Firehed's Blog

Well, some people just love to complain, and I can't say that I blame them in some cases. While I don't regret switching for a moment, there are certainly a few quirks about OS X that have bugged me.

http://www.43folders.com/2007/02/28/mac-whines/

Pack a lunch if you want to read the whole list, but I'll highlight a couple that I quite agree with:

Finder - it's just weak. Maybe if the "always load in column view" option actually WORKED, I'd be a bit more okay with it, but that's yet to happen. Like several others have said, PathFinder addresses a lot of the issues, but is often overkill and bloated for what I need most of the time. Tab support and breadcrumbs across the top would keep me content for 95% of what I do, along with fixing the column view option I just mentioned.

Dock - a lot of people in the thread were amazingly whiny about it. I have mine scaled down to be pretty small as well as auto-hiding (it's effectively pointless when you use Quicksilver) and by and large, it's fine that way. Sometimes I wish it would unhide faster and sometimes I wish it would unhide slower... not a whole lot to be done about that, unless Apple wants to get working on some sort of predictive thing based off of the active window size and position and all that.

Hardware - gah! It's SO overrated. My MBP has been in Apple-land for service twice, and in neither case was the problem really fixed. They honestly should just have replaced the thing; if a major problem comes up again, I'm just going to ask them to do so. Yeah, maybe the crisp edges on my MBP look nice, but the pinched veins in my wrists disagree. My OS X'd ThinkPad is honestly a much better system to work with, aside from the lack of wireless, sound, and battery indicator. It seems lighter (but I don't have a scale), runs MUCH cooler, and - most importantly - doesn't murder my wrists. It's specced about the same as a plain MacBook and runs things surprisingly well, especially considering that OSx86 is a giant hack-job. Mind you, I love the backlit keyboard on the MBP, but these sharp edges where wrists tend to rest, not to mention the stupidly hot casing (literally almost to the point of causing burns) just really make me question Apple's whole design philosophy.

Networking - yeah, that missing volume thing is just bad. Especially on portables where you forget to unmount network shares before packing up and heading out. Otherwise it's great; AFP shares seem to be a lot nicer to deal with than the SMB shares I'm stuck with.

So, yeah, those are my whines. "but omg you're so hypocritical with hating on windows!!1" and all that, right? I never said that OS X, and Apple in general for that matter, isn't without it's faults - it certainly has them. But whenever I'm on a Windows machine, I'm quickly reassured about any doubts that may have come up over time. No dealing around with stupid driver bullshit, registry hacks, quirky installers, and constant ineffective UAC controllers (yeah, I know OS X has something similar, but they're far less frequent and you don't instantly go into "automatic yes" mode with them, for that reason plus having to actually authenticate instead of just clicking OK). Honestly, just changing the resolution in Vista causes the whole system to wig out, as does waking up from sleep. I know it's nVidia's fault, not Microsoft's, but it's still stupid bullshit that neither I nor anyone else should ever have to deal with. XP is certainly more tried-and-true, but I could swear that it just doesn't want to install ever since Vista was released (it just doesn't want to see my drives anymore... go figure).

Luckily, the only thing I need PCs for at this point is gaming, which I don't do much of anymore. I've got a Wii (which, in honesty, is really something that's a LOT more fun with more than one person; you really do feel like a bit of a tool playing alone after a while) and a PS2 that I've never really liked but needed for FFX, X-2, and XII (and that's about it... I own KH and maybe one other game, neither of which got a ton of playtime). I'm considering a 360, but I don't really have the cash to spend on one right now, and only really want it for multiplayer Halo which I've grown surprisingly fond of at school; as I don't have any plans to go back next year and have less than two months left in the semester, there's not much point in dropping the $450 on the console plus game. Eventually I'll fix the XP thing and keep an install around of that for the games that Vista barfs on (SC:CT at least, though everything seems a bit unstable due to drivers); in the meantime, I haven't been gaming too much anyways and I expect that at least some of the software-level annoyances I have in OS X are going to be addressed in Leopard, and I'll continue to pray for a midrange Mac without a display (some sort of headless iMac/beefed up Mac Mini).

4am, time for bed. Costco run tomorrow :)

-Eric, out