I recently purchased a second hand ibook (2003 vintage). I do wish it would stop thinking it knows best. Windows might be like your dimwitted younger brother, but mac os x is like your interfering aunt. Ok, it has a lot of style, but I'm being choked here.
For example, why can't I modify the look and feel so that the text is light on dark? It wouldn't be hard to provide a really stylish inverted colour scheme. But no, aunty mac knows best and the only change I can make is the colour of my buttons.
Also highly annoying is the limited keyboard commands. The mouse is a truly fantastic invention. But it is not the be all and end all (and it gives me oos). When in doubt, I'm happy to clicky clicky with the mouse, but when I'm doing the same thing often, I like to be able to do it with a keyboard command. Also, *why* is the only direction I can delete in backwards?!? Sometimes you want to delete things which are in front of the cursor. Like when you are at the beginning of a line. Mind you, it is so difficult to navigate to words within a line, I might as well plump for the mouse instead (see annoyance above).
However. All of these annoyances pale into insignificance next to the nasty, nasty way they've organised the os upgrades. I think Microsoft are thoroughly evil for their 5 year rolling cycle of forced os upgrades. But mac are doing it too. They've perfected the 'rental' model of purchasing software by making each upgrade cheapish and available just after you've bought the last one. They provide full throttle motivation by providing sod all support for their old versions. I couldn't download iTunes for 10.2.8 from Apple. I had to crawl through the internet until I found a site which had an archived copy. Why did I want to update my iTunes? Because my iPod shuffle (of a comparable vintage) refused to work with the version I had, and their only advice for fixing the problem was to update my iTunes to the most recent version. This nasty pattern is repeated in their dodgy support for Java (without which most of my favourite programs do not run).
I was hoping that being based on Darwin would make a fabulous marriage of mac pretty and unix grunt and flexibility. But the flexibility is sadly missing. I laptop (probably more than a desktop) can be a home away from home. But this is suspiciously like a hotel room, and I've become too idiosyncratic and grumpy to want to put up with it.
To be fair, the stereo in this hotel is very fine. Perhaps my best experience so far has been the podcasting happy when I finally got my shuffle to work with the fixed iTunes.
Posted by carla at August 23, 2007 10:01 PM