Russ Beattie’s (Legitimate) Mac Complaints

Russell Beattie is a fairly visible tech weblogger, so when he enumerates off-putting characteristics of Mac OS X and life in Apple-land, it’s not just Joe Blow who can’t get his com-pooter to work right.

The Apple apologist in me wanted to balk at the very thought that anybody would go from OS X back to Windows (“We are Devo! D-E-V-O!”). In my circle of friends there are still a couple of holdouts who switched from Linux to OS X and could never quite get into the Mac’s cushy interface, UNIX core or no. That I can grok, but Windows?

There’s nary an illegitimate concern in Russ’s list. Some are minor matters of hardware design (having to carry a VGA adaptor dongle in a VGA-saturated world), some are gut-level matters of preference (“I really dislike iPhoto”), and some are core problems that Apple should’ve remedied before OS X ever shipped (the goddamn Finder).

My favorites:

“iChat is [a] non-starter.” It’s amazing how slowly the glaring flaws in iChat get fixed. I don’t know anyone who uses iChat’s video conferencing features, but everyone I know wants it to have tabs and at least sport a feature set comparable to the official AIM client.

“What’s the friggin’ deal with DMG files?” They’re a terrible means to distribute an application or installer (not that the Windows install process makes sense). OS X should’ve shipped with something akin to FreeBSD’s ports tree, Fedora’s yum, or Gentoo’s Portage, that allows “subscriptions” to applications through the Software Update preference pane. Forcing every developer to write their own check-for-updates system is absurd.

“Everything for Macs costs more.” This will never not be the case in Apple-land. The Intel switch won’t drive prices down significantly.

The Dock, Expose, Spotlight, and Dashboard all suck. Basically every OS X “interface enhancement” short of the Aqua look itself is next to worthless, while third party apps like QuickSilver show us what pushing HCI forward is all about. Meanwhile, even the consistency in Cocoa app fit-n-finish is falling by the wayside.

Macs are slow. I so do not care about your Photoshop rendering benchmarks; I click a menu bar, and the time-to-draw is painful. There are little lags all over OS X.

All this has the potential to slowly dissipate the alpha geek mindshare that’s built up around OS X over the last several years. If system performance continues to stagnate (maybe Intel will fix this), new features continue to be nearly irrelevant (Apple stopping feature-for-feature competition with Microsoft and actually innovating would fix this), and the best-in-class interface continues to crumble (Apple can fix this, but has to make an immediate and public choice about it), more and more developers and power users are going to shrug their shoulders, sigh, and move back to Windows or a UNIX-derivative.

I’m not there yet. I simply can’t use Windows without breaking out into hives, and desktop Linux makes my eyes bleed.

Around kenshoto (where all but a couple of us rock a PowerBook), the majority OS philosophy is: “all operating systems suck. OS X just sucks less.”

Let’s at least keep it that way, eh Apple?