I’ve been a Mac guy for almost my entire adult life. I wrote my first college papers on a typewriter, but by the end of my freshman year – almost 30 years ago – I was on an IBM PC. Then, in 1984, I found the Mac, and I never looked back.
Till now.
I’m not saying I’m switching, but I sure am open to a better solution. Because the past year or so has been dominated by the kind of computing nightmares that used to be the defining experience of my Windows-PC-wielding friends and colleagues. And it’s not limited to the Mac – the iPhone is also a massive fail in what was once the exclusive province of Apple: Ease of use.
I’ll caveat this post with the fact that I may be something of an outlier – I have thousands of contacts in my Apple contact database, and my iCal app is burdened with having to integrate with a multi-platform universe at work. And perhaps the fact that I love to take photographs, and have amassed more than 10,000 digital images, means that iPhoto has become mostly useless to me for anything other than as a storage vault. And that, apparently, is all my fault.
But my wife isn’t an outlier. She has about 250 contacts. She tries to use iCal, but can’t make it work. Her email breaks early and often. And she’s spent the past two months in IT hell, trying to salvage her digital life from the clutches of Apple’s self-centered, walled-garden update called the Lion operating system, which wiped out nearly all her previous settings and useful applications. Watching her struggles, and trying to help (and realizing I couldn’t without bringing in expensive professionals) made me wonder – whatever happened to ease of use?
I am certain this post will elicit all manner of Apple fanboys who claim I’m a moron, that I’ve brought upon my own demise through stupid decisions. Well, let’s review a few, and you can judge for yourself.
Honestly, where to start. How about with the iPhone itself? I have an iPhone 4, it’s about a year or so old. The contract is for two years, and I don’t feel like paying $400 to get a new phone. I figured this one must be good enough, right? Wrong.
The phone is pretty much useless now, because all of its storage is taken up. With what, you might ask? Well, it’s a mysterious yellow substance – found, in a masterstroke of intuitive design, in iTunes – called “other.” I was alerted to this issue when I couldn’t take a photo because my storage was full. Oh, and I was also told my storage was too full to download any more mail. And I’m an inbox zero kind of guy!
WTF is all this “other” shit, I wondered to myself. Well, that’s what Apple’s self-hosted forums are good for (I’ve been there a lot lately, for any number of issues, only a few of which I’ll detail in this post). So off to Google I headed – “what is the other in iphone storage” yielded this post, among a lot of others:
OK, so…should I restore the device from backup? How do you even do that? And if that doesn’t work, then what? I have to “restore as new”?
Sounds dangerous, like I might lose all my settings and apps and such. There had to be a better fix. I spent a half hour or so reading various forums, blog posts, and the like about the problem, which seems quite prevalent. Many of the suggestions are summarized in this post, and included deleting your browser cache (that was pretty easy, I did it, no luck), deleting your entire email account and recreating it (a pretty drastic thing to do, but funnily enough, I’ve done it about ten times in the past year due to problems with our connection to work mail, and since I’d done it recently, I figured that couldn’t be it), and my favorite:
Go to /var/mobile/Media/ApplicationArchives using SSH (requires jailbroken iPhone) or DiskAid and delete everything. This folder contains partially downloaded apps which never completed nor removed and were probably interrupted at some point in the middle of downloading.
Are you frickin’ kidding me? I have to jailbreak my phone to fix this problem?
Oh wait, that blog post suggested one last thing I could do: If the above steps fail, do a full system restore :(.
Again, very drastic. But I was getting impatient. I wanted my storage space back. I found another site, one that looked pretty official, that said this:
Unfortunately, scouring available information sources and speaking with Apple hasn’t led to any type of easy resolution.
If you’re experiencing this issue under any version of iTunes, you’ll need to restore your iPhone to reclaim the space occupied by Other. That is the only known solution at this time.
Well shit. I spent a few more fruitless hours trying to find another solution on the web. There wasn’t one that didn’t require pretty significant technical know-how (such as installing a utility, running it to reveal all files on the iPhone, then deleting each file one by one, even if you weren’t sure what the file did). The only option that was relatively straightforward and seemed to work, according to many forums, was to restore the phone.
Which I did. And I lost all my apps save the ones that come preinstalled on the iPhone in the first place. And guess what? It didn’t fix the problem.
OK, I’m going to stop on this example. Because the point isn’t to try to fix the problem (I know I’m going to have to go to an Apple store, and get a “Genius” to deal with this. And I know this “Genius” is going to tell me that my phone is old, and that I need a new one with more storage, and by the way, I should really get an iCloud account, because if I had one then I wouldn’t have a problem at all. In other words, Apple has architechted the iPhone in such a way as to insure that I spend much more money with Apple, and am committed to their cloud solution long term with my data. But that’s another rant). Oh, and the fact that Apple doesn’t respond in its forums about this (or any) issue? Ridonkulous.
My point is simply this: This. Ain’t. Easy.
Another example: iPhoto. May I just say, and I won’t be the first, that iPhoto is A Piece of Sh*t, in particular given how image-driven the company is in its own marketing. iPhoto is about as dumb as an application can be. Just launching the things often takes up my Mac’s entire CPU, crushing performance on anything else I have open (and no, my Macbook Pro isn’t old, it’s one of the newer models). Photos are organized by date, and there’s no easy way to change that. Album creation is utterly non-intuitive (again, I’m sure this is all my fault, Mr. Fanboy), and the “Faces” feature, which seemingly would fix a lot of these issues, is just plain useless.
Now, you Apple fanboys will scream at me: Hey Battelle, you wuss, don’t you know about Some Expert Photo Editing and Organizing Photo App That You Can Buy For Hundreds of Dollars. Or Some Bitchin’ Utility Written By A 19-Year-Old That Will Never Be Supported By Apple. Or something. Well I do, because I’ve searched high and low for help with iPhoto. Again, there are no easy solutions. I could take a class, yep. Or spend a few days manually tagging my photos. But wasn’t the point of the Mac that you SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT?!!
Another example: Nearly all of Apple’s built in “productivity” applications are terrible – email, contacts, calendaring, for starters. All of them are not ready for prime time. iCal is laughable as a shared calendar across platforms and the web – perhaps my IT department is filled with punters, but in five years, we’ve never been able to make iCal work seamlessly across pure Mac networks, not to mention with other solutions like Outlook or Google Calendar. And when we call Apple for support, it’s as if Apple really doesn’t care. Alas, we can’t seem to find anything better, so we limp along…apologizing when things “fall off the calendar” or, worse, when appointments stay on my iPhone calendar long after they’ve been moved from my main iCal on the Mac.
And dont’ get me started on Apple’s “Address Book.” As I said before, I have thousands of contacts. Is that so uncommon? Apparently it is. After months of trying to get my contacts to sync properly across my Mac, my assistant’s Mac, and both of our iPhones, my IT department finally got someone at Apple to admit that, well, the Address Book just doesn’t really work very well once you have more than about 1000 contacts. Seriously. Just – sorry, we don’t have a solution for that. We have found a fix – we use Plaxo – but now we’re dependent on Apple supporting Plaxo, which I’m not certain is a long term bet. Oh, and every time Plaxo syncs with Apple’s contacts, about one in ten of the contacts are duplicated. Why? No one knows. Is there a fix? Nope.
(And what if you want to sync to – gasp – an Android phone?! Well only way to do that is through a total hack involving Gmail. Seriously.)
Let me repeat my refrain: This. Ain’t. Easy.
Without going into detail, my little rant about Calendar, iPhoto, Address Book, et al goes for iTunes as well. I even bought a piece of software to try to fix iTunes myriad issues (Rinse). I can’t figure out whether or not Rinse has fixed anything, to be honest, and so far, all it’s managed to do is marry the wrong album art to about 100 or so songs which previously didn’t have any imagery. Which is kind of funny, but a tad annoying. And just the fact that there’s a market for something like Rinse kind of makes my point.
Oh, and then there’s the vaunted Apple Super Magical User Interface. You know, the Insanely Great Revolutionary Change the World User Experience that everyone fawns over as if it were a fact.
Are you kidding me? If Apple’s UI is magical, then I’ve got a Unicorn to sell you. Let’s start with Mac Lion. There are so many Fails in this OS, it’s hard to know where to start. You need a four-hour class just to understand all the contortions Apple seems to be doing in its attempt to make its desktop interface work the way the iPhone does. You know, pinch and swipe and app stores and mission controls and magic corners and all that. I’ve spent at least an hour figuring out how to turn most of that shit off. It just doesn’t work.
It’s really funny to watch my wife deal with all this, given she’s not exactly one to dig deep into system settings (you know, the very consumer Apple initial designed for). When she got Lion, the way her mouse, her iChat (now “iMessage” or someshit), and of course all her applications worked changed in very dramatic ways. For instance, she could no longer IM me – all of a sudden, she was on “me.com” and her IMs came to my cell phone as texts. (In other words, Apple defaulted to its own iCloud services, and wiped out her AIM-based identity). I’m sure this is all her fault, naturally.
Oh, and every time she clicks her mouse to try to move a window around, a message about “Icons and Text” appears. WTF? Little irritations like this happen all over the place, piling one upon the other until it crescendos with a long, wailing lament – WHAT AM I USING HERE – WINDOWS?!
But we all know the future is mobile, right? And the iPhone and iPad are Perfect Expressions of Beauty, Ideal Combinations of Form and Function. Except they’re Not.
Have you ever done a search in your iPhone contacts? You need the fingers of a poorly fed six-year-old to activate that search function. No, really, I must waste four or five minutes a day trying to make that damn thing work.
Seriously, how can an adult finger ever touch that little search icon without either hitting the “A” or the “+”????
And then there the precious internationalization feature of the keyboard (see image at right). I must turn my texts and emails into Kanji ten times a day. And this is a feature??!
There are countless other examples of irritating UI features on the iPhone. Inconsistent navigation is a primary one, but …OK. I’m going to really stop now. Because I know, learning how to use the tools of computing is MY job, and I’m clearly falling down on it. I know there are ton of tips and tricks that would make my life easier, if only I took the time to learn them. If only I spent hours a week on the Mac tips websites and such. If only I wasn’t busy…writing rants like this one.
And I know that Andriod and Windows are hard to use too. And no, I’m certainly not going to install Linux.
My point is simply this: This stuff is too complicated. There has to be a better way. And while it used to be that Apple was the brand which uncomplicated computing, for me, anyway, that’s simply no longer true. Does anyone out there have similar experiences, or am I really an outlier?
I am having all the exact same problems as you. It is incredibly frustrating. On top of that, updating on the OS on my MB Pro required me to get a new motherboard (!!!) for it to not crash all the time and my iMac has had horrific Wi-Fi problems. Oh… and 3 of my iPhone 4’s just stopped working. This stuff is just brutal
John, RUN WITH THIS ONE!
You hit the sweet spot. I thought it was me because “jumping through Hoops” and endless button pressing with Microsoft is so much worse (It becomes addictive, you get good at it – yet another topic?).
Do the WORLD a favour, present this “Fault Log” as a community effort to expose the failings, but in a helpful and unemotional way. Someone needs to structure this issue and help the grey masses build a colourful petition that Apple would find difficult to ignore.
In the short term, Apple needs a push to address the problems. In the long term, the geeks need a problem to solve. Shine the light. The solutions will come.
Oh yes, my (one of several) gripe is…I wish the creatives would just stop fiddling. If it works, leave it alone I say!
Thank you for a very constructive rant!
Welcome to Windows – we have dealt with these “computer nightmares” from the inception – bout time Mac followed suit -and next stop for you all – “IPhone5” selective viruses. Bet you can hardly wait!
I can’t vouch for the mobile apps but you’re right on in regards to the desktop OS’s. Apple seems to have thrown the Apple Interface Guidelines in the trash for OSx. Also the new Macs have hardware problems I would never have imagined. The power book power supply is wired into the mother board with no isolating circuit. Bad power, mother board dead. They used to ship with the best power supplies. I used to work at Apple in the bad old days. I can’t imagine them letting this stuff out the door in 1990.
I’m old-school-and-disgruntled Mac, too. So glad to read about others sharing Apple frustrations similar to mine. Apple is clearly too busy counting its money to listen. iWeb was the final straw for me. “Make all your web pages with us and we’ll publish them to the net for you! Great! Thank you! And now we won’t!” I was so frustrated I made a brief (2 min) video about it on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87RSIw1iqqA&feature=channel&list=UL or type in “Apple Poisoning its Faithful”.)
There has got to be a better way for personal computing.
Yes Mr. Battelle, you are an outlier – you finally have realized that the Emperor wears no clothes!
Pathetic little piece of ‘journalistic’ crap aka whining
This is certainly not journalism. It’s my personal experience/rant.
Who told you Windows was hard to use? Windows 7 is on par with OSX and Windows Phone is way ahead of iOS in ease of use. Forget everything about Android its a complete nightmare. 90% of all Android users find it so hard to use they end up using it as a featurephone. Just look at the mobile internet traffic – Android is hardly visible.
Odd, but I have no trouble whatsoever to use my phone. Neither does my wife. Or my friends. I think your statement is a little off.
I agree. I had a bit of trouble getting used to Android initially, but that was just because of being used to using an iPhone for a few years. I still use both, but now I much prefer Android because of its ability for customization and ease of use. And the Google apps just work better on it.
That is because the carriers have taken to selling the android phones basically like feature phones (mainly because of the low cost of the phones to the carriers) to a lot of people that really don’t need or want smart phones. These are the perfect customers for the carriers, as they will sell them a data plan knowing a lot of these customers will not be heavy users. I don’t think you can read anything about android usability into the mobile traffic stats. That’s also why the android fans shouldn’t read much into the android shipment numbers as far as android’s power as a software platform are concerned. This is partly why android as a platform is lower return financially to developers up to now.
Ease of use died with Steve Jobs. Bummer.
Best-Anon.tk
I’m not sure this has anything to do with Jobs
I have to agree with you 110%. I started out back in the day with DOS, and made the switch to OSX around Windows XP. I got tired of Windows getting filled with junk and having to reinstall every 6 months. At that time, OSX was great and was a huge improvement.
Over the past 10 years though, I have seen Mac go downhill. I get the feeling that the cause of this is mostly greed. Consumers will constantly spend money to get upgrades…it doesn’t matter if it’s 4.0.1 to 4.0.2, I believe they feel better knowing they have the latest and greatest. I believe Apple has banked on this and have been pushing products out faster than they can be tested. Many of the people that like this are people who can waste time spending hours online trying to find and fix the problem themselves. As I get older, I’m getting tired of doing this and don’t have the time anymore.
Which brings me here. I believe many old school Apple users will make a switch to Linux. It’s been getting easier to use and a lot more stable. Since new hardware coming out is as thin and lightweight as Apple hardware and cheaper, I believe people will make the switch. Just look at Android as an example.
I’ve been waiting for the iPhone release to upgrade my wife’s phone, as she has an Iphone 3gs. After we saw the announcement and price, she is happy getting an Android phone.
This is just my rant. Hopefully somebody can say if I’m on track or off my rocker!!
You’ve got plenty to gripe about. Definitely some issues here.
More interesting, as somebody with nearly 30 years of experience with the Mac and a deep understanding of the shortcomings, you sound fully equipped to go out and build a better mouse trap, sell your technology to other equally frustrated users and reap the benefits of the growth in the Mac platform. At last, you too could be an app millionare
I look forward to seeing your product launch and seeing you improve an obvious market shortcoming. That is unless you’re too busy whining about what others have created.
To paraphrase, maybe those who can do and those who can’t report.
I wish this could be fixed with an APp. Maybe the iPhoto thing…
I tell friends and clients to not use iPhoto these days. Its slowness and obtuse storage schemes (my Air had eventually 1 GByte of “previews” on it that I could not remove) are horrible. Lightroom is the better option.
Ah! How refreshing to know I have arrived to the right place for sticking to Linux for the last 15 years. It has been though, sometimes frustrating, but at least every upgrade cycle cost me comparatively little (my 73 year old mum has been using Linux for the last 5-6 years and she never complains about it. She used to swear when she had Windows Food for thought)
These are some of the dumbest and most childish complaints I have seen in a long time. Of all the problems in Apple Devices, THIS is what you bring up?
>OK, so…should I restore the device from backup? How do you even do that? And if that doesn’t work, then what? I have to “restore as new”?
Sounds dangerous, like I might lose all my settings and apps and such.
Sounds like you have absolute no experience with new technology.
Mac OS X was about 10 years old when Steve Wozniak wrote the operating system for the Apple I and Apple II. When an OS is 40 years old, it is long overdue for replacement.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Mac OS X Public Beta was released to the public on September 13, 2000. Mac OS X has been in public use for 12 years. It bears no relation to Apple’s previous operating systems, other than a vague physical resemblance.
Windows Phone is pretty easy, it all just works. (and Zune is waaaay nice than iTunes)
I second that! I love my Nokia running Windows Phone 7. Also I agree on Zune. I’ve never really used iTunes, but it looks pig ugly compared to Zune
Yes! and I get insulted by late adopters! If you say: maybe aapl could do this better? Gestapo fills my inbox with insults?=($aapl funboys that switched from PC to Mac last year? &/or bought iPhone a year ago?)…on Tablet i find Nexus 7 Jelly Bean_ simple coz Google services which I use 80+% of the time are Fantastically integrated and FAST..use my Mac seldom, it’s so slow comparing to iPad or Nexus, unless i buy a New one? Maybe Chrome OS will be the answer? —it looks super fast and simple but hardware still not attractive….
Anyways, Apple don’t MOVE me any more! Still use it but …. yes’ It ain’t easy or exciting no more. Take a Look at Jelly Bean/Nexus 7 combo.
John, regarding the “Other” yellow bar at Itunes the fact is that sometimes the Itunes does not show the real free space that you have. To me, there is sometimes a almost full bar, with a big yellow bar called other, but it still synchronizes.
I have to access the Ipod disk with Windows Explorer to know the real free space available.
100% AGREE with everything. I work in the tech industry (on the business side) and am kind of a gadget addict and tech “capable” Loved my iPhone for a few years (3 and 4) but every single thing you mention above has been an issue for me.
I have been helping friends with Android phones in last 6 months and realized wow – Google is really solving all these issues (contacts, calendar, photos, syncs across tablet, phone, PC). It has made me consider a Galaxy III. 2 way contact, calendar, phone sync are so difficult to maintain especially if you want to also use MS Outlook (without exchange) and don’t get me started on my old iTouch that has photos not saved anywhere else – try copying them off – cant’ be done cuz it won’t recognize it as a drive like newer devices.
iTunes is the most limiting and kludgy way to do anything and if you use a PC sometimes iCloud doesn’t help and actually hurts.
I am quite tech capable, I research all these issues and try to resolve but boy I can’t believe the pain in the neck it all is. A huge epiphany one day when I realized to use Outlook on my PC (without MS Exchange) and TWO WAY sync mail, calendar & contacts to my iphone was darn near impossible except to use Google as the intermediary (okay that’s funny). Those online who have actually got this working seriously use Google and CALDAV in a freakishly complex way just to have a contact you save on your iPhone sync up to one of the most used programs in the world – Outlook? Seriously?? I have printed over 100 pages of tricks/help etc on this one issue. I would try some more to get it working but all warn that iPhone/itunes might blow away all your stuff in the process
And iTunes/iPhone backups – seriously? This has to be the most insane process I have ever seen that doesn’t even really work most of the time.
Unwanted photo compression, not backing up photos and vids, larger fonts in Accessibility (I am not disabled just older eyes), response time for texting slowed by olds texts stored, too many clicks to find a contact, separation of texting and dialing/phone functions in a bizarre way, safari, if you keep texts must scroll thru entire conversation to find persons phone number, random reset of phone numbers to add a 1 in front of them (making them a new number not associated with a name), can’t see all the albums in my camera app, and on and on.
John you’ve merely turned into a moron. Quit whining like a little baby and go see a Genius. Sheesh, you sound like a six-year-old.
Thanks. Was wondering when someone was going to call me that.
What blows my mind is that you can’t change the font size of the UI in OSX. So, if you’re visually impaired, then you’re screwed. This is such a fundamental requirement for an OS that when I discovered this about OSX it told me everything I need to know about Apple and their respect for diversity.
Apple is spiraling downwards into the same hole Windows Vista put Microsoft in. Apple isn’t a technology company. Apple is a marketing company, and they’re very good at it. They can get by selling last years tech dressed up with contorted, backwards UIs to idiots that will buy it because they remember better times. It’s like playing the lottery… keep buying losing tickets and you’re bound to get one good one right? right???? As a UI/UX designer, I’m stumped trying to find what my money bought me with OSX Mountain Lion. My system settings were all reset, and I have to relearn how to use my computer. This is an upgrade??? I hate how I can’t search for apps in Finder anymore… do I have to manually track down and launch them now? There’s gotta be another way to search that I’m missing.
All over, Apple gets an F.
It’s easiest still, if you’ve ever tried doing these same things on an Android phone before
The culprit is “magic”. Apple is selling the impression of magic, but as adults, we should know magic does not exist.. When eating apple food for too long, people start to lose the reality and expect too much 🙂
awesome read!
Apple – Windows – etc. it’s all the same message from the engineers, “we will not rest until the entire population of the planet comes to the conclusion that they are too stupid to own a computer!”
You’re absolutely right. They ruined iPhoto — they made the editing functions more difficult and you’re right about the storage issue. Also, in Lion, when you restart, Word will open every single page you had open before (no, unchecking “restore all pages” doesn’t help). Safari does the same, no matter whether you uncheck it. Same goes for making the last 10 docs in Word zero. I searched online and I’m told I can paste text into Terminal. I found that, pasted in text, and nothing. I’m just a regular user. Should I really be looking on nerdpages for workarounds, or should my computer just, you know, work.
(I got my first Mac in 1985.)
There isn’t anything easier. Sorry. You are just seeing the world get more complicated as you now have multiple computers that you use many hours a day. You are remembering the early Mac nostalgically becaus you spent only a tiny number of hours with one computer and never relied on it much. Your newspaper and TV still worked when the Mac was down.
Apple gear is easy, but iPhone/iPod still have to be backed up so you can restore them if necessary, and same with the Mac. You can’t lose data on an OS upgrade if you backup first.
Also, you can go to a Genius for help. That option is not even available elsewhere.
Apple has seriously tarnished the word genius.
PS Great program for Mac for writing – Scrivener, by Literature & Latte. $45 and they give you a month free trial. Exports to Word, Final Draft and others.
Wow, an Apple person dissing Apple! John, I agree and not just because I am a PC guy. I am frustrated by the “genius” system. Their most common fix when I take an iPad or other device in for troubleshooting is to say that I should erase everything and start over. I don’t need a genius to help me with that. I have two iTunes accounts. I didn’t mean to, it just happened with multiple devices. Their inability to help me to merge these two and only have one is baffling. I could go on, but you said it best.
Completely agree about the internationalization feature on the keyboard. I had the very first iPhone that came out in 2007, and don’t recall running into that issue. Recently I borrowed a friend’s iPhone 4, and the first problem I encountered was this.
Have you tried out the contact search feature on Windows Phone? It’s a *joy* to use.
Just an aside to those claiming to be “old school Mac” folk: you simply don’t exist in the Appleverse, sorry.
Nope, you’re right on point. I have the latest Macbook Pro Retina. I also had to upgrade to the latest Mountain Lion ( shouldn’t that have come with the machine ?! )
— One thing that sold me on Mountain Lion, was that I really craved the speech-to-text feature. It’s crappy. Can’t make out even simple words and sentences, even when I speak very slowly.
— Full Screen, Mission Control (I miss my stackable workspaces), Hot Corners, are all great ideas. But I find them buggy, unintuitive, and poorly implemented.
— The Tab and Delete keys are squeaky… on a brand new machine !!!
— The driver for my wireless mouse dies occasionally. I have unplug, then replug in the USB … , to get it back.
There’s a lot more annoyances, but I won’t go on. I’ve been using Apple products, and paying the extra money, specifically to not have to deal with these usability issues. My Desktop Linux investigation will be underway shortly.
Sigh
Come over to the dark side, John. LOL. Apple has been brainwashing users for years into believing their products are “superior.” Hogwash I say. I’ve only known one Apple user who has ever really accomplished anything with a mac. Most of the rest use their iPads to play sidoku and crap. All the productive people I know use PC’s. I swear Apple is like cocaine. You can’t get a user to accept the fact that they have a problem. They just go get another fix from some “genius”. Keep spending your hard earned cash at the Apple school, fanboys, while I breeze past you in productivity with my PC.
Overpriced status symbols.
As a thirty year Apple user, I have to say that YOU ARE SO RIGHT!
I can’t reconcile Apple’s billions of quarterly profits with their woeful under-investment in their core apps.
i agree with you so much it hurts. We switched to Mac in my office… tried hosting our own email on our Mac Mini Server… there is NO WAY ON EARTH that iCal or Address Book could ever, ever, EVER handle the needs of even a small business like ours (10 users). We had to get Kerio Connect (like MS Exchange, sort of) just so we could schedule with meetings with clients who (shock!) were not on the same network as us and (obv) not on Macs. We leapt at Outlook for Mac once it was available. AND TotalFinder so we can have our “folders on top” in Finder.
I don’t fully regret the switch, but no, not easy in the slightest.
I used a mac for about a year or two and here are two tips and annoynces:
* coming from windows’ snap feature, I was appalled at the annoying way mac works with partial full screens, and impossible windows stacking. A small free utility fixed it but dammnn.
* also, maximizing a window doesn’t always “maximize” it, it will only make it span full height and a predetermined width. Extremely annoying
* when using photoshop, trying to zoom in always created a new search window due to shortcut conflicts 🙁 why wasn’t there a “mac” button or something for it? The same way searching windows you use “Windows key + F”
* maybe I’m spoiled but when I had those 20 search windows open, I had no way to review all of them easily (the same way windows has pop thumbnails that you can close out). It was shitty
Cinch adds Windows 7 style screenborder window resizing.
I used a magic mouse utility that allowed better snapping than windows 🙂
We’ve got a mac pro laptop and a 27 imac in our house. I have spent about 2 hours over the past few weeks on the phone with apple support trying to get our mail app to open. It quit working when we installed mountain lion. Won’t even open. Apple engineers are “looking into” the issue.
I’ve never owned an iphone and probably never will. ICS on my galaxy s2 is awesome and my wife’s galaxy s3 is even better. Apple not going with the industry standard micro usb just seems irresponsible and a giant middle finger to all their customers. Don’t really like being treated that way.
Really wish apple would just be more open to working with google. It would be so much better and easier for the end users but that just doesn’t seem to be their concern.
This surprises me. I have recently navigated over from Windows to a Mac and I had it all down within a few days. Everything syncs beautifully with my iPhone (I’m on Mountain Lion) and it all just seems that much more intuitive. Maybe the way my mind works is better suited to the Mac environment than yours.
Hi John,
Excellent take on the current state of things.
The first computer I ever bought was in the late 80s, the MacII. At the time it was the dog’s bollocks (sorry, too much time overseas), which is to say that it was leaps and bounds above the MS-DOS stuff all of my friends at the time were struggling with. I upgraded to one of the PowerPC models in the early 90s, and again was completely satisfied with the product, even if I did have to pay 4 times the price for the software (if I could find it), secure in the knowledge that my hardware and OS were superior and I never had the compatibility and programming issues that my MS using colleagues had. It just worked.
In the late 90s I moved overseas and my access to Apple software and products became severely limited, so I was forced to switch to Windows 98. I found this to be a cheap ripoff of my excellent MacOS, with usability and refinement not nearly at the level of what I had been used to. After this I was stuck in a Windows world, upgrading to XP (then Vista, W7 and now W8), all the while pining for the days of my long lost friend. It wasn’t until my purchase of the iPhone 3GS that I was reacquainted with that friend. And like most things viewed through the cloudy haze of nostalgia, sometimes it is better to leave them in your memories, as the reality never seems lives up to what you remember as great times.
Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone was, and is, an excellent product, just not the holy grail that its disciples claim (I like my new Android phone more). It was actually not the iPhone itself that turned me off, but the iTunes program that I was forced to install just to get the phone to work for the first time, and to do anything else for that matter, that put a bad taste in my mouth. On top of being a bloated system hog that froze and crashed almost every time that I tried to use it, it simply wasn’t very easy to use. I thought perhaps it was an issue with my Windows machine and Apple compatibility, but the more research I did online, and then using iTunes on a friend’s new MacPro, i found that it wasn’t just my machine. And it wasn’t just iTunes that was the problem. As I watched my friend play around with his new MacPro, and have problems with at least half of the the things he was trying to show me (the beachball of doom), I had a feeling of deja vu: watching my old MS friends trying in vain to get something to work.
I don’t know what has happened to Apple in the past decade, but it seems like they have taken their “screw what everyone else is doing, we’ll do our own thing” mantra that spawned innovation and excellence for so long, and turned it against the customer.
Maybe it’s just an extension of the new corporate mentality, the sue them rather than out perform them attitude.
Like I said before, everything looks better through nostalgic glasses.
Sorry for the length of my post.
Just because you stated ”
I am certain this post will elicit all manner of Apple fanboys who claim I’m a moron” in your post doesn’t mean you are not a moron. Maybe a computer isn’t for you. Or your wife. You know there are lots of folks out there in the same boat and it’s TOTALLY ok. If you can’t figure out that your wife is right clicking when she’s moving a window around and that’s why it says “Icons & Text” there’s nothing anyone or any Apple Genius can do to help you.
Of course I know that. The problem is, it doesn’t go away even when I reset the mouse etc.
There are always exceptions, but Apple’s stunning success means only one thing: For millions and millions of people, their stuff just works. If your Apple stuff isn’t working, take it to the Genius Bar. That is what they are there for. Not to belabor the obvious, but a trip to the Genius Bar will be much more productive than complaining on the internet.
+1 My wife and I have used Apple exclusively for our home and business. Lion is a mess and broke everything. The computers run slow and crash daily. All the problems you point out about Mail, iCal, and more. iMove is now a bloated app whose only function I believe is to spin the progress wheel and lock-up the computer. This stuff worked elegantly and smoothly for well over a decade and has crumbled into a worthless pile of rubble. The frustration is now constant.
I agree with a lot of your points. I am no techie but have had to become one especially with the introduction of icloud. My wife uses an older macbook pro and it’s a nightmare. As well she has an iphone3G which of course isn’t supported now. Wayyyy toooo hard from where it was 3 or 4 years ago. Itunes really sucks big time. It des way to much when all I want is a place to store my music and use it in various ways. I am happy to use another app for books and stuff. I love Apple but they are up their own butts now with too much meaningless integration and woweee stuff like integrated message centers.
If you’re young and interested, Linux is the way to go. The idea behind Linux is that everything is customizaable – you invest the first day into making everything exactly how you like it. No other OS will let you do that. Of course, you have to invest time into learning how to use Linux; I can understand why that’s a deterrent!
I have to use a Mac at work. I hate the thing. It’s interface make me vomit. I’ve gotten to the point where I practically don’t use the mouse or the UI and do everything from the terminal. There’s no such thing as “poorly designed text” haha.
You aren’t alone, give Windows 7 and Android a chance. Google has mobile OS down perfectly, especially with the latest version.