, it would be the Mac game market. However, the game companies can't even blame their pricing on that, as there are virtually no Mac games whatsoever on the warez networks.

The Finder

The Finder has so many annoyances that it's getting its own subsections.

FTP Support

To call the Finder's ability to mount FTP servers as volumes support makes is just... no, I won't even try. It's the saddest, most decrepit piece of networking software ever written. First of all, it only works with a very small subset of existing servers. Most notably, servers where your home directory is anywhere except the root directory show up as empty. Also, trying to unmount a server after you've disconnected will lock up your desktop, all open Finder windows and all applications currently displaying a file dialog until the server connection times out.

Open or Rename?

On every operating system on earth, pressing enter with a file selected will open it. All of them except Mac OS, where it means rename. Granted, Apple pioneered the graphical user interface, so it didn't have any standards to follow back then, but that isn't an excuse not to have fixed it twenty years later. At the very least, they could add an option so that people coming from other platforms can open files the first try and not the fifth.

File Browsing

With the arrival of Panther, Apple declared the Finder to be the best file browser in the world. Why then is it that it isn't it even close to being a match for the Explorer in Windows 95? You still cannot see a hierarchy of folders without also seeing every file in them, you still cannot see the contents of one folder whilst navigating to the destination folder in the same window. The only even remotely usable view is column view, and that only allows you to see a few files at a time, and doesn't even allow you to choose how they're sorted. The file browsing abilities of the Finder are truly very sad, and with Apple being so proud, there's little hope of improvement.

Proxy Files

When you're copying a large amount of files to a new location, the Finder begins by creating empty files with the same names in the new location. If it then crashes whilst copying, these files will remain, looking just like the real files, but lacking their contents. Not only might this lead users to believe that the copying operation was completed; these so-called proxy files are also often next to impossible to remove from within the Finder.

Folder Settings

The old Finder was spatially oriented. Each folder could only be viewed from one window, and it would remember the window's settings perfectly. You learned to visually recognise folders by their size, shape and location on screen. The new Finder has two modes, browser and "old style". The difference between these are now (in Panther) largely cosmetic, and further blurred by the fact that in both modes, any given window can either present a folder, a tree or a column view. Since you can now see the same folder in many windows at once, there is no sane way for the folder to save its settings, with the result of every folder's settings being a complete surprise the next time you open it.

SMB Server Disconnect

If you have mounted a Samba network volume, and you lose connectivity before properly unmounting it, the Finder will lock up. Completely. Including, again, all applications displaying a file dialog. If you're very lucky, the Finder will present a disconnection dialog several minutes later. If you're not so lucky, you will need to reset your machine, as the Finder has now turned into a zombie process, even preventing you from logging out properly.

Window Resizing

Quartz was revolutionary when it came. In fact, it still is in many respects. Quartz Extreme even more so. Yet there is one little problem with it. Try resizing a window and you'd swear you were using a 486 SX. Actually, that's not fair; full window resizing on a 486 was never this slow, whether you were using Windows or OS/2. Now, I understand that reallocating video memory on the fly and re-rendering the entire window, in software, using a PDF-based rendering engine is kind of demanding, but... that's still no excuse. If you cannot use a system, because it's ulceratingly slow, then that system is useless regardless of how clever its code is.

"No, it's not available for the Mac [yet]"

Not counting Windows, the platform with the greatest amount of software, both commercial and Open Source, is the Mac. It's the only other platform for which Microsoft provides Office; not something I care about, but a fact that's terribly important to the world of cubicles. Basically any piece of Unix software, and almost all major commercial software suites, run on Mac OS X.

Why is it then that almost every time a new novel piece of software is released from a company other than Apple, it's "not available for Macintosh?" Well, obviously since Apple has a very small market share, so from a business perspective, blah blah blah.

The only way I can blame Apple for this is to say that if they hadn't "fired" Steve Jobs, the Mac would have had NEXTSTEP or some other advanced system a decade or so earlier, and they would have been able to retain much of its market share, possibly even gained more, but this is a rather far-fetched argument1. The fact remains that this is a major irritant, I just won't bother with the fingerpointing, since in this case, it won't to any good.

However, I still consider it true, especially judging from the way he has and still is saving Apple after his return.

Optimizing System Performance

Whenever you have installed software with the Apple Installer program, the process ends with a phase called Optimizing System Performance. What it does, basically, is fix the newly installed applications so that they will launch faster.

Great, nothing wrong with that.

Except that, if you're unlucky, as you are approximately every other installation, it will churn away at your harddrive for up to fifteen to twenty minutes, making the entire system crawl, as it seems to process every single application you ever installed, read about or even dreamed of whilst on psychedelic mushrooms. Since, according to the documentation, this process is automatic whenever the system encounters a non-optimised binary, is it too much to ask to be able to choose whether or not you want to give up using your computer for a quarter of an hour?

Developer Documentation

Say what you will about Microsoft, but if there's one thing they know, it's how to write developer documentation. The MSDN is very likely the most comprehensive source of usable knowledge available for any platform. Apple's documentation, however, is in places so sad it doesn't even deserve the name. Some areas of the Carbon API documentation, for instance, are nothing more than lists of function signatures. Quick starts and tutorials are often either missing or chatty and misguided. Some subsystems don't have a discussion section at all, only brief reference information. While this situation has improved greatly since Jaguar, it's still very bad.

Terrible Consumer Hardware QA

The Reality Distortion Field's favourite counter-argument when someone points out the higher price of the Mac is that it's the computer world's BMW. Sure, you pay extra, but you get it back in terms of quality and ease of use. This is a valid argument, and most of the time, the very reason I'm using a Mac. However, this argument is only valid when the quality actually stays high, and lately, it hasn't. For example, the avalanche of recent iBook failures, long denied by Apple, has finally been acknowledged, a free repair program has been created, which recently was even extended to include the newer machines. Well, that's great, right?

Wrong. For one thing, giving free repairs doesn't change the fact that they 1) made a sub-par product, and 2) tried to cover up the fact in face of rampant failures and massive protests. For the other, the fact that they extended the free repair program means that they haven't fixed the problem in newer machines, even after having admitted to its existance.

There are other such incidents as well, such as the white spots on all sizes of late aluminium PowerBooks, the extreme heat problems with early 12" PowerBooks, several issues with the G5:s, etc. All this certainly doesn't sound like BMW:s, or any other luxury item for that matter. Apple is known to have high profit margins on their hardware, and I see nothing wrong with that. I love supporting the company that brought me the greatest computer I've ever owned, but they need to either lower their prices and admit to being a Dell, or wise up and do actual QA, even on lower-end hardware. The current situation is unacceptable.

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