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Living Room / Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« on: June 07, 2015, 04:03 PM »
The thing that gets me about Mac users is...
Well, I am also one of those people that don't "get" Mac. I've accepted that this is true and that I never will "get" it, just like Innuendo above. I always thought there really was something to "get" though, that there really was some identifiable, useful difference - an advantage. In terms of hardware this was arguably true for a long time, at least for non-custom builds, and still is to *some* degree in the laptop area. But Windows machines are catching up steadily, and with the hardware inside being essentially identical for years now, soon there will be little overall difference physically.
I do see OS X doing a number of pretty nice things that I would count as advantages... but they're strangely *not* the thing that *most* Mac users I know actually like or even use much. In fact, having lived with a Mac user for a while now, and knowing several others over the years, it's amazing to me how little they take advantage of even what OS X *does* offer (nevermind the things it's missing that they could benefit from).
But here's what's confusing to me: Mac users are, as a whole, very loyal to and "satisfied" with their platform. If you ask most of them they'll sing its praises, how easy it is to use, how "intuitive", etc. But have you ever actually watched and lived with a Mac user for a long period of time? They have just as many frustrations and issues with their computers as Windows or Linux users! True story. I've seen hard freezes, random reboots, inability to shut down, crashing apps, install/uninstall issues, and much more. Macs aren't, on the whole, more stable or reliable than any other machine, nor more easy to troubleshoot. And when you start to look into the world of troubleshooting Mac issues you discover there's a whole ugly underbelly there. Threads 10s or 100s of pages long in Apple's support forums of users reporting the same issues, like problems with switching between onboard and discrete graphics in laptops. And these are issues that aren't necessarily solved between hardware revisions. And new issues crop up with every new piece of hardware, despite how minor many of the iterations are!
Perhaps even worse, in my eyes, they often use their computers in the most naive and ignorant ways. For example, OS X doesn't (as far as I know) have a really easy way to minimize/maximize a window (rather than use "full screen") by clicking something (on Windows you just click the entry on the taskbar and the app comes up and then minimizes again, easy and clean). So many Mac users I know just *drag the window to the edge of the screen* when they want to see something behind it, or another app, then *drag the window back afterward*. This is incredibly cumbersome and time consuming, and it means that your windows are almost always in slightly different places because you're dragging them arbitrarily around. This makes difficult to develop really good muscle memory for where buttons and functions are, for one thing. OS X has a decent way to deal with this, which is a couple of hotkeys/shortcuts like Command-H and Command-M (hide/minimize), but no Mac user I know uses them! I suspect it's because hotkeys are, for them, "too techy" or advanced or something.
The reality actually is that Macs and OS X in particular *can* be pretty awesome for advanced users as you almost need to be one to use the OS properly and efficiently (ironic!) *and* it's got BSD underpinnings so there's a pretty sweet commandline, piping, and all kinds of other stuff going on there that's fun for power users... But *most* users actually use the OS very inefficiently and suffer from and struggle with its limitations or design choices fairly frequently (whether they realize it or not). Take the still-batshit-crazy-to-me behavior of OS X (and Mac for as long as I've known) of separating applications and their windows. Why do I want MS Word to be open and sitting there in the background *if there are no documents open in it*? How many times have I seen a Mac user using some high-memory application, then close all its windows but *leave the application running* because *closing all windows does not close the app*? (hint: many, many times)
Granted on Windows there are occasionally some awkward things that result from the Windows behavior being opposite (applications are defined by their windows and closing all windows usually closes the app), for example applications that always want to have *some* document open, so if you close the last one it creates a new, default, blank document (many applications work around this by having a background "workspace"). Hardcore Mac users will tell you that the advantage of having these floating windows that are not "contained" by their parent app and a "workspace" is that you can more easily drag and drop things between apps, a function that Windows has in a more limited capacity as far as I know, and one which I think is theoretically useful. But practically I've actually *never* seen an average Mac user do any of this fancy drag-and-drop between apps. So once again some theoretically advanced capability of OS X goes underutilized.
In the end I think this all goes a long way toward explaining why Apple may be merging iOS and OS X in the end. Much less of iOS's functionality is wasted simply because it has less functionality. So much of OS X that Apple has to maintain is really being lost on the majority of their users. They've been steadily alienating their power users while profits soar, so I think they're on the right track, at least as a business. If they go through with it they can probably reduce complexity of their core OS (and fragmentation) by 75% while maintaining 95% of their market. Win!...
But I'll never be a Mac user.
- Oshyan
Well, I am also one of those people that don't "get" Mac. I've accepted that this is true and that I never will "get" it, just like Innuendo above. I always thought there really was something to "get" though, that there really was some identifiable, useful difference - an advantage. In terms of hardware this was arguably true for a long time, at least for non-custom builds, and still is to *some* degree in the laptop area. But Windows machines are catching up steadily, and with the hardware inside being essentially identical for years now, soon there will be little overall difference physically.
I do see OS X doing a number of pretty nice things that I would count as advantages... but they're strangely *not* the thing that *most* Mac users I know actually like or even use much. In fact, having lived with a Mac user for a while now, and knowing several others over the years, it's amazing to me how little they take advantage of even what OS X *does* offer (nevermind the things it's missing that they could benefit from).
But here's what's confusing to me: Mac users are, as a whole, very loyal to and "satisfied" with their platform. If you ask most of them they'll sing its praises, how easy it is to use, how "intuitive", etc. But have you ever actually watched and lived with a Mac user for a long period of time? They have just as many frustrations and issues with their computers as Windows or Linux users! True story. I've seen hard freezes, random reboots, inability to shut down, crashing apps, install/uninstall issues, and much more. Macs aren't, on the whole, more stable or reliable than any other machine, nor more easy to troubleshoot. And when you start to look into the world of troubleshooting Mac issues you discover there's a whole ugly underbelly there. Threads 10s or 100s of pages long in Apple's support forums of users reporting the same issues, like problems with switching between onboard and discrete graphics in laptops. And these are issues that aren't necessarily solved between hardware revisions. And new issues crop up with every new piece of hardware, despite how minor many of the iterations are!
Perhaps even worse, in my eyes, they often use their computers in the most naive and ignorant ways. For example, OS X doesn't (as far as I know) have a really easy way to minimize/maximize a window (rather than use "full screen") by clicking something (on Windows you just click the entry on the taskbar and the app comes up and then minimizes again, easy and clean). So many Mac users I know just *drag the window to the edge of the screen* when they want to see something behind it, or another app, then *drag the window back afterward*. This is incredibly cumbersome and time consuming, and it means that your windows are almost always in slightly different places because you're dragging them arbitrarily around. This makes difficult to develop really good muscle memory for where buttons and functions are, for one thing. OS X has a decent way to deal with this, which is a couple of hotkeys/shortcuts like Command-H and Command-M (hide/minimize), but no Mac user I know uses them! I suspect it's because hotkeys are, for them, "too techy" or advanced or something.
The reality actually is that Macs and OS X in particular *can* be pretty awesome for advanced users as you almost need to be one to use the OS properly and efficiently (ironic!) *and* it's got BSD underpinnings so there's a pretty sweet commandline, piping, and all kinds of other stuff going on there that's fun for power users... But *most* users actually use the OS very inefficiently and suffer from and struggle with its limitations or design choices fairly frequently (whether they realize it or not). Take the still-batshit-crazy-to-me behavior of OS X (and Mac for as long as I've known) of separating applications and their windows. Why do I want MS Word to be open and sitting there in the background *if there are no documents open in it*? How many times have I seen a Mac user using some high-memory application, then close all its windows but *leave the application running* because *closing all windows does not close the app*? (hint: many, many times)
Granted on Windows there are occasionally some awkward things that result from the Windows behavior being opposite (applications are defined by their windows and closing all windows usually closes the app), for example applications that always want to have *some* document open, so if you close the last one it creates a new, default, blank document (many applications work around this by having a background "workspace"). Hardcore Mac users will tell you that the advantage of having these floating windows that are not "contained" by their parent app and a "workspace" is that you can more easily drag and drop things between apps, a function that Windows has in a more limited capacity as far as I know, and one which I think is theoretically useful. But practically I've actually *never* seen an average Mac user do any of this fancy drag-and-drop between apps. So once again some theoretically advanced capability of OS X goes underutilized.
In the end I think this all goes a long way toward explaining why Apple may be merging iOS and OS X in the end. Much less of iOS's functionality is wasted simply because it has less functionality. So much of OS X that Apple has to maintain is really being lost on the majority of their users. They've been steadily alienating their power users while profits soar, so I think they're on the right track, at least as a business. If they go through with it they can probably reduce complexity of their core OS (and fragmentation) by 75% while maintaining 95% of their market. Win!...
But I'll never be a Mac user.
- Oshyan
And not a bad result on the hyperlapse either. 