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The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment

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KynloStephen66515:
My only experience with Mac:

Went into my old work place, and they asked if I could get the specs for an old POS Apple Computer they found in one of the storage rooms. (One of those that just looks like an old CRT TV) - It took me a good minute to find out how to turn it on...then when it was on, I tried to find the browser (couldn't) - Then tried to find the control panel (couldn't) - Then tried to find any sort of reference to what the hell I was doing.....After 30 minutes, I gave up, turned the machine off, and they put it back in the storage room (Where I hope it will stay until it rots).

JavaJones:
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. :D

- Oshyan

Innuendo:
My Dell XPS 13 owning friend pointed out to me that one can still order an XPS 13 (or just check out pricing) from this web page.

tomos:
My Dell XPS 13 owning friend pointed out to me that one can still order an XPS 13 (or just check out pricing) from this web page.
-Innuendo (June 07, 2015, 06:55 PM)
--- End quote ---

thanks Innuendo, apparently that model is only available in the US; they also have a not quite so cheap model for the UK market, but they seem to have decided to go full price for the German market. (I got chatting with someone on their German site - they also say the offers change every week and they have no idea what's coming next.)



@Oshyan, interesting description of how things work (or dont) in the Mac world. I think a lot of people originally went for Macs because they had style compared to stodgy old beige Windows :-) Not so relevant any more.

JavaJones:
tomos: yes, style over substance! I think you may be right, at least to some degree. It also may be true that Macs actually were "easier to use" somehow, in the past, but as Windows has evolved to be easier and more hand-holding, and OS X has evolved to have more features (overall), perhaps they've converged more than not.

It reminds me of the classic and still-repeated "Macs are better for artists" BS which only ever had a logical basis nearly 2 decades ago when Macs had more creative-oriented software and better graphics capability (hardware-wise and OS-support-wise) than Windows. There was a period of maybe 5 years where those differences were really true and clearly evident, and another 5 years or so of decline where the differences were rapidly diminishing, but there were still some advantages for artists and creatives of being on a Mac. That period ended at least 10 years ago though, and PCs have been as good as - or often better than - Macs at doing graphics and other creative tasks since then. Yet so many people *still* to this day will repeat the "Macs are better for artists" BS.

The Mac's main remaining advantage at this point is reputation, the *idea* that it's easier to use. We all know how the placebo effect works, right? And confirmation bias? And over-justification? All of these logical failings are factors in the ongoing success of the Mac desktop platform, in my opinion. Which probably boils down largely to good marketing and product positioning.

- Oshyan

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