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Meet the new boss; same as the old boss
I hate Apple. Let me just get that out there, so that there’s no ambiguity: I hate Apple.
That said, I recently took shipment of a new laptop, and it’s a Macbook Pro. What brought me to this horrible point? It’s like this…
The loyal Lenovo laptop I ran at home has served me admirably for seven long years. It was solid, unlike the Dell and Sony laptops that preceded it. But after seven years, it’s dog slow and has a lot of really outdated software on it, including Windows XP and Office 2003. It isn’t able to handle higher-quality streaming video, and it has a broken spacebar. So I needed a new machine.
But why a Mac? Well, I’ve been using a Macbook Pro at work for the past two years, which is enough time to see its strengths and weaknesses in accurate detail. And frankly, the Mac has many more shortcomings than it has advantages. The problem is that it is strong in ways that are important, and weak in ways that are mostly just irritating.
If you really want to know, here is my list of factors…
Mac strengths
- Performance
- There’s no question: the Macbook screams. And that’s doubly true on the new machine, which comes with an SSD. Spinning magnetic disks? That’s so 1980s mainframe thinking…
- Stability
- Honestly, both my Mac and XP machines are stable as all hell. But I do think Windows is a little more prone to memory leaks and gradual degradation of performance.
- Quicksilver
- Quicksilver beats the hell out of both the Windows Start Menu and the Mac’s Spotlight. It is an amazingly versatile launcher/utility, and if you’re on OSX and not using it, you might as well be using OS/2.
- Gestures
- Like Quicksilver, gestures are an amazing productivity tool. Better than anything I’ve seen on the Windows platform.
- Adium
- On Windows, your IM client is either Trillium or Pidgin. They suck. Adium isn’t perfect, but it’s a whole lot better. This matters.
- Dev Tools
- Coda’s not a bad frontend dev tool. It’s kinda surprising, but there are more serious dev environments available for OSX than there are for Windows these days.
- Virtual Machines
- On OSX, I have a choice of several ways of running Windows VMs, whereas the reverse is not true. Having the best of both worlds is easy when you have both worlds on one machine!
- Web Dev
- OSX comes with Apache, perl, and PHP built in. That’s kinda convenient. What scripting languages come preinstalled on Windows?
- Shell Clipboard
- Here’s a surprise: you can cut and paste text in the OSX command window! Wow… Funny how Microsoft never thought about that!
Mac Weaknesses
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- On Windows, I can access any item in the program menu from the keyboard. On OSX? It’s just not possible. Talk about making your software unusable! I shouldn’t have to use my mouse to perform simple menu selections.
- Trash
- Similarly, I shouldn’t have to drag a file to the Trash icon to delete it. See that double-width key marked “Delete”? If your OS is so intuitive, why can’t I delete something by pressing “Delete”? Morons.
- Apple Hardware
- It’s fast, but it’s incredibly expensive, and it sure is prone to failure! Every piece of Apple hardware I’ve owned has failed within two weeks of the warranty expiring, and I can’t count the number of failures I’ve seen other people endure. Apple hardware is shit.
- And it’s tasty, too!
- First of all, the power cord is a ridiculous 80 fucking dollars. Second, it’s shielded with a rubbery compound that any cat or dog is going to adore chewing. Where’s your vaunted user-centered design now, Apple? Thanks so much.
- No Kedit
- Kedit… There’s a reason why I’m still using a PC port of the mainframe editor I was using thirty years ago. It’s a great editor that does things that no other editor in the world can do. I guess I can still use it in a Windows VM…
- iTunes
- iTunes and the Apple Store suck ass, period. And as a whole, Apple’s “take it or leave it” attitude toward their customers is something that really grates. I didn’t want your crappy Quicktime software; I don’t want your crappy iTunes software, and I don’t want you locking me into your grand designs for world domination. Honestly, watching Apple’s famous “1984” commercial these days is an exercise in irony and corporate hubris.
- Format now? (Default=Yes)
- Unix has always been eager to take any opportunity to trash your file system. This is no different under OSX. If you pull that USB drive out of its slot without telling Apple, you can kiss everything on it goodbye. Strangely, this never happened to me under Windows.
- Interface Mediocrity
- You’d think that a company like Apple, with its reputation for user-focused design and UI excellence, would provide a way to send the active window to the bottom of the window stack. Nope. Can’t do it. Not only is there no keyboard shortcut, but there’s no programmatic way to do it, either.
Those are only a few of the many annoyances I’ve tried to work around when migrating to OSX.
Now, before I go, let me relate three other observations.
First, back to the SSD. I can’t speak to its reliability (or lack thereof), but this is my first machine without a hard drive, and it screams. Why didn’t we do this 20 years ago?
Second: Retina. So the argument in favor of Apple’s new Retina laptop is that it has better resolution than a regular LCD. Okay. Now the negatives:
- It doesn’t come with an antiglare display.
- The battery cannot be replaced.
- The memory cannot be replaced or upgraded.
- Before any application looks good on the Mac, the application developer must rewrite it to take advantage of the Retina display.
- Before any website looks good, the website author has to rewrite their site to take advantage of the Retina display.
- It’ll be years before Retina-style displays trickle down to the majority of web users, and I don’t want to put myself, as a web designer, on different hardware than the rest of the world.
- The machine doesn’t have a DVD-ROM, an Ethernet port, or a Firewire port.
- It’s first-gen hardware and apparently has image burn-in problems.
So as you can imagine, I didn’t get a Retina Mac. And I’m extremely happy about that.
Finally, this was one of the worst purchase experiences I’ve had in years. Why?
Went to the Apple store. After convincing the sales clone that I wasn’t there to chat, but to order a machine, he told me they only stock three standardized configurations, none of which suit my needs, which was mildly disappointing.
Then he had me walk through their website’s online ordering form, but after every page: the configurator, entering my info, entering my payment information, confirming my purchase… Every time I hit “Continue” I received a “Your session has timed out” error, even after only 30 seconds on the page. It happened so many times that the Apple Stormtrooper who was “assisting” me suggested I place my order at home, from my Windows machine. Apple fail!
Then, two days later, Apple sent me an email indicating that my payment had been rejected, and my order was on hold until I called my credit card issuer. After half an hour on the phone with the bank and another half hour with Apple, I learned that yeah, the bank had stupidly declined the initial charge, but Apple had then retried the transaction, and it had gone through the second time.
Of course, they didn’t bother sending an email to let me know that I didn’t have to waste my own time chasing the bank. What do they care if they waste an hour of their customer’s time by sending him off on a wild goose chase? It’s just another part of the vaunted Apple experience.
A few days later I went back to grab a DVI adapter for my external monitor. Guess what? Oh no, they don’t stock those. What???
That’s three strikes, Apple. All I can say is that your machine had better blow me away, because if there were any decent alternative, I’d be out the door like a rocket.
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I will agree wholeheartedly, though, with your assessment of the Apple Store (brick-and-mortar version). Also, it's usually far too crowded to be useful, and guess what? They don't bother selling software! Which meant that when I wanted to get Civ V, I had to download the multiple gigabytes over my home modem - literally DAYS of downloading!! At least the thing was able to deal with dropped service without starting over again.
Still, hope you enjoy the Mac, even though I know it won't convert you.
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