Charlie Brooker is my new favourite hero, based solely on this article.
I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.
GB, I await your scorn.
[Thanks Duarte]
[tags]charlie brooker, mac ads[/tags]
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 
I will weigh in, but not bearing scorn. per se.
As a relatively recent mac owner, I have to say that its advantage is not security, its not anti-MS activism, its not feng shui, its not even the babes. I’ve worked on Windows 3.0/3.1/95/98/NT/2000/XP, MIPS OS on DEC, SunOS/Solaris, AIX 3.x-5.x, OS 400, the first release of slackware right through to the latest kubuntu, even a little big iron.
The appeal for the mac is that it just works. no tinkering, no fiddling, no tweaking, no waiting for just the right phase of the moon. It just works.
I have to say, though. I too hate mac owners and Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot is with one mouse button (when you clearly support the concept of a right click) and no menu accelerators.
You and Charlie Brooker need to get over yourselves.
Every single experience I’ve ever had with a Mac is in many ways just another version of my first experience. It went something like this:
I was in 3rd or 4th year university, and a buddy of mine in residence was sick, and needed to print off an assignment. Being a good friend, I say “no problem buddy, I’ll hand it in for you.” So he gives me a disk, and I head off to the Mac lab in the CS building.
I put the disk in the machine, and print off the assignment no problem. “Hey, these Macs are pretty easy” I say to myself as I reach to eject the disk from the drive. If there was anybody else in the lab, I’m sure it would have been amusing to watch me poke the spot where the “disk eject” button should have been 4-5 times. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to get that damned disk out.
I love the idea behind most of what Apple does, but every time try to get on board, I find some incredibly simple thing that is done in the most retarded way possible. The iPod hardware and the wheel navigation metaphor is brilliant — but the iTunes library management is a usability disaster.
My problem with Apple (and most Apple users) is that they can’t seem to admit when somebody else has a good idea. Yes, Microsoft and the PC world steal a lot of different ideas–but in general they take those ideas, adapt them and make their own product better.
Apple seems to hold on to the stupidest things, even when another way is objectively superior. For the love of all that’s holy, get a real mouse already. I have 4 buttons on my mouse, and I wish I had a couple more.
I have a Mac myself and recently wrote a commentary on Brooker’s article (see here), but I have had an experience similar to Joe’s. A few years ago I wanted to burn a CD image I’d found on a magazine cover DVD, and assumed that my cousin’s Mac would do it in a flash. I naively thought it would be as simple as clicking on the image in Finder and that Finder would know how to burn an ISO to CD. Wrong. After one or two wasted CDs (having copied the ISO file but not burned the file-system) and a lot of frustration, I gave up.
A few months later, when I got my Mac, I learned that you need to use the “Disk Utility” which is tucked away in the Utilities folder. Silly me!
I guess that’s what’s always annoyed me about Mac users…they keep saying “It just works.” Well, so do PCs for 98% of the things you need to do…the other 2% are a pain, but I suspect Macs have their own 2%. The ads are just trying to convince customers that the lacking 2% on the PC is all the fun stuff like music, movies, pictures, webcams and so on. The Mac 2%, apparently, involves ejecting discs and burning CDs. 🙂
I agree that there is a lot of religion about what is a good idea and what is not. If ‘Microsoft’ came up with it, the mac community thinks its bbadddddddd.
While I have found that there are some oddities, that is going to be true anytime you move systems. I defy any non-Linux user to sit down at a Linux box and burn a CD even on the third try.
I’ve found that most of the interface stuff that I’ve struggled with has been stuff that I’ve been conditioned to elsewhere (Linux, Windows, etc). For instance, I was trying to figure out how to automount a disk image and I couldn’t figure it out. It turns out I just had to add the image to the ‘login items’ (which, I agree, is buried a bit too deep).
My point about it ‘just working’ isn’t so much the interface. Any change there is going to cause folks to stumble and for every anecdote one way, you can give an anecdote to counter. It’s just a different pile. In fact, most of the ways we interact with a computer are completely ass-backwards for mostly historical reasons. About Face 2.0 provides an excellent presentation of this. Did you ever consider why we have to ‘save’ our documents? To someone who has never worked with a computer the idea that the default is discard the last 2 hours of work and that I “might” want to keep it is completely ridiculous. The behaviour is completely the opposite of the way it should be. The reason for this behaviour is the physical distinction between RAM and disk storage and the fact that disk storage was extremely slow historically which didn’t allow software to easily ‘save as you go’ and allow ‘discard’ to be the exception rather than ‘save’.
Ah, but I digress, by ‘it just works’, I mean the ‘cost of ownership’ stuff. Things like hardware recognition/configuration, power management, network configuration, software installation. Some of it’s still garbage, but I’ve found the mac to be way less hassle in the long run than any system I’ve worked on before.
Note: I too find it weird that there is no eject button
do you hate linux too?
ack ,dammit, link didnt post properly
apparently I need a mac…mmm shiny
I don’t hate Linux, but I hate Linux/Unix snobs. If I read one more person’s blog about how Ubuntu is going to save the world, I’m breaking my personal internet tube.