Things you HATE about Macs...

[zync]

Is it overhead to the OS? The default window behavior would have to be changed to have a resizable border around the windows but then it bubbles throughout the rest of the system. It's hardly resource intesive. Far less than Expose and a transparent Apple menu, to be certain. How quickly we forget about OS9's (and prior) wasteful eye candy such as the flashing menu selections on far less powerful hardware -- and you're worried about whole window resize handles?

This was my point. My point was that all of the little things add up. I'm not saying that it's going to cripple the system. My point was also that it doesn't fit within Apple's software philosophy. I already mentioned that exposé (and dashboard) take up way more resources than adding the ability to resize a window from the borders. But, as I said originally and correctly, being able to resize from the borders requires more resources than the single corner alone. I didn't say it was a lot, I just said that it was more.

If you're going to go that far, why not add the ability to move windows from any spot (that doesn't already interact) by holding a modifier key such as command and clicking? Why not make it so that option clicking on the title bar sets windowshade mode? I do miss windowshade mode actually. How about command+option clicking and dragging within the window resizes a window to fit a selection? Maybe command clicking on an interactive UI element highlights all other UI elements that can interact. All of these things are relatively simple to do, and each wouldn't increase resources more than adding the ability to resize from window borders. Make sure all of those events have an associated animation too. Would you like them to add all of those UI interactions? I doubt it. Implement enough of those and you'll be staring at a beach ball each time you press a key. At the very least, there will be even more books trying to teach people how to use Mac OS. Is this a ludicrous example? Yes, but it illustrates my point.

And, that menu flashing behavior is still present in OS X. I believe they left that in OS 9 because previous versions of the OS could hang if the menu was left open. I assume the flashing was a sign that the menu hadn't frozen, though they could have just closed the menu. That's probably what they though of to make it interesting in those days and so it stuck. It's a character element, but yeah, it's a waste of resources. It takes relatively nothing, but it's still a waste.

Please don't assume what my programming experience is. You don't need to explain to me how to implement such features, I'm well aware of the process, thanks. And while we're talking about it, I've actually never made a "hello world" program in anything. I understand the purpose of writing such programs, but they're boring. In any class where I was required to do something like that, I always made sure to add something else to it.

And might I add a reason why it's inferior -- one can't grow an application window in the negative X and/or Y axis in a single step. In other words, I'd have to MOVE the window up and to the left, and then in a separate step move down to the lower right corner of the window and resize it. As opposed to grabbing the upper right corner and expanding it in a single step.

This, I will concede to. It's a good reason.

 

[spaceballl]

I've been getting the spinning beachball WAY too much in safari recently. I feel like a dual core 2.4ghz machine w/ 4 gigs of RAM is too fast to give me a damn beachball when browsing!

 

[TuffLuffJimmy]

I've been getting the spinning beachball WAY too much in safari recently. I feel like a dual core 2.4ghz machine w/ 4 gigs of RAM is too fast to give me a damn beachball when browsing!

Samezies. I think it's an issue with 10.5.6. I've had more slow downs since I've updated and my hot corners and cmd+tab switcher stop working.

 

[Topher15]

Not all HD content is the same. I avoid buying movies from iTunes (because I'd rather have a physical copy of the disc as a "master") but as far as I recall iTunes content is only 720p, right? Is there any 1080p content available on iTunes at all?

Plus, as was mentioned earlier, online versions of movies are going to be optimized for minimal file size and not for quality like a disc master would be.

True, but still my points stands: by releasing a Blu-Ray drive they will money.

 

[Reigner]

All that I have against macs is the disk space on the system. 10.5 uses way too much (10 GBs? You're kidding!), 10.4 is half as bad, 10.3 keeps me satisfied, but OS 7.6 keeps me happy (With a whopping 90 MBs!)

Macs aren't Macs anymore is what I think.

 

[NT1440]

All that I have against macs is the disk space on the system. 10.5 uses way too much (10 GBs? You're kidding!), 10.4 is half as bad, 10.3 keeps me satisfied, but OS 7.6 keeps me happy (With a whopping 90 MBs!)

Macs aren't Macs anymore is what I think.

Because of the size?

Tell me what percentage of the hard drive did the 90 MB 7.6 take up?

Im guessing it wouldnt be an issue if apple had higher capacity drives standard.

 

[Acronym]

We all know that PC's are tonnes better than Macs

fixed it for you, I prefer the PC layout i find the interface easier to use

i will hand it to macs for there audio and video editing programs movie maker sucks balls!!!!!!!!

but over all usage i prefer pc's by far.

 

[zync]

fixed it for you, I prefer the PC layout i find the interface easier to use

i will hand it to macs for there audio and video editing programs movie maker sucks balls!!!!!!!!

but over all usage i prefer pc's by far.

You just broke it again, mate

That is, except for yourself of course.

 

[Matek]

All that I have against macs is the disk space on the system. 10.5 uses way too much (10 GBs? You're kidding!), 10.4 is half as bad, 10.3 keeps me satisfied, but OS 7.6 keeps me happy (With a whopping 90 MBs!)

Nah, that's a dumb comparison. Software size has always gone up along with technology advances. If I use that silly reasoning of yours - How can OS 7.6 keep you happy, the first Apple II had 4 kB of memory - its OS was obviously much better .

Wake up, Vista and other modern operating systems take up a lot of space as well. We have bigger icons and images, better quality sounds, more features - all of that needs disk space. Do you complain about Blu-ray movies taking up more space than DVDs used to as well?

 

[Shlomit]

These are things I don't like...

1. Mail - Mailing list names are not in alphabetical Order
2. Mail - Sending attachments appears embeded in windows outlook body email and there are only workaround solution
3. iTunes - Hate the fact that it works only with playlists and not via folders
4. iTunes - Unable to select more than one playlists and drag them into folder or to open a second window to help drag from one another
5. iPhoto - Same as iTunes with inablilty to read via folders

but i love the mac and will never replace it, never ever

Shlomit

 

[Loccy]

Speaking as someone who came to Mac relatively late as an IT pro of some gazillion years experience (indeed, in the late 90s I presided over the ethnic cleansing of the Macs from our organisation). When Vista came out the cumulative grief of MS OSes finally prompted me to look for something else for personal use, and I eventually came to the Mac/OSX (OSX being a thousand times superior to previous, non UNIX based Mac OSes) via Linux and then Hackintoshes. So, that gives you an idea of my background, and might explain why I hate the following:

1) iLife/iTunes/iBollocks type stuff - Apple make fine computers, and their OS is excellent, but their applications are all style over substance. If I want to fill up my hard disk with cruft I'll install it myself.

2) The menu bar at the top of the screen. Made sense on a non-multitasking classic OS on a 9" screen. Makes no sense on a modern OS where you'll have dozens of apps and windows open at the same time. I have a huge widescreen display and a window towards the bottom - but I have to drag the bloody mouse to the top of the screen to do anything. Notwithstanding the illogic of doing it this way, separating the functions from their window within in a multitasking environment.

3) The "Apple's way or the highway" mentality. Like iTunes/iPod, where they subtly drive you into acquiring music through their channel, and load the thing up with DRM, when it'd be so much simpler to just present the device as a USB storage device and let you drag/drop to it. And the "you may NOT change anything in the presentation of the OS - mummy knows best" approach.

But these are minor irritations in what is overall a superior way of working. And my self of 10 years ago would never have believed I would ever type that.

 

[mcavjame]

I've been getting the spinning beachball WAY too much in safari recently. I feel like a dual core 2.4ghz machine w/ 4 gigs of RAM is too fast to give me a damn beachball when browsing!

Try performing some maintenance. Repairing permissions and performing a weekly/daily/monthly script may do wonders.

 

[mcavjame]

why I hate the following:

1) iLife/iTunes/iBollocks type stuff - Apple make fine computers, and their OS is excellent, but their applications are all style over substance. If I want to fill up my hard disk with cruft I'll install it myself.

I would venture to say that iLife adds value to the Mac. iTunes vs Windows media player?? iMovie vs Windows Moviemaker?? iPhoto vs Windows picture viewer? iDVD vs Nothing?? Windows has their fair share of "cruft". None of it is nearly as refined as Apple's.

2) The menu bar at the top of the screen. Made sense on a non-multitasking classic OS on a 9" screen. Makes no sense on a modern OS where you'll have dozens of apps and windows open at the same time. I have a huge widescreen display and a window towards the bottom - but I have to drag the bloody mouse to the top of the screen to do anything. Notwithstanding the illogic of doing it this way, separating the functions from their window within in a multitasking environment.

You could try spaces. It really good, especially in multi-screen environments.

3) The "Apple's way or the highway" mentality. Like iTunes/iPod, where they subtly drive you into acquiring music through their channel, and load the thing up with DRM, when it'd be so much simpler to just present the device as a USB storage device and let you drag/drop to it. And the "you may NOT change anything in the presentation of the OS - mummy knows best" approach.

I've never felt compelled to purchase songs only from iTunes. I have tons of music added from my CD collection years ago. I've purchased from Canada's Puretracks site and added those songs without issue. And yes, given that the price is pretty close all over, I usually buy from Apple. This is even less an issue now with more DRM free tracks than ever.

As for the drag/drop thing. I have owned my fair share of other media players: Sony player with the tiny CDs (can't remember what is was called), an iRiver player and an Archos 605. The Sony player was a nightmare with DRM. Music organization was clumsy and difficult to manage. The iRiver played MP3s but had no music management (at the time anyway). The Archos was all drag and drop, but killed you with plug ins and add ons to play the most basic files.

Anyway, Apple has their issues, but when talking about a good consumer experience, they have presented the best integration of management and usability IMHO. And, yes, because of timing I'm not likely to switch to another device now. It would seem that others would agree simply by the volume of users that purchase the devices.

Just some counter points to consider really. No system is perfect.

 

[MattZani]

They just look so damned good, really distracting when im working

 

[zync]

2) The menu bar at the top of the screen. Made sense on a non-multitasking classic OS on a 9" screen. Makes no sense on a modern OS where you'll have dozens of apps and windows open at the same time. I have a huge widescreen display and a window towards the bottom - but I have to drag the bloody mouse to the top of the screen to do anything. Notwithstanding the illogic of doing it this way, separating the functions from their window within in a multitasking environment.

I always hear this and I wonder what the big deal is. I know it's nice to be able to move things around, but this UI element is just like Windows. Granted on Windows, it's at the top of the window, but that's not a huge jump. Really I hear the complaint that people can't put the dock up their because of it. I just think that no matter where it is, you're always going to have to go to it. What would be pretty neat is a Maya like system where you hold down a button and the commands center on the cursor. Having said that though, I'm just fine with it on top. It takes up less space than a default Windows taskbar (which I always auto-hid) and easily lets me know what's selected, what's available, and what the status of the system is. I think my beef with the taskbar, which offers similar functionality in the system tray, is that it was always on the bottom and I needed that space at the bottom of my window. It seems that I generally need less space at the top, and I can't move my windows above the top anyway, which can sometimes be annoying, but usually makes me happy.

That said, I can see your complaint about logic. However, even in a multitasking environment, you can still only do one thing at a time. I like that the menu bar shows the name of the program first and foremost in bold. I think that's very helpful. I know the windows themselves show whether they're active or not, but I find it easier to just check the menu bar than find the active window out of a bunch of windows, especially with multiple UI types.

But these are minor irritations in what is overall a superior way of working. And my self of 10 years ago would never have believed I would ever type that.

Agreed. When they first put in an Apple Store here in like 2001 or 2002, I waited outside as my PC friends went in to check it out. I didn't even want to be seen in the store. I made fun of Macs for the longest time. The last time I had used a Mac was in elementary school and the ones we had always crashed when we played SimCity. I think they crashed more than we got to play. I also think they were clone machines thinking back on it. Anyway, one of those friends got an iPod that Christmas and I thought it was so amazing that I just had to have one.

I took an electronic media class that spring semester and we worked on older 233MHz iMac's running OS9. I liked playing around with OS9, and I had begun to play a bit in OSX when that same friend's mom got one of the UFO iMacs. I needed a 20gig firewire drive for that class. I thought to myself, hey an iPod could fill that task. I used my scholarship money to buy the 2nd gen 20gig iPod.

At the end of that semester I desperately wanted a Mac to replace my aging POS Dell that I traded my first personal laptop to a previous employer for. The next semester I was skateboarding to class and wasn't paying attention going down a gently hill and my front truck hit the edge of the sidewalk and flung me off the board. That heavy ass Dell swung me around and my bag and wrist (unfortunately) hit the ground. The case broke a bit and I didn't feel like fixing it. That month they released the first 15" Al PowerBook, and though it's had it's share of hardware issues, is still my favorite computer. It fulfilled it's role, even though the bottom inch or so of the screen is dead most of the time. Anyway, from that point on, I've never looked back.

Ironically, those two friends have yet to own a Mac! One of them considered buying one recently, and might get an iPhone at some point. The other still hates them for the most part.

 

[iBookG4user]

I've only got one real thing that I hate about a Mac right now and that's that Kernal task takes up all of the CPU power sometimes on my MacBook Air. That gets quite annoying and makes the computer almost useless until it stops, it usually happens when the computer gets a bit on the higher temperature side.

 

[janstett]

You could try spaces. It really good, especially in multi-screen environments.

Spaces is great, but it doesn't solve the problem.

The context is the system menu bar at the top and the illogic of application menus being located there (it gets lost through the nested quotes).

I have complained about this too, and there is an even worse example of this archaic model breaking down -- multiple displays.

Let's say I have just two monitors (won't even go to the case of 3 or more), and I have an application on the far side of monitor #2. I have to move the mouse all the way up and over to the upper left of monitor #1 to do anything with the menu. That's a heck of a lot of mousing. And it's ridiculous.

Look at the applications you use. They all have toolbar buttons at the top, whether it's iTunes or FireFox or Handbrake. I can't think of an application that doesn't. Even TextEdit has toolbar buttons. Anyone who's ever programmed knows these toolbar buttons s are basically shortcuts to menu items. (E.G. the play button on iTunes is a shortcut to menu item controls->play). It's completely inconsistent, logically, for the toolbar buttons to be located in the application window while the menu items are up at the top in the system window.

If you want to be logically consistent, and graphically consistent (anybody remember Apple's UI guidelines?), then they should move the toolbar buttons to the top under the system menu too. If you want to hit back in FireFox, or hit Play in iTunes, you should now have to go to the top of monitor #1 every time. But pretty much all of you would say that is ridiculous. And the reason that is ridiculous but doing the same for the menu isn't, is because you are blinded by the inertia of always having done it that way -- the wrong way.

Use a multi-monitor setup and you'll see how quickly this antiquated model falls apart.

While I'm pointing out Apple's bad UI design and mixed metaphors, how about the dock. It's a complete nightmarish mess. A disaster. Shortcuts and running programs thrown together on the left; stacks and system shortcuts on the right. Eeew.

 

[JoeG4]

I hated the global menubar at first but I currently love it. On a multi-monitor setup IT WOULD be nice if the menubar simply followed your mouse to whatever screen you're on.

Theoretically if you're using an app like that, it shouldn't be on a second screen anyway though.

 

[mishugs2]

gah this machine...

i grew up using pcs. i got a job that uses macs. and going from a sophisticated machine to this archaic hunk of plastic is overwhelmingly frustrating. i'm in the accounting field, and quickbooks for a mac is different than quickbooks for a pc. so i can't even enter things the same way or pull up reports the same way. this dumb thing is about enough for me to want to bash it with a baseball bat. i HATE HATE HATE macs and will NEVER own one. so basically, what i hate about macs is their very existance. quite a waste if you ask me.

 

[MaskingTape]

i grew up using pcs. i got a job that uses macs. and going from a sophisticated machine to this archaic hunk of plastic is overwhelmingly frustrating. i'm in the accounting field, and quickbooks for a mac is different than quickbooks for a pc. so i can't even enter things the same way or pull up reports the same way. this dumb thing is about enough for me to want to bash it with a baseball bat. i HATE HATE HATE macs and will NEVER own one. so basically, what i hate about macs is their very existance. quite a waste if you ask me.

you have anger issues that need to be worked on

 

[hiimamac]

HATE?!? I couldnt imagine feeling a negative emotion as strong as my LOVE for my Apple products.

Hate is a strong word.

Reminds me of all the nuns.... in Catholic school, of course they were right, hate is a strong word, we were always corrected and told to say, "dislike."

 

[edesignuk]

Their "support" structure.

 

[zync]

Use a multi-monitor setup and you'll see how quickly this antiquated model falls apart.

While I like the menu being on top, it is quite annoying and doesn't make sense when you're running something on display 2. They could at least run a duplicate menu on display 2.

 

[zync]

i grew up using pcs. i got a job that uses macs. and going from a sophisticated machine to this archaic hunk of plastic is overwhelmingly frustrating. i'm in the accounting field, and quickbooks for a mac is different than quickbooks for a pc. so i can't even enter things the same way or pull up reports the same way. this dumb thing is about enough for me to want to bash it with a baseball bat. i HATE HATE HATE macs and will NEVER own one. so basically, what i hate about macs is their very existance. quite a waste if you ask me.

And you're on macrumors why?

It sounds like what you hate most is Quicken's Mac division. Pretty much anything that is "archaic" about a Mac is new in Windows. Although I must say that if your Mac is made of plastic it probably is archaic. Most Macs these days are made out of aluminum.

 

[MacKid9930]

Macs are Awesome

I love my Macbook Pro There are a little hiccups here and there, (like compatibility with other computers, and other little cosmetic things like the sleep light and the plus button) but over all I love macs, and would always choose them over PCs