20 things iHATE about MAC

Advertising can turn a lemon into lemonade or make something that really isn't that much different from your product look like junk. It's the reason McDonald's is the Number 1 burger joint in the world despite the crappy food they serve. It's also the reason MAC sales are surging while the nearly identical VISTA failed. Yup, you heard me, VISTA is MAC on a PC.

So why does everyone avoid computers with VISTA loaded? And they do. I know people who bought laptops with Vista and had them retrograded, which is a lot like buying a Mercedes and putting a Hyundai engine in it, then complaining because it doesn’t work right.

Well, a few hard core PC Gamers found VISTA's operating system slowed down their games, which often require 110% of their processing capabilities (you get 110% by spending a fortune on internal cooling systems that clock the processor at speeds well beyond what it’s designed for).

Then the Network Administrators started slagging it because it meant having to learn a whole new set of protocols and that not only meant work for them but it also increased the likelihood they’d miss something critical and get canned.

So once word got out that the Geek Elite was avoiding VISTA it didn't take APPLE long to cap on that and start their infamous "PC vs MAC" ads. After that you could literally see the fat lady warming up.

But here's the big joke to that. Geeks don't buy MACs because it doesn't matter how much you know about computers there’s nothing a series gamer can do to bypass Mac systems and goose the extra speed from it you need for a serious bout of Warcraft.

So the lemmings who bought the message and avoided VISTA were the people it was actually made for. And instead of using a system that was not only cheaper than a Mac but more compatible with 99% of the free world they leapt off the cliffs of doom and plummeted into the Mac Cult where the best thing you can say about your computer is that it looks nice.

But in case you're thinking of buying Mac and are still on the fence let me share just 20 of the big complaints I have with it:

1. PRICE: C'mon, you can get 3 PCs that'll do the same thing for the price of this system, and they actually have programs loaded in them that iNEED.

2. THE APPLE KEY. This is the single most annoying invention in the history of computing. It does the same thing a CONTROL key does on a PC, only it's one key further in on the keyboard which makes finding it without looking almost impossible.

3. THINGS DON'T CLOSE WHEN YOU CLICK X. On a PC the file ends operations when you click the red X, on a MAC it just minimizes and appears to go away but remains. After you forget all about it and you suddenly notice its still active you actually have to go MENU> PROGRAM> CLOSE> YES to get rid of it. Good luck if you're in a hurry.

4. THE DOCK: If you use a MAC you know bloody well what the problems here are. Could this be any less intuitive or more annoying? If you don’t use MAC go into an APPLE STORE and tell the cultists to leave you alone while you play with the “computer”. Open any three applications then minimize them and try to get from one to the next. hehehe

5. PROGRAMS FORCE THEMSELVES TO THE FRONT: Ever opened multiple apps on a PC. You can put them where you want and they'll close in reverse sequence to how you opened them. In MAC there are programs that decide for themselves to go up front SUDDENLY. Even if you want to see something else you can't because the program doing something in the background keeps popping up front. It means you can't touch type on a Mac if you're multitasking because you have no way of knowing which program you'll be typing in.

6. UPGRADING: This is sort of #1 again. A 500 gig PC internal Hard drive costs me $150, a 300 gig MAC internal Hard drive will cost me $750. WHUUUUU???

7. PROGRAMS: Oh sure, if all you're going to do is iLIFE it coz you only want to surf the net, check mail, take photos and listen to music then your overpriced MAC comes fully loaded. If you want to do ANYTHING else the programs costs at least 2x as much as they would for PC - AND THERE AREN'T MANY TO CHOOSE FROM so forget about shopping around. Oh and none of them are free so don't even bother looking.

8. SMALL DIALOGUE BOXES: You'd think for $3000 they could make a dialogue box big enough that you didn't need to squint at to read it. The 9 inch Mac screens went the way of the dinosaur decades ago, pity the programmers haven't realized that yet.

9. CONSISTENCY: Even if a feature is not necessarily intuitive, it’s easier to understand if it works the same way everywhere it’s encountered. Unfortunately, Mac isn’t as consistent as one might expect. For example, if you select a folder as the source for images in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences, it might work in one tab, but not in another.

10. DESKTOP: Why doesn't the pop-up menu near the top have a Fit Screen option that would proportionately stretch or shrink the image to match either the horizontal or the vertical pixel dimensions of the display? Such an option would work equally well with both portrait and landscape pictures, without clipping or aspect ratio distortion. The screen saver already does this by default, so why can’t Desktop?

11. DISAPPEARING SIDEBAR: Menu items should do what they say they will do and not have unintended consequences. Case in point: if you choose View > Hide Toolbar (Option-Command-T), not only does the toolbar disappear but so too does the Sidebar. This isn’t the behaviour described by the menu item, and it's really annoying when the Sidebar disappears unexpectedly.

12. DOESN'T NETWORK WELL: The moment we set things up so that the MAC could transfer files between it and other systems in our house we ran into the unexpected problem of the MAC freezing up on start up if those units were shut off. And it stayed that way until we confirmed that the other computers (which it treats as volumes in it's own system) weren't available. IT DID THIS EVERY SINGLE TIME UNTIL WE TOOK IT OFF THE NETWORK!!

13. ARE YOU SURE?: Okay, this can be a really useful function in a computer. However when your computer doesn't warn you that the unnamed scratch file IS being used by other applications and lets you delete it only to later discovery you've just lost 4 months work that's annoying. Particularly since it insists on warning you about completely harmless operations every single freaking minute of use!

14. THAT MEDIA TYPE IS NOT SUPPORTED: Huh? You know the Mac ad where it brags about being compatible with everything? HA!! I've had media files the Mac created and then like a father who can't handle the responsibility suddenly it completely refuses to recognize the file. It's visible, it just won't open. If I had a Dollar for every file I created in Mac but had to transfer to my PC, change into a compatible Mac file format and then import back into Mac to get onto the next step of what I wanted to do the bloody MAC would have paid for itself!

15. LACK OF HELP ONBOARD: Ever got a file that your PC didn't recognize? Notice how various applications pop up trying to help you find out why, or help you download the driver to make them work? Notice how most of that is free? iPHOTO doesn't do that. After adding a folder full of images into my iPHOTO library I started getting all sorts of dialog boxes telling me "the source files were unreadable because they were in an unrecognized file type". Fair enough, but iPHOTO doesn't offer any assistance to deal with this. Most bloody MAC programs don't. It either works or it doesn't iEXIST! However, the moment I import these into the supposedly more inferior PC I not only get help opening them but have the tools I need to convert them so my idiot MAC can view the bloody things. I've never had an extension I couldn't open in my PC. I might need to download a driver which the PC will not only help me find but install for me, often for free. I've got hundreds of pictures and videos my MAC doesn't even acknowledge and others it'll VIEW ONLY but won't otherwise touch. Bloody useless.

16. PINWHEEL PAUSES: Remember the blue screen of death? How long has it been since you saw that? I'm betting if you bought a PC in the last 5 years operating on XP or better it's been about 5 years. For some reason MAC, the self-proclaimed stability master, freezes up hourly while some mysterious program is working on something. Now, i've got quad processors so it should be able to do 4 things at once. The very least it could do was leave one processor for what I'm working on at the time and let the other 3 handle whatever the background thingy is that requires so much effort, but NOOOOOOOOOO, the whole computer freezes up sapping whatever productivity gains the Mac promised into some void - the same void where this mysterious application is that keeps causing the PINWHEEL OF INFREQUENT BOREDOM to appear.

17. PERMISSIONS: Ever worked on a network in your office? Notice how there are things you can't do because the Administrators have locked those functions out? Imagine now you're using your computer at home and you're the only one who uses it. You are the only user! Now imagine that you're trying to do something but suddenly your Mac says you don't have permission to perform that task. If you're lucky it might ask you to authenticate yourself as an administrator but if not you're screwed. So if you don't have permission to do, who does?

18. EMPTYING THE TRASH: Imagine you are trying to empty the Trash and a dialog box pops up notifying you that "the operation cannot be completed because the item is in use." Fair enough right? You don’t expect Mac OS X to allow you to delete a file that’s actually being used by another application, but apparently it's too much to expect to be told the name of the application or thread that’s laying claim to the document? You know, some info so you could figure out how to free it of the lifeline that's keeping you from flushing the trash!

19. APPLE STORE EMPLOYEES ARE USELESS: So I go into the APPLE STORE and I explain the problem I'm having with my Mac. I've already checked the internet and found lots of references to the problem but no solutions. You know what the APPLE EXPERT SAYS TO ME? "It shouldn't do that." Uh, yeah. I know. That's why I'm here. How do I fix it? “I don’t know, it shouldn’t do that.” Yeah…

20. JUST BECAUSE THE CABLES CONNECT DOESN'T MEAN IT'LL WORK: This is my favourite. I bought the Mac and because the G5 tower I was told I needed costs more than the most expensive PC on the market I opted not to buy the monitor. "No problem!" said the APPLE expert. Any monitor you have will plug in and work. So I got home and sure enough the spare monitor I had came with a cable that fit perfectly into the corresponding MONITOR connector on the Mac. I turned it on and voila it worked perfectly. I set everything up and then clicked the six steps required to shut her down. The Mac shut off and the whirring of the fan came to a halt and then I stood up to go do something else. Suddenly the Mac turned back on. I continued to do this until I decided to put everything on a powerbar I could manually switch off which was how I got the thing to stay off for the first few months. Skip ahead those months and an entirely unrelated problem had me on the Mac Help line. All of a sudden the 3rd techie on the other end asked me what kind of monitor I had. I told him, answered all his questions and then he said, "You can't plug the monitor into the monitor port. You need to get an adaptor and use this other port." Why? Because the monitor port was only for a Mac brand digital monitor and my generic monitor wasn't digital so even though it was compatable and had worked it was confusing the Mac and causing the restart problem. So I went to the APPLE STORE and bought the cheapest cable they had for the problem. It's 3 inches long and costs $50. The monitor only cost me $5. So when an Applenista brags about how universal Macs are, remember the caveat: "Yeah, if you've got the cash for the right adaptors."

So why do I use Mac then? Because someone convinced me it was a better platform to edit video on. I still use it for editing, but at least now I have a PC so I can do real work.